The body in higher/tertiary education, face-to-face and distance learning
Le corps dans l’enseignement supérieur/tertiaire en présentiel et à distance
Contextes et Didactiques n° 25, 2025
Published on Tuesday, March 05, 2024
Abstract
This call for contributions for the publication of issue 25 of the journal Contextes et Didactiques, scheduled for April 2025, emanates from the study day entitled “La place du corps dans l'enseignement tertiaire en présentiel et à distance” (The body in higher/tertiary education, face-to-face and distance learning), held at the Haute école pédagogique de Lausanne on November 22, 2024. The scientific event was attached to the trinational project: RESPIRE – Rétablir l’Expérience Sensible pour des Pratiques Inclusives, Résilientes et Équitables. This project explores the possibilities of preserving the synergy between the cognitive and the sensitive, including in remote modalities, through professional support centered on the experiential. We pay particular attention to embodied and contextualized knowledge, and to the ways in which it is transmitted, which we approach through sensitive experience.
Announcement
Presentation
This call for contributions for the publication of issue 25 of the journal Contextes et Didactiques, scheduled for April 2025, emanates from the study day entitled "La place du corps dans l'enseignement tertiaire en présentiel et à distance" (The body in higher/tertiary education, face-to-face and distance learning), held at the Haute école pédagogique de Lausanne on November 22, 2024. The scientific event was attached to the trinational project: RESPIRE – Rétablir l’Expérience Sensible pour des Pratiques Inclusives, Résilientes et Équitables. This project explores the possibilities of preserving the synergy between the cognitive and the sensitive, including in remote modalities, through professional support centered on the experiential. We pay particular attention to embodied and contextualized knowledge, and to the ways in which it is transmitted, which we approach through sensitive experience.
This study day addressed various issues relating to the importance of the body in higher education. It also provided an opportunity to explore various notions for describing bodily professional knowledge, such as corporeality and sensory experience, and to examine the impact of cultural and institutional contexts on face-to-face, hybrid and/or distance training devices.
Following on from this event, this issue focuses on the body in face-to-face and distance higher/tertiary education.
Contributions exploring these aspects are encouraged. Depending on the journal's editorial line, they may include empirical research, reports of innovative practices, analyses of didactic devices, literature reviews or theoretical reflections. They may focus on the following questions: the links between embodied and lived knowledge in higher education, the epistemological foundations and devices of face-to-face and distance learning that rely on the body as an object of study, and the methodologies used to apprehend bodily presence in face-to-face and distance learning contexts of higher education. We also welcome contributions exploring the use of experiential pedagogies in non-body-centered disciplines.
Pitch
While bodily engagement in training has been the subject of recent work (Duval et al., 2022), little explicit attention has been paid to the trainer's body in tertiary institutions, and even less so in distance learning arrangements (Klaas et al., 2023). In recent years, there has been debate about whether online environments lead to a form of absence of the body (Bolldén, 2016). These questions have been the subject of several studies following the restrictions imposed on face-to-face teaching during the COVID-19 period (Carillo and Flores, 2020). Indeed, the pandemic context has altered the way we think about teaching and training situations in colleges, vocational schools and universities.
The advantages and limitations of remote interaction are highlighted in research on tertiary education carried out during the COVID period. In particular, the loss of contact with students is perceived by some trainers as detrimental to the effectiveness of training (Paoletti, 2022) and to the wellbeing of trainees and trainers (Güsewell and Terrien, 2021). However, a reorganization of pedagogical interactions can be seen as an opportunity offered by these devices. However, the move online can artificially force the development of teachers' digital skills, favoring instrumentations that are more technical than didactic. As a result, teaching practices become unbalanced along three major dimensions: temporality, the purpose and nature of learning and assessment, and the cognitive and physical engagement of learners (Venant and Passaro, 2022).
In the literature, this problem arises at first sight in the teaching of disciplines requiring the learning of specific gestures involving the body (in sports, arts and crafts, in particular). Time and space for teaching and learning have been reexamined and put to the test on a daily basis. However, the dimensions of embodied knowledge (Johnson, 2007) would undoubtedly benefit from more systematic analysis (Hegna and Ørbæk, 2021; Marsault and Lefèvre, 2022), including for disciplines traditionally reticent about the body or more in line with dualist approaches (Berg and Seeber, 2016; Green and Hopwood, 2015). Moreover, the incorporation of knowledge is not independent of the historical, cultural and social contexts in which learning takes place, insofar as each social group has a vision, a particular image, a historically determined way of apprehending its own body and that of others (Delcroix, 2019; Delcroix et al., 2013; Forissier et al., 2017, 2020). From then on, questions emerge:Which teacher training schemes include the body, and how is the body mobilized in them? What about training courses in which gestures involving the trainer's body are traditionally less present, for example mathematics, languages, environmental sciences, geography or in education science training (Dias and Serment, 2020)? On the contrary, what challenges do we face in teachings that involve the physicality of trainers and trainees, such as physical education, visual arts, creative and manual activities, design, science and technology or music? What role do contexts play in a training situation?
If, for Craig (2018), embodied knowledge is at the heart of teaching and teacher training" (p. 329) and teaching and learning depend entirely on it, the links between the cognitive (intellect) and the sensible (bodily feeling) with a view to reducing learning inequalities are little questioned when it comes to tertiary trainers.
According to Korthagen (2004), learning to become aware of oneself (perceptions, intentions) is important for developing coherent professional gestures from the trainer's point of view, i.e. a link between what is experienced internally and one's actions in the world, through sensitive experience. When the body is taken into account, we speak of corporality awareness, the relationship between self-awareness - through the body - and awareness of others and the environment - spatial, temporal and institutional (Johnson, 2007). To achieve this, somato-reflexive approaches (Eddy, 2016) to making layers of the sensible accessible and exploitable in pedagogical practice can be envisaged (Emond, 2022; Emond et al., 2022; Emond and Rondeau, 2019).
All of this research raises the question of methodological approaches: how do we gain access to bodily experience? How can we measure its didactic effects? Gathering and analyzing traces of subjective experience calls for specific research postures (Van Manen, 2014; Varela et al., 1993) and collection and analysis tools, such as the explicitation interview (Vermersch, 1994, 2006), the microphenomenological interview (Depraz, 2014; Petitmengin, 2006) or the self-confrontation interview (Theureau, 2004).
Contributions can be organized around three themes
Theme 1: Embodied and lived knowledge in tertiary education
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Experience and conceptualize professional practice
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Conduct professional research and discuss transfers to practice
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Discuss/experiment with the place of experiential pedagogy in higher education.
Theme 2: Epistemological foundations and teaching methods
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The body as an object of study - concepts, definitions, foundations.
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The body in face-to-face and distance learning devices in different disciplines (technological vs. didactic devices) and consideration of contextual effects.
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Sensory experience as a mediator of embodied knowledge.
Theme 3: Methodological issues and choices
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Methods: scope and limits of the various research and training methods used to access bodily presence in face-to-face and distance learning situations in higher/tertiary education.
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Experiential implementations: communities of practice, somatic awareness, links with teaching practices.
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Data collection and analysis: questionnaires, explanatory interviews, simple and cross self-confrontation interviews, first- and third-person research, logbooks with narrative, visual (e.g. drawings) and/or audio traces; analysis of graphical data.
Terms of submission
Interested parties are invited to submit their expressions of interest to: lisa.lefevre@hepl.ch, venant.fabienne@uqam.ca, elisabeth.odacre@univ-antilles.fr (issue coordinators) and antoine.delcroix@univ-antilles.fr (journal editor).
by March 22, 2024.
Expressions of interest should include a 500-characters summary of the project and a short bibliography.
Once these expressions of interest have been accepted, by April 2, 2024, at the latest, complete article proposals must be submitted electronically by June 15, 2024, to the coordinators of the thematic issue: lisa.lefevre@hepl.ch, venant.fabienne@uqam.ca and elisabeth.odacre@univ-antilles.fr, with a copy to the journal: contextes.didactiques@univ-antilles.fr
Article proposals will be submitted to a double-blind review and then to the editorial board.
- Feedback to authors: September 30, 2024
- Receipt of the final version of the article: February 1, 2025
Issue 25 of Contextes et Didactiques will appear on the journal's website in electronic format in April 2025.
For more information (editorial policy, recommendations to authors, style sheets), please consult the information on the Revue Contextes et Didactiques website: https://journals.openedition.org/ced/279
All issues are available online free of charge: https://journals.openedition.org/ced/
Calendar
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Deadline for submission of abstracts: March 22, 2024
- Feedback to authors on abstracts: April 2, 2024
- Deadline for paper proposals: June 15, 2024
- Evaluation of proposals: September 30, 2024
- Submission of full text: December 15, 2024
Scientific coordinators
- Lisa Lefèvre, HEP Vaud, LausanneF
- abienne Venant, UQAM, QuébecE
- lisabeth Odacre, Université des Antilles Guadeloupe (France)
Subjects
- Education (Main category)
Date(s)
- Friday, March 22, 2024
Keywords
- corporéité, expérience sensible, enseignement tertiaire, enseignement à distance, effet de contexte
Contact(s)
- Antoine Delcroix
courriel : contextes [dot] didactiques [at] univ-antilles [dot] fr
Reference Urls
Information source
- Hélène Wachtel
courriel : helene [dot] wachtel [at] univ-antilles [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0 .
To cite this announcement
Lisa Lefèvre, Fabienne Venant, Elisabeth Odacre, « The body in higher/tertiary education, face-to-face and distance learning », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, March 05, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/vyf4
