Over the next couple of months I have the opportunity to work with teachers in two separate educational settings at opposite ends of the educational journey – that is with a group of pre-primary teachers as well as with four professors who teach at the undergraduate level. With both groups of teachers I am hoping to develop a methodology of embodied pedagogy.
Embodied pedagogy is an approach that seeks to actively dismantle the mind-body dichotomy. It can add new dimensions of understanding to subjects that are traditionally taught through the modalities of text/words – writing, reading, and discussion. Thinking and experience do not happen only in words. Therefore, the learning of subject matter needs to be expanded to realms other than words. This is not to undermine the value of text, but rather to work towards unifying the learning-thinking-experiencing process to include two modalities that are in fact both located within each body. The first modality, which has always been used by conventional teaching methods is cognitive, abstract, and seemingly disembodied. The second modality, which I want to investigate, is a more physical, tactile, and experiential approach.
Embodied pedagogy restores the focus to the body as a whole, by reestablishing the connections between what we experience as mind and body. So, the body is an 'instrument' in learning (physically participating in practical exercises), and a 'site' of learning (what other kinds of understandings are possible by including your body in the learning process). The former has been explored to some extent in classroom exercises and activities. But in my experience, the greater value that embodied pedagogy has to offer is to draw out a more nuanced and layered understandings that occur when the body is engaged with knowledge production.
