The thinking body

pp. 269-295

in: Wolff-Michael Roth, Alfredo Jornet, Understanding educational psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

In the chapters of the first two parts of this book, we focus on specific issues that historically have been topics of educational psychology. We begin this third part of the book with a summary of the position on the thinking body that has emerged throughout those chapters. This summary is in the form of a holistic study of learning that accounts for the thinking body as a whole. Using exemplifying fragments from a tenth-grade physics course, we articulate a monist, one-substance approach. The analyses exhibit how the monist approach advanced throughout the book solves three perennial problems that plague present-day research: (a) the separation of body and mind that is accompanied by the reduction of affective and bodily practical dimensions of life to the intellectual (mentalism); (b) the conflation of thinking and speaking; and (c) the separation of individual and collective subjectivity