Journal of Teaching Innovation and Reform

Articles

Vol. 1 (2025)

Music as Somatic Therapy: An Embodied and Affective Educational Approach for Older Adults

Published
2025-08-01

Abstract

This study proposes an embodied educational approach for older adults through singing practices in community spaces—not merely as a form of entertainment or social interaction, but as a process of somatic and affective therapy. From a posthumanist theoretical perspective, older adults are no longer perceived as "subjects in need of care," but as somatic agents—individuals who sing to connect, to feel, and to exist in an increasingly fragmented and dehumanized world.

Singing in clubs becomes a practice of embodied education, where older adults materialize memories, sounds, emotions, and even silences—thereby creating a learning space in which humans, objects, technologies, and temporalities are entangled. This is where they practice the right to be present—not merely to survive, but to live with emotion, connection, and voice.

By combining posthumanist theoretical analysis with empirical surveys in community singing clubs, the study elucidates the material–affective–social forces shaping the quality of older adults' learning through music. At the same time, it proposes a model of the “Sustainable Singing Club” as a space of somatic education, where music serves as a medium of therapy, embodiment, and ontological reconfiguration within a shared ecology of humans, sounds, memories, technologies, and communities.

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