The corporeality of practice-based learning

Abstract

Practice-based approaches to learning and knowing can be credited with their contribution to, among other things, establishing the social basis for human cognition, action and interaction. However, although they emphasise the (ontological) significance of practice, inter/action and activity as the basis of learning and knowing, little attention has been paid to the body — that which makes all doing and performs all action. The aim of the present study is to suggest a corporeal ground for a practice-based learning theory. The body is regarded as our link to the practical (social and material) world, and is thus the medium of learning and knowing. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962; 1964; 1968) advanced phenomenology learning is viewed as a process of incorporating and absorbing new competencies and understandings into our body schema, which in turn transforms our ways of perceiving and acting. Learning is corporeal, pre-discursive and pre-social, stemming from the body’s perpetual need to cope with tensions arising in the body-environment connections. The study closes with some theoretical and practical implications for practice-based approaches to learning and knowing.