Inhabiting the body through the arts in teacher education: The experience and relevance of an enhanced somatic dimension

This article focuses on a meeting between the fields of teacher education, arts education and somatic education. Somatic education, the process of learning to experience the body from the inside, is a lesser-known modality within teacher education, and this research sought to explore its potential scope and relevance within this context. The article thereby offers a theoretical discussion on the relevance of somatic principles and practices for the arts education component of teacher education, and goes on to provide a particular illustration of the experience of its integration within an Irish pre-service context. The data for analysis within the phenomenological case study included participant journals, post-module questionnaires, and interviews which drew on aesthetic and embodied modalities. Ultimately, the somatic-aesthetic relationship which evolved was considered to be critical to experiences of flow, presence and attunement within the arts, and to related dispositional and perceptual shifts in identity and professional orientation.