Body, reflexivity and educational citizenship: embodied practices for the dialogic construction of meaning

Abstract

The contribution is situated within a line of research that understands the body as a mediator of knowledge, identity and the educational relationship. The hypothesis that guides it is that bodily experiences do not in themselves generate ethical-civic learning, but can foster reflexivity, mutual recognition and citizenship where they are intentionally designed and supported by dialogic practices of re-elaboration. The body is not assumed here as an instrument or support for learning, but as an original condition through which the subject perceives, acts, interprets and communicates. Movement, gesture, posture and interaction with space, both physical and digital, acquire pedagogical value insofar as they convert experience into awareness, speech and responsibility. From this perspective, the dialogic dimension does not arise as an additional moment in relation to action, but operates as a device that gives form to bodily experience and makes its meanings shareable, even when the educational relationship is mediated by digital environments or by Artificial Intelligence. On this basis, the contribution proposes a model founded on the body-reflexivity-citizenship triad, articulated in three interdependent dimensions. The first, experiential, links the body to situated access to knowledge; the second, reflective-dialogic, entrusts its elaboration to sharing; the third, ethical-civic, concerns responsibility, listening, belonging and participation. What emerges is a contribution to that common grammar of Embodied Education in which the educational quality of bodily practices depends on intentional design, capable of enabling the student to recognise themselves as an embodied, relational and responsible subject. Embodied Education is therefore not positioned as an alternative to the digital, but as an experiential anchor that restores bodily depth to technologically augmented learning.