Who Can Form Jiwasa?

Different Bodies, Rhythms, and Ways of Learning

The music begins.

Some people recognize the rhythm immediately. Others need to observe before moving. One person dances standing up, another while seated. Someone follows the sound; another perceives vibrations, gestures, or the movement of bodies through space.

If we consider only those who perform the expected movement, we will quickly classify who kept up and who fell behind.

But perhaps the most important question is different:

Can the collective learn from those who participate differently?

Jiwasa cannot be formed only by young, trained, non-disabled people who are able to follow the dominant rhythm.

It must include those who perceive, learn, communicate, and move in other ways.

Those Who Need More Time Today May Guide the Collective Tomorrow

In school, there is often a student who needs more time to understand.

They ask again.

They interrupt the pace of the class.

They need another explanation.

In a harsh popular expression, someone might say that this student is “dragging a chain.”

But perhaps they are revealing a difficulty created by the path itself.

Today, they need the collective to slow down.

Tomorrow, they may be the person who asks the necessary question that helps everyone understand better.

Someone who appears to delay the group may be showing where the group has not yet learned how to teach.

This does not mean denying real difficulties, diagnoses, or support needs.

Autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and motor, sensory, or intellectual disabilities may require accommodations, specialized support, and public policies.

Classification can help secure rights.

The problem begins when it stops opening pathways and starts determining in advance who a person will be, what they can learn, and how much they can contribute.

Neurodiversity invites us to change the question.

Instead of asking only:

“What can this person not do?”

we can ask:

“What needs to change in the relationship among the person, the task, and the environment?”

Knowledge Also Needs to Leave Its Dominant Rhythm

The same problem appears in science.

Each field develops its own language.

Neuroscience speaks of afference, interoception, and executive functions.

Education speaks of mediation, learning, and curriculum.

Anthropology speaks of territory, relationships, and ways of existence.

Dance speaks of presence, weight, pause, direction, and gesture.

These languages matter because they provide precision. But they can also trap researchers within their own fields.

Each area may find very good answers to the questions it already knows how to ask. It can then remain within a local optimum: an efficient solution inside its own limits, but one that cannot see other possibilities nearby.

Scientific Jiwasa begins when different fields can translate their questions without erasing their differences.

Neuroscience can ask how attention changes.

Education can investigate how someone learns.

Anthropology can ask which relationships make that learning possible.

Choreography can test how space, time, and movement alter participation.

The participant can describe how the experience was lived.

None of these answers is sufficient on its own.

Translation among fields does not weaken science.
It increases the number of questions science is able to formulate.

This translation is necessary because every field depends on teaching and learning.

Scientists need to learn from participants.

Teachers learn from students.

Choreographers learn from different bodies.

Institutions need to learn from those whom their rules still fail to include.

Learning Does Not Belong to a Single Age

Modern schools often separate people by age.

This organization can support planning and activities suited to different developmental stages.

But it is not the only possible way to learn.

Outside school, children, young people, adults, and older people participate in the same world.

A child asks questions adults have stopped asking.

A young person understands a new technology.

An adult organizes resources.

An older person recognizes continuities and consequences that others have not yet noticed.

Among different Indigenous peoples, learning may take place through coexistence, territory, care, observation, and participation in collective activities. There is no single Indigenous pedagogy, and these forms of knowledge should not be turned into a universal formula.

Their contribution is to show that learning does not have to mean placing people of the same age in the same room, doing the same task, and obeying the same rhythm.

An intergenerational Jiwasa allows roles to circulate.

The person teaching now may learn later.

Someone who needs help with one task may guide the next.

Leadership circulates because the knowledge required also changes.

Jiwasa Is Not Mandatory Synchrony

In dance, many bodies performing the same movement may create a powerful image.

But synchronization is not the same as inclusion.

A group can execute a perfect choreography and still exclude every body unable or unwilling to reproduce it.

Within the BrainLatam hypothesis, Jiwasa is a “we” that does not require the disappearance of the “I.”

Participation, therefore, does not necessarily mean performing the same gesture.

One person may dance while seated.

Another may follow visual signals.

Someone may need silence.

Another person may prefer not to touch or be touched.

Communication may occur through speech, writing, sign language, technology, gaze, or gestures agreed upon by the group.

These differences are not peripheral adaptations added to an already finished dance.

They may transform what the collective understands dance to be.

Inclusion does not mean bringing everyone closer to the body considered normal.
It means allowing different bodies to transform the norm itself.

The same principle applies to education and research.

A student does not need to imitate an ideal learner.

A research participant does not need to produce the expected data.

An older person does not need to move like a younger person.

A different response may not be an error.

It may be information the method did not yet know how to recognize.

Diplomacy Before Classification

BrainLatam proposes the idea of Brazilian Diplomacy as a form of care before automatic classification.

Diplomacy does not mean avoiding conflict or claiming that everything is equal.

It means not deciding too early:

who knows;

who does not know;

who teaches;

who delays;

who leads;

who should only follow.

Before classifying a person as a problem, the collective may ask:

“What is this difference trying to teach us?”

This question does not remove the responsibilities of teachers, researchers, therapists, or managers.

A collective does not magically self-regulate simply because it is diverse.

Groups can also exclude, humiliate, and protect violent behavior.

For any form of co-regulation to emerge, certain conditions are necessary: safety, accessibility, mediation, consent, the right to pause, and freedom to disagree.

Diversity offers information.

But the collective must learn how to receive it.

Circulating Leadership

In Jiwasa, leadership is not permanent property.

The person who knows the space may guide movement.

The person who notices overload may request a pause.

Someone who uses a wheelchair may discover pathways others had never imagined.

A person who needs silence may reveal how much noise was being treated as normal.

Someone who took longer to learn may discover a clearer way to teach.

This does not mean that everyone carries the same responsibility.

The teacher remains responsible for the educational process.

The researcher remains responsible for the method.

The choreographer remains responsible for artistic decisions.

Circulating leadership means recognizing that these positions do not contain all available perception.

No one perceives everything all the time.

For this reason, leading also requires learning from those being led.

Data Must Also Learn to Include

Research on dance, education, or neurodiversity may record movement, heart rate, EEG, fNIRS, performance, and behavior.

These measurements can help answer important questions.

But no isolated data point can define who belongs to the collective.

A person showing less synchronization may be tired, protecting themselves from overload, or participating in another way.

Perhaps the equipment was not designed to recognize their movement.

Perhaps the recorded difference is the most important discovery.

Data sovereignty requires participants and communities to know what is being measured, who can access it, how it will be interpreted, and what benefits will return to those who produced the information.

Data should not leave a person and return only as classification.

It should return as understanding, protection, and possibility of choice.

Who Can Form Jiwasa?

The music continues.

One person follows quickly.

Another needs time.

One dances.

Another watches.

One leads now.

Another will lead later.

Jiwasa does not exist because everyone learned the same thing.

It begins when the collective can learn from what it does not yet understand.

Who can form Jiwasa?

Those who teach.

Those who learn.

Those who do both at the same time.

Those who follow the rhythm.

Those who reveal that perhaps another rhythm must be created.

Those who appear to be “dragging a chain” today, but may be showing that the chain is attached to the path itself.

A more inclusive Jiwasa does not ask every field to abandon its language.

It asks them to cross their boundaries.

So that a question from dance may reach neuroscience.

A discovery from anthropology may transform education.

An educational experience may inspire an experiment.

And the person being studied may stop being only an object and become a participant in the creation of knowledge.

A collective does not become more intelligent when everyone reaches the same answer.
It becomes more intelligent when it can learn from different ways of asking questions.

In the previous text, we argued that no one should have to surrender their feelings to prove that they belong.

Now we move toward another freedom:

No one should have to abandon their way of perceiving, learning, or participating in order to be recognized as part of the collective.

References and Their Contributions

PRECIADO JIMENEZ, Susana Aurelia et al. The Dynamic Interplay Between Students and Staff in Enhancing Inclusion in Higher Education in Latin America. 2023.
Contribution: presents collaborative approaches that replace models focused only on deficit with environments built through the participation of neurodivergent students.

QUILAQUEO, Daniel; TORRES, Héctor. School Contextualization with Indigenous Groups’ Socio-Educational Methods and Pedagogies. 2024.
Contribution: supports dialogue between schools and Mapuche socio-educational knowledge without reducing inclusion to adding Indigenous content to unchanged colonial structures.

CALDERÓN, Dora Inés; BLANCO VEGA, María de Jesús; LEÓN SUÁREZ, Juliana Patricia. Inclusive Dance with Deaf People: A State of the Art. 2022.
Contribution: shows that sound and hearing should not be treated as the only entrances to rhythm, movement, and dance.

DELABARY, Marcela dos Santos et al. Brazilian Dance Self-Perceived Impacts on Quality of Life of People with Parkinson’s. 2024.
Contribution: values the first-person experience of older participants and people with Parkinson’s without turning reported benefits into universal evidence.

TORINO, Emanuelle et al. CARE Principles for the Governance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data. 2024.
Contribution: grounds collective benefit, authority, responsibility, and ethics in data use, inspiring questions about community participation in scientific production.

EDU O. et al. Nunca Mais Abismos. 2023.
Contribution: shows how disabled artists and accessibility resources can participate in the language of the work itself rather than appearing as later adaptations.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. Jiwasa: Learning and Teaching Within a Collective Self.
Contribution: proposes that learning, teaching, and leading should be circulating functions without presenting collective self-regulation as an automatically guaranteed mechanism.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. Brazilian Diplomacy.
Contribution: proposes delaying automatic classifications so that differences can be investigated as information about people, relationships, environments, and methods.

The central sentence becomes:

Jiwasa is not a collective in which everyone learns in the same way, but one capable of learning from different ways of learning.