Designing with AI, Teaching the Body.

A Pilot Study on Pre-Service Teacher Training for Embodied Emotional Literacy

Autors

Dario Lombardi.

Abstract

This pilot study investigates how pre-service teachers in a General Didactics course (LM-85bis) design educational interventions for Embodied Emotional Literacy (EEL) using generative AI as a co-design tool. EEL integrates body awareness, interoception, and expressive movement as foundational pathways to emotional competence. The pedagogical urgency is grounded in documented epidemiological data: alexithymia affects 10–20% of adolescents; childhood obesity involves one in five Italian primary school children; eating disorder onset now occurs as early as age eight. Students withSpecial Educational Needs (SEN) show heightened vulnerability across all three dimensions. Within a single session structured on the ADDIE model, student groups used an AI chatbot to co-design body-oriented interventions tailored to specific SEN profiles. A retrospective then-test assessed perceived changes in self-efficacy, theoretical knowledge, and AI utility for inclusive instructional design. Preliminary findings suggest that AI-mediated co-design activates tacit pedagogical knowledge about the body-emotion nexus, producing measurable gains in self-efficacy and intervention quality.

Keywords

Embodied emotional literacy; AI-assisted instructional design; Pre-service teacher training.

Bibliografia

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