Through a field inquiry, the present study explores the potential of movement-based performing arts focusing on bodily imagination as an approach to participatory and embodied research methods in educational sciences. Special focus is given to the role of kinaesthetic imagination (Serlin 1996) in connection to the concept of radical imagination (Haiven and Khashnabish 2010), as both research tools and factors of social change through research. Imagination is approached as a kinesthetic, cognitive, social and educational process that might be central to the generation of critical and creative knowledge co-creation.

Embodiment and embodied research in education are framed through interdisciplinary perspectives coming mainly from Performance Studies, Body Studies, Cognitive Sciences, and Artistic Research. The present article explores how movement-based performing arts lessons that focus on bodily imagination may provide experimental strategies for participatory and embodied research involving teachers as co-researchers. The aim of the research is to describe the kind of research strategies that are co-constructed in the context of a secondary school teacher training dedicated to movement-based performing arts that focus on bodily imagination, by analyzing the kind of learning experiences and emotions described by participants. The study adopts the approach of an arts-based action research and the lens of embodied inquiry, involving two groups of secondary school teachers in Spain and in Italy. Embodied research tools are shared with secondary school teachers in order to explore the role of bodily creativity in their learning experiences and teaching strategies. The paper proposes that teachers as agents of change can train their radical imagination (Haiven and Khashnabish 2015) in connection to kinesthetic imagination (Zarrilli 2020, Serlin 1996) as a research activity for social change (Fratz and Walker 1995), by exploring embodied teaching and learning (Anttila 2018, 2015) as a form of epistemic activism (Fricker 2007) in the classroom, and in order to prepare students to envision and shape just realities (Brown 2019).

Keywords: Participatory methods, embodied research, movement-based performing arts, inquiry-based teaching, educational research.