The Palgrave Handbook of Embodiment and Learning

This handbook provides an important overview of corporeality, embodiment and learning in education from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Situating the body at the centre of educational practice, the editors and contributors introduce the concept of ‘tact’ as a practical corporeal language. The chapters provide a spectrum of historical, conceptual, empirical and practical educational approaches for embodied pedagogical engagement. Tact and embodied knowledge form a significant component of a teacher’s capability and professionalism: interacting with students, a pedagogue responds to them tactfully, emotionally, sensitively, and reflectively searching for the right thing to do, the right words to say, improvising in aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual way that are as restrained as they are enabled by the body. This handbook questions the familiar and established essentialist and naturalist view of the body to allow new perspectives on how corporeality affects learners.It will be of interest to scholars in education and philosophy as well as those researching in across social sciences.

Anja Kraus is Professor of Arts and Culture Education at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focuses on corporeality in educational contexts; phenomenological, ethnographical and theoretical research on practices and arts education amongst other topics, and she has published widely in these areas.

Christoph Wulf is Professor of Anthropology and Education and a member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology, the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB, 1999-2012) “Cultures of Performance,” the Cluster of Excellence (2007-2012) “Languages of Emotion,” and the Graduate School “InterArts” (2006-2015) at the Freie Universität Berlin. His books have been translated into 20 languages. For his research in anthropology and anthropology of education, he received the title “professor honoris causa” from the University of Bucharest and the honorary membership ofthe German Society of Educational Research. He is Vice-President of the German Commission for UNESCO.