Embodiment en la educación universitaria: un estudio de caso transcultural sobre el teatro del oprimido en el mundo académico

This study explores the impact of the long-standing divide between mind and body in higher education. Given a traditional dearth of body-centered curricula in universities, the thesis analyzes how Theatre of the Oppressed (TO)—a collection of techniques first developed by Brazilian artist Augusto Boal—can be a useful methodology for implementing embodied education in universities and colleges. Such embodiment is crucial if we want to adequately address diverse ways of learning while favoring a holistic pedagogical experience for university students, thereby stimulating genuinely transformative education. The research, which arises from a PhD co-tutorship at the University of Bologna and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, involved analyzing the implementation of TO in seven different contexts, as part of workshops from various disciplines and across three universities in Italy and Spain. Through analysis of the fieldwork, this cross-cultural case study finds that TO can be used as an embodied critical-pedagogical strategy to support anti-oppressive, socially just, and emotionally attentive higher education practices. Informed by Freire’s critical pedagogy, this research concludes that it is necessary to reevaluate the role of the body in university education and that universities should operate as spaces for students to practice active engagement in a democratic society. The findings suggest how—when incorporated into broader university curricula—TO could be a valuable approach for reestablishing a perception of the body and mind as mutually constitutive entities, fostering teaching practices that cultivate what writer Eduardo Galeano refers to with the term “sentipensante,” the ability to act without separating mind and body or reason and emotion.