Embodiment and educational policy sense making

Abstract

In this paper I present a conceptual analysis on the relation between the body and educational policy. I defend that school actors make sense of educational policy through their embodied engagements and actions in the school context. An embodied perspective on educational policy sense making implies a reconceptualization of the meaning and nature of educational policy and a reconsideration of the active and creative role of school actors in the process of policy sense making. An embodied analysis of educational policy challenges traditional conceptions of educational policy as a property of policy elites. It allows us to see how the school actors transform and recontextualize the policy when they try to make sense of it. This perspective offers an explanatory framework to understand how is it possible that school actors adapt and recontextualize policies in idiosyncratic ways.