Journal of Dance Education
July 3, 2021
Matthew Henley
4 citations
Dance educators face a challenge from the Western assumption, rooted in Cartesian dualism and reinforced by the computer metaphor of mind, that thinking is separate from bodily action. This view reduces students to inputs and outputs, but dance education has long offered a counter-narrative, integrating conceptual and physical learning through pedagogies and neuroscience research showing their deep interconnection. Despite this history, dance educators can still inadvertently separate dancing from thinking about dance in their teaching. The article argues for recognizing the artificiality of this boundary and the transformative power of the thinking body.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Christian Kronsted, Matthew Henley, Miriam Giguere
The Kolb Learning Cycle describes experiential learning through four phases: experimentation, concretization, observation, and conceptualization. This article extends the model by integrating 4E cognition (embodied, enactive, embedded, extended), group role theory, ecological psychology, and participatory sense-making. The authors argue that as individuals cycle through group roles—leader, follower, naysayer, observer—they shift into different Kolb phases, which changes the group's emergent dynamics. Social interaction thus drives the learning cycle. Because individual behavior emerges from group processes, reductive explanations of group learning as the sum of individual contributions are inadequate; instead, the group itself is considered a cognitive system that drives learning.