Beyond Skills: How Embodied Learning Transforms Adult Education
Between January and April 2025, something remarkable unfolded in Paris. Thirty-seven educators, artists, activists, and researchers from across Europe gathered for an experiment in transformative adult education—one that asked not just what we teach, but how we show up as educators in an increasingly complex world.
We began with a recognition many adult educators share: traditional pedagogical approaches often fall short when the challenges we face are relational, emotional, and systemic. How do you teach resilience to communities navigating displacement? How do you foster collaboration in deeply divided groups? How do you help learners reconnect with themselves when institutional systems demand constant productivity?
Studio Atelierista Erasmus+ project, "Empowering Educators: Improving Lifelong Learning in Europe through Transformative Pedagogies," emerged from the belief that educators need more than new content delivery methods. They need practices that integrate body awareness, collective intelligence, and creative approaches—tools that honor the whole subject, not just the cognitive mind.
A Different Kind of Learning
Rather than traditional training sessions, we designed a blended five-month journey structured around direct experience. Two intensive residencies in Paris (eight days total) bookended a period where participants tested their learning in real-world contexts—their classrooms, community projects, and organizations.
Each day began not with lectures but with embodied practices drawn from Social Presencing Theater—awareness-based movement work that helps us notice individual and collective patterns. Participants learned the "20-minute dance", explored "Stuck" exercises, and developed group sensing techniques.
One educator captured the shift perfectly: "I learned that the body knows—this changed how I approach facilitation."
From Theory to Living Practice
The prototyping workshops became unexpected laboratories of possibility. Rather than planning comprehensive programs, participants learned to design small experiments, test them quickly, gather feedback, and iterate. One developed "pocket choreographies"—choreographic games for regular classroom use. Another created containers for "slow fight" to work constructively with conflict.
"I'm starting to think in possibilities or in a prototype," one participant reflected. "This was really a big learning."
The blended structure proved crucial. By spacing the two residencies three months apart, participants had time to try methods in their own contexts, encounter real obstacles, and return with questions rooted in practice rather than theory. This transformed the mobility from a one-time training event into an iterative learning cycle.
The Ripple Effect
Six months after the residencies concluded, the impact continued to unfold in ways we couldn't have predicted:
In classrooms and communities: Participants integrated practices into refugee support programs, senior care initiatives, primary schools, and professional workshops. One educator working with youth observed: "We could reach students who haven't been connected to some emotions they dislike and then they could share it in this way."
In organizations: Multiple institutions began incorporating movement-based methodologies into their curricula. Research organizations gained new methodological approaches. Staff implemented what they called "bold educational initiatives" with newfound confidence.
In networks: Regional clusters formed organically—the Florence participants dubbed themselves "the Magnificent Seven" and meet regularly. Cross-border collaborations sparked joint research proposals and curriculum projects. Colleagues and students joined the network through personal invitation, creating organic growth.
Perhaps most significantly, 50% of participants reported continued practice integration six months later—well beyond typical post-training enthusiasm that quickly fades.
What We Learned About Learning
Embodiment is foundational, not supplementary. As one participant discovered: "When I'm not centered in my body with myself then I'm not open to others... it's so easy in a way but you have to do it."
Diversity of contexts is an asset. Our participants came from university research, primary schools, community arts, refugee support, corporate training, and activism. Rather than seeking universal solutions, we embraced this diversity, using prototyping to help each person adapt methods to their specific reality.
Soft skills are foundational competencies. The ability to hold polarities, work with intangible outcomes like trust and hope, and facilitate in complexity proved essential for adult education contexts addressing social cohesion, integration, and community resilience.
Long-term follow-up reveals genuine impact. Immediate post-training surveys miss the most significant outcomes. Our six-month qualitative follow-up revealed unexpected developments—career shifts, curriculum innovations, cross-border collaborations—that couldn't have been predicted or measured immediately.
The Honest Challenges
Not everything unfolded smoothly. Some participants struggled to maintain practices amid competing institutional demands. One reflected candidly: "Somehow this autumn has started very weirdly for me... I feel I have become quite disconnected from my body."
As a small organization without institutional reserves, we faced significant financial risk. Operating on full reimbursement rather than the typical 80% advance payment meant pre-financing everything—travel, accommodation, meals, materials—with no advance funding. The project succeeded thanks to core team commitment, but it revealed how Erasmus+ administrative requirements can inadvertently barrier the grassroots initiatives that often generate transformative outcomes.
Language differences created genuine challenges, though the embodied nature of practices surprisingly helped transcend linguistic barriers. Movement, sound, and visual methods communicated across differences in ways purely verbal exchanges could not.
These struggles matter. Transformation doesn't mean overnight change or effortless integration. The value lies partly in gaining tools to notice when disconnection happens and pathways to return to practice.
What Makes This Work
Several participants articulated what distinguished this experience from conventional professional development:
- "I gained more courage and self-awareness thanks to the project with you. This transformed my work toward a humanistic approach."
- "It gave me strength and convincement of how important embodiment and working together is for improving social life in general."
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"I feel like I'm a little child still but starting to think in possibilities or in a prototype."
The metaphor of "seeding" emerged repeatedly in follow-up conversations. Participants understood the mobility not as a complete package but as the beginning of ongoing growth—something living that continues to unfold.
A Living Network
The network functions not as a tight-knit group requiring constant contact, but as a distributed resource. People connect when relevant, share resources occasionally, and maintain loose ties that activate when needed. As one participant acknowledged: "Even though I may not talk to many of you, I feel a real interconnection with all of you."
This looser structure may actually support long-term sustainability better than expectations of intensive ongoing collaboration. The network provides what one participant called "the fabric of global citizenship and global connectedness"—a sense of participating in education's evolution, however incrementally.
Looking Forward
The foundations laid in Paris continue to grow. Participants are developing collaborative curriculum materials—12-15 filmed practices for schools and universities. Follow-up residencies are emerging organically (Helsinki welcomed the next gathering in November 2025). Multiple research projects are examining embodied pedagogy and collective emergence. Institutional curriculum revisions are creating lasting change.
One participant captured the long-term vision: "What I really look forward to is to develop ways of togetherness in an activist way... to change in some ways the education systems... we can do things only if we trust the power of all of us."
What This Means for Adult Education
This project demonstrates that adult education professional development can go beyond skill transfer to catalyze genuine transformation. When educators experience learning that honors their whole selves—body, emotions, intuition, creativity, and intellect—they become capable of offering that same wholeness to their learners.
The implications extend beyond this single project. In an era when adult learners navigate rapid social change, digital transformation, isolation, and systemic uncertainty, educators need approaches that address complexity at its own level. Traditional methods that privilege purely cognitive knowing fall short. Methods that integrate embodiment, collective intelligence, and creative practice offer pathways forward.
For organizations considering similar approaches, the message is clear: innovative pedagogies, genuine relationship-building, and commitment to long-term process over quick results create lasting value. Success requires courage to work differently, but the returns justify that courage.
A Final Reflection
"I feel a real interconnection with all of you," one participant shared in our final follow-up conversation. That sense of interconnection—extended across borders, sustained over time, rooted in shared practice rather than just shared ideas—represents what transformative adult education can be.
Not every participant launched ambitious institutional change. Some made smaller integrations—a 10-minute centering practice before facilitating, introducing one exercise to a colleague, maintaining personal practice without immediately extending it professionally. Both scales matter. Value doesn't require institutional transformation to be genuine.
The project succeeded not despite its unconventional approach but because of it. In doing so, it offers a compelling model for how adult education can evolve to meet the challenges of our time—by starting with the humans at its center and trusting what emerges when we truly learn together.
Acknowledgments
This project came to life through the dedication and vision of an extraordinary core organizing team:
Anne-Sophie Pastel Dubanton
Ricardo Dutra
Agathe Peltereau-Villeneuve
Candice Marro
Arawana Hayashi
Marina Seghetti
Deep gratitude to Studio Atelierista for hosting and holding space for this work to unfold, and to Aalto University and Presencing Institute for being knowledge partners/supporters..
The "Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness" project was co-funded by Erasmus+ (Project nr. 2024-1-IT02-KA122-ADU-000211033) and implemented by Studio Atelierista, with AMLE (Association Méditation Laïque pour l'Éducation) as host organization in Paris.
Interested in learning more about embodied pedagogies and transformative education? Connect with Sudio Atelirista or explore upcoming residencies.
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