The body at school

Girls and boys find in play and movement a privileged form of interaction with reality, self-expression, and learning. Their thinking is structured precisely through the bodily experience they have of the world. However, at school, the body is often little considered, neglected, and immobilized. In many Italian schools, students are required to stay still, seated, and composed, with spaces organized to favor adult control: every movement is perceived as a transgression. The school environment primarily stimulates the mind, promoting cognitive skills, while bodily and motor skills remain confined to a single weekly physical education lesson. Thus, despite, as Ivano Gamelli—promoter of a pedagogy of the body—emphasizes, “every knowledge is knowledge of the body,” the school persists in the idea of a body emptied of its sensitive and relational dimension, ignoring the role of the active body engaged in the construction of knowledge.

There are, however, school experiences that represent an exception: realities where the body, both of students and teachers, is recognized in its materiality (Massa, 1998). Examples include numerous schools today inspired by education in nature and outdoors, forest schools and kindergartens (Mai, 2019), “schools without backpacks” (Orsi, 2016), as well as schools adhering to the Manifesto “Una Scuola” (Antonacci, Guerra, 2018), aimed at promoting inclusion, social transformation, and an educational culture based on play, adventure, and education. In these school experiences, the body is more considered in daily school life, and the integration between body and mind is promoted also thanks to the valorization of play, exploration in nature, performing arts (music, dance, theater, circus), martial arts, meditation, and yoga, to foster learning that does not happen only seated but also standing and moving (Antonacci, Guerra, 2018).

Another school experience where the body is central is that of hospital schooling, present since 1986 as a branch of the local school and active in all school orders and levels in the main hospitals and pediatric wards across the country. This school ensures, in an integrated way, health, education, training, relationships, and educational continuity for hospitalized or homebound children and adolescents. It guarantees equal opportunities and the right to study even during illness, promotes dialogue among family, home school, and healthcare context, facilitates school reintegration, and helps prevent school dropout. There are no desks, chairs, or bells in this school: times, spaces, bodies, and relationships are regulated in a completely unusual way, flexibility is the norm, and healing the illness is the priority. Here, the body of children and adolescents is always a sick body: exposed, observed, touched, controlled, invaded by medical instruments, disciplined by the times and rhythms of care, which override those of existence, thought, and education. It is through this suffering body that the experience of illness and hospital learning is lived.

Even in pediatric hospital schooling, the body thus appears separated from the mind: it is not thought of as moving or relational, nor adequately considered during or after care, for example with respect to the representations children develop of themselves. However, paradoxically, it is precisely the presence of that sick body that sets the conditions for making hospital schooling a place of possible inclusion and didactic innovation, providing interesting examples to other schools by showing how it is possible to learn even lying down, in bed or standing, through many languages and not only logical-mathematical or linguistic-verbal ones, in the presence of family members as well as healthcare staff, during pauses between therapies, with weakened or non-functioning limbs and organs.

In school, in hospital schooling, and in all care and education contexts aimed at childhood, promoting awareness of the body, which accompanies every experience of the world, is a priority. This requires listening, slowness, competence, and depth, and above all, it requires adults to be fully aware of the role and meanings that their own corporeality assumes in the relationship with girls and boys.