Embodied Change Erasmus Project

Project Title

Embodied Change

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

This strategic partnership was created in response to low levels of participation of young people in Europe. It seems that although increasing youth participation has been an important objective of international and local funds supporting non-formal learning activities, existing teaching and training methodologies haven’t been efficient enough to increase social and civic activism – statistics suggest that it is still low. There are difficulties to find interventions for empowering young people to take control of their circumstances and a strong need to develop new approaches how to engage and strengthen young people.

And here we see the huge potential and importance of embodied learning. Most education of all kinds – takes as a starting point the conveyance of new information, based on the premise that knowledge is power. Books, teachers, models, new ideas and simulations are all great places to start when learning something new. The problem is most learning stops there. Once the book is shut and the teacher is gone, we head back to our lives, where we proceed to do things very much the same way that we did them yesterday. That’s because exposure to new ideas is necessary but insufficient to enable us to take new action.

Embodied learning constitutes a contemporary pedagogical theory of learning, which emphasises the use of the body in the educational practice. It views the physical body as a domain of learning, change, and transformation. One of the main advantages of embodied learning is that it gives a chance to take a new action or explore different ways of being and acting immediately.

Goal of this partnership was to elaborate innovative body and movement based learning principles and methods for boosting young people’s participation and activism. Special focus has been put on developing competencies such as initiative and entrepreneurship, social and civic skills.

Main theme uniting all the activities and outputs of this project was embodied learning – its main concepts, principles, approaches and various methods, viewing the physical body as a domain of learning, change, and transformation.

The project included two training courses and one international plus several local multiplier events in all involved countries. Partners have developed an online course about body and movement based learning and an embodied learning toolkit that can be used in work with young people and also with adults.

Partners also explored different points of view about the role and importance of body in education, and ideas for practical work with the body and movement in learning context by creating a podcast where experts from different countries and organisations are sharing their knowledge and best practice examples.

One of our objectives was to help professionals working in the field of youth, training and education to understand the importance and role of body and movement in the learning process and elaborate guidelines and tools on how to learn from the body and with the body. We hope to inspire educators to become more attentive to the needs of their own and their learners bodies and integrate body and movement based learning in their work with young people and also use it for their own professional development.

Activities were based on methods such as work with digital tools, various disciplines of movement and bodywork, case studies, exploring research data, expert interviews, feedback, group discussions, creative and reflective writing exercises, individual and group challenges, tasks for reflection and evaluation.

More than 1400 people participated in offline and online, local and international events that happened during this project – most of them professionals who are active in the field of youth and education.

Several researches related to various areas of expertise highlight the usefulness and the necessity of the body itself as a learning tool. Despite this, until recently, the body has not been used in education and involvement of the body had been consistently excluded from the educational practice, the process of learning and the interaction among learners. Thus besides developing professional competences of the participants who were involved in various activities and providing them new tools for their work, in longer period of time partners hope to increase understanding about the importance of body and its processes in education and learning. That would lead to more holistic and efficient training and teaching strategies, with a higher potential to provide young people empowerment that is needed for them to become more active and engaged citizens.

This project has helped to increase interest in embodied approaches to learning and also about the different ways how state of our body influences our abilities to learn. It has sparked new initiatives and partnerships thus the development of embodied educational approaches and methods is continuing.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 58716 Eur

Project Coordinator

Piepildito sapnu istaba & Country: LV

Project Partners

• Nomadways
• Associazione Teatro invisibile