Embodied Sensibilities - Moral Formation for Multidimensionality of Adolescents and Teenagers Open Access

Walker, Renee (2012)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/1544bp63g?locale=en
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Abstract
Embodied Sensibilities - Moral Formation for Multidimensionality of Adolescents and Teenager

In the midst of unprecedented turmoil in our country since the Great Depression, our youth strive daily to face all time high pressures and damaging harms, often lacking adequate decision-making tools to engage the contingency and flux of life. Based on the evidence in this dissertation, I assert that character education in U.S. schools revolving around mere virtues-lists is inadequate to its task of developing our youth's potential for more coherent identity, decision-making skills and inventive problem-solving in vibrant relation. This dissertation takes up the adolescent and teenage age group as its primary focus due to its intense systemic changes that create capacities and vulnerabilities that generate high risk behaviors and initiate the trajectories of habit for adulthood. Concerned educators and ethicists must address these foundational issues of moral formation. I contend that the categorical nature of virtues can more easily succumb to the dangers of dualism by avoiding embodied realities lived out in the intersections of our identities.

Based on praxis and transdisciplinary analyses, I follow concerned phenomenologists, activists, somatics experts, philosophers of education and scientists who seek a dynamic non-dualistic understanding of humanity that rejects dualistic notions of embodiment, rationality and discipline that segment human capacities. In this dissertation I propose an embodied moral formation approach that develops dynamics of human multidimensionality through an embodied moral anthropology, and the aesthetic ethic of passionate intelligence in combination with soma-psyche body work habitus. It takes engaging and healing the body substrates that hold the patterns of our habits and cultures' impact in order to fully stretch into our healthier self-compassionate and compassionate selves. This dissertation features a case study based on a one-year long Life Art Workshop with twelve teenagers. Rather than a common language that easily transcends race, class, gender and religion, virtues must be embedded within an embodied moral anthropology of the Citizen as Artist who undertakes a rhythmic creative process of engaging daily life through the communicative and productive process of channeling energies through attentiveness, composing tensions, experiencing wonder and collaborative work. Through this creative process one finds oneself in growth and gaining traction in changing one's communities during complex times, rather than based on anesthetic morality or mere competition.

Table of Contents

EMBODIED SENSIBILITIES: MORAL FORMATION FOR MULTIDIMENSIONALITY OF ADOLESCENTS AND TEENAGERS



INTRODUCTION EMBODIED SENSIBILITIES: MORAL FORMATION FOR ADOLESCENTS AND TEENAGERS...1



CHAPTER ONE: BEYOND CHARACTER COUNTS: TOWARD EMBODIED MORAL FORMATION EDUCATION...19

DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTER COUNTS...23
TOOLS OF CHARACTER COUNTS...24
FOUR MAJOR CRITIQUES OF CHARACTER COUNTS VIRTUES LIST-BASED APPROACH...27
EXPLAINING THE CONSTRUCTIVE CRITERIA FOR AN ALTERNATIVE EMBODIED MORAL FORMATION APPROACH...40


CHAPTER TWO: DEWEY'S EMBODIED MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY...56

EMBODIED MIND...58
CONTINUUM OF THE MATERIAL AND IDEAL...62
AN EXPERIENCE...64
"MAKINGS"...67
THE PROCESS OF PASSIONATE INTELLIGENCE...70
EDUCATION AS MIDWIFE OF DEMOCRACY...78
PSYCHE-SOMA CONNECTIONS AND THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE...80


CHAPTER THREE: PERCEPTION AS PARTICIPATION: EQUIPPING OUR YOUTH...92

PERMISSION TO STEEP...95
RHYTHM, TENSION AND SYNTHESIS...102
ECSTATIC JOY AND NATURE...111
REORGANIZING TIME AND SPACE THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS...119


CHAPTER FOUR: YOUTH ON THE BRINK AND DAILY HABITUS: GREATER EXPECTATIONS AND MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY...122

OPENING TO BODY SPEAK...125
SOMATICS...129
NATURE ENGAGEMENT...134
MEDITATION...136
IMPROVISATION...137
BODY MOVEMENT/DANCE - NIA...140
CITIZEN AS ARTIST WITH PASSIONATE INTELLIGENCE AND SOMA-PSYCHE HABITUS...142


CHAPTER FIVE: CASE STUDY: LIFE ART WORKSHOP...145

THE ENVIRONMENT AND DYNAMICS...147
WORKSHOP ELEMENTS...150
SESSION NARRATIVES...176


CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION: EMBODIED SENSIBILITIES--MORAL FORMATION APPROACH FOR ADOLESCENTS AND TEENAGERS...193

GUIDE TO EMBODIED MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY...194
GUIDE TO PASSIONATE INTELLIGENCE-DISCERNMENT METHOD...196
GUIDE TO SOMA-PSYCHE BODY WORK HABITUS...206


BIBLIOGRAPHY...213


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