Embodied Education at the center of a new paradigm: a contribution from art and theatre for a multimodal interface

Abstract

The research - Embodied Education through art and theatre – tries to underline the relationship between the artistic and theatrical languages and the neurosciences, in particular starting from the discovery of the MNS Mirror Neuron System (Gallese, Rizzolatti.
1996), to offer a contribution for an enactive learning. The Embodied Simulation tells us that at the basis of the understanding of the world there are the representation of the aim and the sensory-motor involvement, motor and intentional basis of learning, that art and theatre express through pre-linguistic instruments: images and actions. In the last years the educational sciences and the cognitive sciences (Fischer, Daniel, Immordino-Yang, Stern, Battro, Koizumi. 2007) have intensified their connections to the point of identifying a unique science MBE, Mind Brain Education science (Tokuhama-Espinoza,
2010). This common field concerns the classical themes of learning, memory, attention and language, but also the themes of consciousness and body. The theoretical and empirical research, arisen at the end of the XXth Century, and now developing in cognitive sciences, is causing the change of the research interests from the mind study itself to the study of an ecological mind, of an interdependent mind between body and environment: the focus is the concatenation mind-body-environment, the extended mind.