Body pedagogics: embodied learning for the health professions

Abstract

Medicine as Embodied Practice Bodily dysfunctions bring patients to their doctors and even diseases of the mind can originate in patients’ bodies. Doctors respond by using their own bodies – hands, eyes, ears and sometimes noses – to make diagnoses and treat diseases. Yet, despite the embodied nature of practice, medicine typically treats the body as an object, paying scant attention to the subjective embodied experiences of patients and doctors. Much health professions education (HPE) reflects this, prioritising cognition over learners’ sense of embodiment. Hence there is a gap between the embodied realities of practice and the disembodied nature of medical education. This article introduces readers to ‘body pedagogics’ as a framework that can help to re‐establish embodiment as a central principle of HPE. Body Pedagogics This embodiment theory, drawn from sociology, anthropology and phenomenology, has informed such disparate fields as glassblowing education and military training. Body pedagogics emphasises learning as a physically embodied process. It illustrates how multisensory experience causes embodied changes that become an automatic part of physician expertise. We introduce core body pedagogic concepts using physical examination as an example, examining the bodily means of HPE, students’ bodily experiences and the resulting bodily changes. Implications Body pedagogics can help us to focus attention on embodiment as a central principle of HPE that transcends the discipline‐specific teaching of clinical skills. Moreover, it provides a set of conceptual foundations for an interdisciplinary practice within HPE with implications for instructional design. Body pedagogics can also help us to make strange the habits and disregarded aspects of embodied learning and in so doing help us to consider embodiment more critically and directly in practice and education, and in the ways we research them.

Examining the Short‐, Medium‐, and Long‐Term Success of an Embodied Learning Activity in the Study of Hand Anatomy for Clinical Application

“…Embodied learning has proved useful in a range of disciplines including sport, education, and ballet (Aalten, 2007; Evans et al, 2008; Andersson et al, 2013), but there is limited research which takes an educational view on embodied learning for the study of anatomy in the medical and health professions. Kelly et al (2019) propose that learning should not solely be a cognitive process but that the body itself provides an often disregarded site of knowledge production and corporeal wisdom. It has been perceived that medical students' early sensory experiences have become progressively “oculocentric” thus favoring what can be seen over the input of other senses such as touch, hearing, and smell (Kelly et al, 2019).…”

Touch matters: COVID-19, physical examination, and 21st century general practice

“…In the context of our professional encounters, the physical examination, aside from its diagnostic value, is an important mode of communication and a skill that requires embodied learning and practice -'body pedagogics'. 3 We should be wary of discounting its value.…”

Embodying empathy: A phenomenological study of physician touch

“…In the clinical setting, faculty staff could be asked to explain why they do or do not choose to communicate by touch such that students could be made more aware of the tacit decision making that lies behind NVC. Integrating communicating by touch with other touch practices such as physical examination and the performing of procedures can help students focus on touch as both communicative and procedural, rather than one or the other, and thereby emphasise the integrated nature of clinical practice …”