26 Sept - 28 Sept 2024
1st Specialist Seminar on Embodied Education
Embodied Education experts of the world, bring your bodies to Bressanone, and your minds are bound to come along!
With this seminar, we aim to bring together researchers and educators who are working in different areas of Embodied Education (EE). We would like to create a setting where participants can learn from each other for furthering research on the foundations of EE, and for developing innovative approaches to EE, particularly for educating primary and secondary school teachers (i.e., for teacher training).
Four keynote speakers will provide inspiration and suggestions. The invited speakers are:
- Shaun Gallagher - Department of Philosophy, The University of Memphis (USA)
- Magdalena Kersting - Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
- Athanasios Papaioannou - Department of Physical Education and Sport Science, University of Thessaly (Greece)
- Jordan Zlatev - Division for Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University (Sweden)
To facilitate productive theoretical and practical activities during the seminar, we want to work on the following four concepts:
(1) Balancing the body
(2) Conceptual blending
(3) Emotion, motivation, and the body
(4) The body and energy
Click on "Additional Notes" down below to see explanations of what we mean by these notions
Provisional program:
Thursday, 26 September
14:00 Opening ceremony
14:30 Key-note speaker 1
15:30 Constitution of working groups
16:30 Break
17:00 Activities of the groups
18:30 Social event
Friday, 27 September
9:00 Key-note speaker 2
10:00 Activities of the groups
11:30 Break
12:00 Activities of the groups
13:30 Lunch
15:00 Key-note speaker 3
16:00 Activities of the groups
18:00 Social event
Saturday, 28 September
9:00 Key-note speaker 4
10:00 Sharing results of working groups
11:30 Break
12:00 Planning follow-up research and activities
13:00 Closing and future activities
Scientific Committee
- Michele Cagol, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
- Carla Cardinaletti, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
- Attilio Carraro, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
- Rita Casadei, Department of Education, University of Bologna
- Federico Corni, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
- Denis Francesconi, Department of Teacher Education, University of Vienna
- Hans U. Fuchs, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
- Jesper Haglund, Department of Engineering and Physics, Karlstad University
- Angelika Pahl, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
- Monica Parricchi, Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Participants will be invited to work on one of these subjects during the seminar. To facilitate the creation of four study groups, we kindly ask prospective participants to provide a short outline of their expertise and to share ideas and questions related to the concept(s) they would like to be engaged with during the specialist seminar. These notes will be available on the seminar website to all participants in July 2024.
There will be ample time to share individual perspectives and work on the concept of choice—we encourage participants to make use of embodied practices during group work, whenever possible. The results of reflections, suggestions, and practice will be shared between the study groups at the end of the seminar.
We are planning to publish the results of the seminar either in a book or in a special issue of a journal; after the seminar, we will invite participants to contribute to this endeavor.
The short outlines should be sent to multilab@unibz.it by June 15, 2024; please state your preference for one of the four concepts listed above and add what would be your second choice.
Notices of acceptance will be sent by June 30, 2024.
Conference fees are 150€
You can register for the event by clicking at the link below
(1) Balancing the body
The direct embodied experiencing of balance, including practicing it willfully in physical engagement in general and in sports in particular, leads to a schematic-abstract structure in our mind. This schema (called the image-schema of balance in cognitive linguistics) is used imaginatively (by metaphoric projection) for a great many different examples of human activity in realms ranging from the psychological, artistic, and social (political and economic) all the way to our encounters with natural phenomena.
(2) Conceptual blending
Through the development of the theory of conceptual blending, Fauconnier and Turner argue that “all our learning and thinking consists of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences”. By drawing from and integrating structures from different conceptual spaces, we form novel features that did not exist in the original spaces.
(3) Emotion, motivation, and the body
Emotions find expression in the body, moving the body. Certain emotional situations influence the tense state of the body and the quality of its movement, breathing and thinking. So, body awareness is an irreplaceable resource for sensing (discerning, feeling) the emotional process as a flow of energy and information and can be a resource to consciously regulate and guide them. This means that the body has a mind, and the mind has a heart: all these dimensions find their healthiest condition in integration.
(4) The body and energy
Energy, or, more colloquially, force or power, is a broad concept that arises from embodied experiences of (causative or “forceful”) encounters we have with nature, with other people in social situations, and with our personal emotions and feelings. It makes its way into academic fields such as physics, biology, ecology, economy, geopolitics, and policy, where its meaning is formalized, restricted, and therefore changed, at least to some degree. However, in all these fields, it pays off to rediscover the embodied meaning of the concept.