Challenges of Teaching Embodied Pedagogy during Covid emergency

In February 2020, Lombardy knew the first European case of Covid-19. Therefore, University of Milano-Bicocca closed its doors, inviting all professors and trainers to translate their didactic activities in an online form. This was a critical issue, especially for Embodied Pedagogy, mandatory course in the program for future teachers and educators. In particular, this class usually comprehended practical workshops, which have always been structured in small groups and in physical education classrooms and based on intensive and experiential trainings, such as theatre, yoga, dance, mindfulness, art. Taking into account the risk of the complete removal of bodies in the process of teaching and learning, which could be a great risk of the massive use of Distance Learning in Education, The Embodied Pedagogy teaching research group seized the opportunity of organizing these workshops online. In particular, the challenge was keeping in mind the restrictive characteristics of Distance Teaching while aiming, where possible, to highlight the unexpected values of the emergency on-line setting, as its limits as well. Our group found solutions that could be successful in Distant Teaching but could also represent valid tools for teaching in presence. The solutions we found to plan those workshops took into consideration the pedagogical categories of body, space and time and also had the aim of contributing to the revitalization of the quality of "presence" in teaching, overcoming any worthless opposition between real and virtual. Since we received highly positive participants’ feedbacks, in the present contribution we’d like to report these experiences, developed during the pandemic emergency, in order to discuss some elements of this new "pedagogical virtual dispositive", which has a different composition from the traditional pedagogical categories. We would like to present the workshop’s construction process, uncovering some critical issues but also new awareness gained from the online implementation of our course.