| The initial form of teaching is embodied teaching.Elders or teachers make children learn and do at the same time by demonstrating in real scenes,which is a kind of education that fully involves the body.However,when we review the connection between the body and teaching today,we will find that the status of the body in today’s school teaching is gradually weakening,and the school teaching is constantly developing towards such a trend,that is,the teaching process pays less and less attention to embodied thinking activities.Learning has gradually become a simple mental process and a process of contemplation.Specifically,it is a process of passively representing symbols and psychologically calculating on them.This kind of contemplative teaching is derived from the traditional mind-body dualism,which holds that man is composed of two fundamentally different parts,mind and body.Among them,mind is the essence of man,while body is the servant driven by mind and the unstable factor that needs to be suppressed.When this thought enters and dominates teaching,it will lead to the disrepute of labor,practice,emotion and other contents associated with the body in teaching,forming the separation of theory and practice,cognition and emotion,knowledge and experience which is difficult to overcome up to now.In recent years,with the deepening of phenomenology,hermeneutics,postmodern philosophy and other studies on the body,there has been a trend in the theoretical circle to gradually regard the body as the source of mind development.This theoretical hypothesis of promoting the value of the body has been supported by experimental evidence of embodied cognitive science.Cognitive science using three great problems existing in disembodied cognition’s hypothesis to strongly challenge the ideas of mind-body dualism,which prompted us to reflect on the problems of traditional contemplative theory of teaching.This research is carrying out under this background,benefiting from embodied cognition findings,which wants to build a form of teaching stress the importance of body and its action,and want to build a form of teaching value body and mind equally.This form of teaching is named embodied classroom teaching.In the course of historical development,people have formed three basic forms of understanding toward body concept:they are illusory,inert and vigorous bodies,among which the illusory and inert understanding of body are the fundamental reasons leading to the formation of contemplative theory of teaching.This kind of spectator theory of teaching is affected by the inert understanding of the body,which holds a contradictory attitude toward body.Specifically,teaching needs a body in good condition to undertake instrumental tasks,but it does not want to waste too much energy and resources to take care of the body,and teaching should try to prevent the body activities that interfere with mental learning.This complex attitude will lead to three kinds of teaching behaviors toward body.They are oppression on physiological value,compression on sensory experience,and suppression on personal and emotion,which will lead to one dimensional development of students,and cause harm to teaching fairness and create the consequences of teaching separation and alienation.The vigorous body is understood as a life body with both subjective and objective attributes,which can generate complex mind and has specific social and cultural symbolic significance.Because it highlights the important roles body play in the development of mind,it enhances the existence value of the body.Moreover,with the support of abundant evidence from the embodied cognition,vigorous body has become the most reasonable understanding toward body in embodied classroom teaching.Based on this concept,embodied classroom teaching can be understood as a kind of teaching with purpose of rousing or wakening vitality of body.Specifically,this teaching show enough respect to the law of the body,and design action-oriented activities to mobilize the whole body to participate in classroom activities,and try to cultivate mind with the help of embodied participation,which will eventually promote the competence of students’ body.The reason of believing the promotion of body competence lies in that the teaching pay enough attention to students’ embodied need,for example,the teaching will give response to students’ cultural difference etc.In essence,the embodied classroom teaching is a kind of teaching with the goal of cultivating people who are fully developed;It is also a kind of teaching hoping student can learn knowledge actively;It is also a kind of teaching want to guides students constructing meaning themselves;It is also a kind of teaching that value differential development of students.In order to realize the teaching’s vision,we need to start from the following three aspects.Firstly,teachers need to change their teaching philosophy,specifically turn from the disembodied philosophy of teaching to embodied philosophy.Secondly,teacher need to cultivate implementing competence of the teaching.Thirdly,we need to build a body-friendly learning space. |
