1st Edition
Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning
This book delves into the embodied ground of thinking, illuminating the transition from theorizing about the embodied mind to actively practicing embodied thinking in research, teaching and learning. The authors speak from immersing themselves in novel methods that engage the felt, experiential dimensions of cognition in inquiry.
The turn to embodiment has sparked the development of new methodologies within phenomenology, pragmatism, and cognitive science. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin's philosophical work on felt understanding, and Francesco Varela's enactivist approach, contributors explore innovative embodied thinking methods such as Focusing, Thinking at the Edge, micro-phenomenology, and mindfulness practices. They demonstrate the practical applications of these methods in research, teaching, and learning, highlighting their liberating and empowering potential for researchers and students. In an age marked by information overload and societal polarization, methods of embodied thinking provide an innovative edge to critique, complementing more traditional approaches to critical thinking.
This book shows how heeding the essential, yet often overlooked, embodied grounds of critical and creative thinking can deepen and strengthen each of research, teaching and learning. It will interest philosophers of education and educators in higher education in particular, as well as philosophy researchers and postgraduate students more broadly curious about how embodied thinking practices can transform research, teaching and learning.
1. The Leap: the creative and liberatory potential of embodied thinking
Donata Schoeller, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Greg Walkerden
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
2. Transformative and responsive power: potentials of embodied thinking
Donata Schoeller
3. Vitalizing Critical Thinking: Embodied Critical Thinking in a Philosophical Context
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir and Elsa Haraldsdóttir
4. Sensing and thinking from within: Aesthetic perception and embodied thinking
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir
PART II: THINKING AT THE EDGE AND FOCUSING
5. Thinking at the Edge and the Production of Knowledge
Kevin C. Krycka
6. In search of relational imagination: An auto-ethnographic journey through training in Embodied Critical Thinking
Katrin Heimann and Dorothe Bach
7. Refreshing the relationship to research and expanding its meaning: On the use of the TAE process in a micro-phenomenological research project
Magali Ollagnier-Beldame and Véronique Servais
PART III: MICROPHENOMENOLOGY AND MEDITATION
8. Micro-phenomenology as coming into contact with experience: subtilization, surprises and liberation
Claire Petitmengin
9. Understanding experience as ethically sensitive action
Toma Strle and Urban Kordeš
10. Multidimensional Mindfulness Trainings and Methods of Embodied Thinking in Universities of the 21st Century
Mike Sandbothe, Reyk Albrecht and Thomas Corrinth
PART IV: EMANCIPATIONS
11. Focusing on Emotions in Climate Education: A Felt Sense of the Climate
Ole Martin Sandberg
12. Embodied Critical Thinking and Environmental Embeddedness: The Sensed Knots of Knowledge
Anne Sauka
13. Focusing in the School of Architecture: An account of introducing and integrating focusing into the design studio at the Technion
Ram Eisenberg
14. Learning to catalyse socio-ecological change: reflective practice experiments
Greg Walkerden
15. Disciplined thinking, sensuous wisdom
Donata Schoeller, Greg Walkerden and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
Biography
Donata Schoeller is Research Professor, Philosophy, at the University of Iceland, Iceland.
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir is Professor of Philosophy, University of Iceland, Iceland.
Greg Walkerden is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia.
