Educar com a ecosofia e a somática: provoc-ações a partir de experiências corporais com licenciandas em pedagogia da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This research was developed by a teacher-artist’s body who, in the course of teaching, realised the importance of her formation both in dance and theatre. And when experiencing the living-body acting in the classroom, realised that artistic learning was just as, if not more, significant than a mere degree. Through a performative writing, was understood that the contemporary environmental crisis is linked to all others crisis and that it is urgent that education frees itself from metaphysical dualisms, such as body and mind, man and nature, which are responsible for the utilitarian and abusive man-nature relationship. Ecosophy and somatics are two of the research's muscle concepts for proposing strategies and practices for the invention of other modes of subjectivity. Ecosophy as a guiding concept and somatics as a device for producing subjectivities offered the possibility of investigating the impact of studying the body from/with the body in pedagogical training. During the research, it became clear that women studying pedagogy, who made up the study sample, face varying degrees of difficulty in their relationship with their own body. The lack of proper spaces for body work in traditional educational environments is attested and the possibility of the void as a pedagogical space is indicated. It affirms the urgency of a sensitive education that no longer hierarchises intellectual knowledge and disregards knowledge of the body. The concept of the privileged image, proposed by Bergson in Matter and Memory, makes it possible to understand a continuum, since between the individual body (privileged image) and the other human and non-human images (matter of the world) there is no difference in nature, but in degree. This allows us to affirm an understanding of the body in its entirety, without the primacy of the brain in the process of knowledge. In Bergson's, the brain is responsible for motor action and for choosing, from the totality of past virtuality, the memory that is useful for action. Perception is geared towards action and the present is sensorymotor. Attention can be thought of as an attitude of the body and, therefore, somatic work can contribute to broadening attention and building more creative bodies. Somatic work in teacher training is therefore seen as resistance and (de)education of docilized bodies by years of schooling, and which then arrives at university. Educational sciences have accumulated knowledge about the body, but it remains immune to gravity, a mere concept, in teacher training. We talk and write about the body, we praise the importance of experience in general, but in the construction of the subjectivity of future teachers we experience few bodily actions other than talking and writing. In defence of the interdependence of life and with its feet firmly planted on Gaia, the text presents, in interconnected scenes, the importance of relearning how to breathe, touch, trust, take care of our voice, creating a renewed disposition for teaching, assuming that the body is alive and not a body-machine. It concludes by suggesting that somatic knowledge should be added to curricula in pedagogy for the education we need in the 21st century: anti-racist, feminist, counter-colonial in the construction of Good Living, a concept under construction inspired by the way of life of indigenous peoples to resist the commodification of life.