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The Meaning of the Body’s Movement for

Learning in the School

By Ella Shoval and Theresa Kauffman

This article deals with the integration of body movement into school learning processes, not
only to avoid sedentary behavior that harms learners’ health but also to improve their learning
and academic achievement. Many studies—involving different learner ages from kindergarten
to university and many study topics in languages, sciences, and humanities—have examined
this integration. Movement of the body contributes to the learning process in many situations.
The authors explain two basic processes: (a) renewing arousal and improving concentration,
and (b) providing kinesthetic information. They also briefly suggest ways to deal with the two
main difficulties in implementing movement integration: (a) organization and management for
allowing movement, and (b) finding ideas for incorporating movement into learning.

bout 2 months after she entered first grade, Sharon was asked, “What is it like
Ato be a student at school?” Her answer was: “Great! It’s just a pity there are
classes between breaks.” The adults in the room laughed at the girl’s wit, but she was
offended and gave an explanation: “It’s not funny; in the classes we sit all the time
so you can’t really learn.”
For centuries, an argument has raged between those who see the body and the
mind as separate and those who see the body and the mind conjoined. Education
systems in the western world have evolved based on this body-mind separation.
Thus, in the school system, the body is engaged for about 2 hours a week of physical
education classes, and the rest of the time, the body is ignored.
Sometimes, the learning is more active and inquisitive and provides examples of
“incidental movement” because the children hold test tubes; look at cells through a
microscope; run into the woods next to the school, bending and crawling to look for
snails heralding winter; or try to solve physical challenges as a group. Such incidental
movement differs from “mindful movement,” which is defined as a body movement
used to illustrate an idea, clarify it, express it, and apply it—thus deliberately serving
non-motor learning processes. In mindful movement, verbal processes are integrated
before, during, and after the movement.
Today, with the help of research into medicine in general and into medication for
mental illness in particular (e.g., Cheung et al., 2021), studies on brain development
and general brain research strengthen our understanding of the lack of separation
between body and mind. In education, too, the number of studies dealing with
“embodiment” is increasing. Embodiment is a theory in cognitive psychology that
emphasizes the role of the physical body in shaping consciousness and awareness of
things. According to this theory, human beings use the information received through
the senses and their experiences in the physical world in order to link tangible images
to abstract concepts and understand them (Shoval et al., 2018).
At the same time, studies in health and health education present the harms of
sedentary behavior in the digital-screen age of the 21st century. Studies that involved
observing children’s behavior during the day have found that children do not achieve
the necessary minimum physical activity for their health and development (Hollis
et al., 2016). According to varied health organizations (e.g., Davies et al., 2011;

Schools Fostering a More Equitable World 17