THE EMBODIED COGNITION IN KINDERGARTEN: A PRE-WRITING EXPERIENCE WITH AN EMBODIED AND ANALOGICAL APPROACH

During the last decade, embodied cognition theories have become increasingly influential in science. This paper aims at deepening the educational purpose of said theories in the developmental age. First, we will focus on the research concerning writing and reading learning processes, then describing a pre-writing experience in kindergarten that tried to concretely promote an embodied and analogical educational practice. Said experience is supported, from a theoretical point of view, both from theories that assume a facilitating influence of the sensorial-motor representations established during handwriting on the processes of reading and writing, but which also tries to naturally follow the way indicated by Butterworth (2007) enhancing the potential of the child, promoting an active, immediate and experiential learning that overturns the domination of the didactic discipline on instinctive processes, presenting itself as a non-conceptual learning method. Therefore, a learning method that, rather than linguistic interaction, focuses on the inner images of mind, an embodied mind, which works intuitively and silently (Mehrnoosh & Fusi, 2018). In brief, this experience has been implemented with the aim of enhancing a culture of dialogue where educational research and professional formation of teachers meet in a circularly virtuous relationship, between the academic world and the school world.