An Approach to Research on Embodiment and Forms of Knowledge Methodological Challenges to Interpretation

This paper deals with the researcher’s role and the status of the data s/he is inclined to use. The outset is theories on embodied knowledge and knowledge forms such as those devised by Pierre Bourdieu, Hubert & Stuart Dreyfus and Jean Lave who all struggle to find out how to view embodiment from either a subjective or a cultural perspective without neglecting the other. Consequently, their respective theories fail to account for the ways in which the subjective perspectives and cultural contexts are necessarily interwoven – as Merleau-Ponty puts it – or ethical – as Aristotle would claim – or interdependent – as Højrup argues. Studying a teacher training program, specifically the relation between placement and teaching, this presentation argues for a ‘meeting point’ and theoretical frame of Merleau-Ponty, Aristotle and Højrup that dialectally grasps the relations between researcher and interviewee by understanding them as either bodily interwoven, a life-mode or virtuously related. The inclusion of subjective perspectives and cultural conditions enlightens educational research as a process of interpretation where the embodied and life-mode structured observation both opens and closes ways of interpretation. The conclusion is that being interwoven with the interviewee is a virtue in itself that increases as well as imposes certain limits on singular opportunities as the researcher and interviewee project meaning onto each other in terms of pre-reflective perceptions, life-mode ethnocentrism and appropriate knowledge forms.