In the last four decades, we have been witnessing a turn in cognitive science, social sciences, and the humanities toward understanding learning, feeling and cognizing processes in general as situational embedded, embodied activities. For short: The turn toward enacted, embodied cognition. The EMBED unit harbors research focused on various aspects of embodiment with implications for education, learning and pedagogy.

Focus:

• Embodied and enacted approaches to mind and learning, including radical enactivism
• The phenomenological (embodied) tradition: impacts on pedagogy
• Pragmatism (neo- and classical) transformations of educational thinking

Work:

Discussions, presentations of papers and ideas at our (virtual) meetings every 5-6 weeks. Collaborations on publications and conference presentations. We collectively presented at ECER in Yerevan 2022 and at the INPE conference at AU/DPU in Copenhagen 2022: https://conferences.au.dk/inpe2022. A summer university course ‘Enacting Education’ was offered at AU., and a Ph.D. course 'Embodied Education - 4Es cognition and emotion in education, pedagogy and didactics' (with Prof. Shaun Gallagher, Memphis University) took place autumn 2022. Cooperation on applications for research funding. 

The first International conference on Embodied education, hosted by AU/DPU, organized by EMBED, was held at Aarhus University, Danish School of Education (DPU), Copenhagen 2024. 

The International Society of Embodied Education was officially founded June 11, 2026, on the conclusion of The second International Conference on Embodied Education, which took place at DPU in Copenhagen, June 8-11 2026: https://conferences.au.dk/embodied-education-2026   The society was created to serve as a platform for global dialogue and academic collaboration among the communities of scholars working in the field of Embodied Education (EE), with the interest of sharing knowledge and strengthening the burgeoning networks of research and practice of embodied teaching and learning.

Future conferences under the banner of the society will move to new hosts, with the next iteration being organized by Federico Corni, Stefania Moser, and their team.

• Camila Leporace, University of Coimbra, Portugal
• Dag Munk Lindemann, UCL University College, Denmark
• Denis Francesconi, University of Vienna, Austria
• Farida Youssef, The Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Egypt
• Henri Pettersson, University of Oulu, Finland
• Matthew Crippen, Pusan National University, South Korea & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
• Ralph Ings Bannell, The Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Menno van Calcar, Erasmus University, the Netherlands
• Tibor Solymosi, Susquehanna University, USA
• Veli-Mikko Kauppi, University of Oulu, Finland
• Francesca Aloi, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Surya Pasupuleti, University of Lapland (visiting scholar)