How much presence or distance in teaching and learning?
Embodiment as a frame of reference for holistic education
Abstract
Media pedagogy and media didactics point to countless possibilities that arise from opening up virtual spaces and using digital media in teaching. Blended learning thus opens up additional spaces for learning and encounters without sacrificing the unique features of face-to-face teaching. Why is it still not appropriate at this point in time to optimistically state or proclaim that distance education is equal to face-to-face teaching? This requires an insight into the connections that exist between learning associated with emotions and bodily experience. The physical body and bodily experience in (social) space play a central role in learning processes within a holistic personality development. Moreover, knowledge alone is initially abstract; it is only in people and within human communication that it becomes a meaningful, contextually networked experience in which cognition, emotion and motivation are closely interlinked. A reductionist view of people as computational machines and of the learning process as pure implementation of knowledge has long since become a very questionable position in terms of learning psychology. At the present time, digitally supported face-to-face teaching, specified according to content and context, is most likely to meet the requirements associated with the holistic needs of pupils and students. This is in line with the current state of scientific knowledge and the subsidiary principle of our university system.
