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Teaching as an Embodied Practice


"Recognition is inextricably intertwined with selfhood and personal identity"

"the practical active knowledge that animates teaching is something that belongs phenomenologically more closely to the whole embodied being of the person as well as to the social and physical world in which this person lives"

"our actions are sedimented into habituations, routines, kinesthetic memories ... [and] are sensitive to the contigencies, novelties and expectancies of our world."

I'd like to unpack these quotations with reference to the Heideggerian term Befindlichkeit that Manen mentions and to the Greek term phronesis that he alludes to when talking about 'practical wisdom.'

Central to both of these concepts is the idea of situatedness/embodiment/being-in-the-world. For Manen, and for me, this idea of temporal, spatial and individual existence is the critical piece, oft underemphasized by students, of teaching education. It reminds me of the three-body problem in computational modeling. Given two bodies, we can enter all we know about them and a computer can easily output a model of how those two bodies will interact. Add a third body, however, and the computer can no longer handle the load of variability needed to accurately make a predictive model. This is a good analogy for the experience of teaching. No amount of knowledge in the world can prepare us for the reality of teaching in a classroom full of students, each with their own experiential pasts, bodies, and brains. Even if there were only one student for each teacher, there are simply too many variables to consider. This is why I love the way Manen emphasizes the in-between place where theoretical, intellectual knowledge meets the physical reality of existence. It's the bridge between higher-level problem solving and baser instinct; it's where the rational and the animal interact.

To my mind, there is no way to develop and strengthen these interactions other than to practice.

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