When preparing my poster for the AAPT/APA conference in New York in January 2024, I had to consider not only what topics would interest fellow educators but also what might be aesthetically appealing to spark curiosity and conversation. I try to incorporate the same factors in planning my syllabi and individual classes. Including what appeals to or intrigues our senses means we are encouraged to spend more time with the subject at hand. We often neglect embodied realities for the sake of intellectual pursuits when in fact engaging the body—whether through the senses, movement, or enthusiastic dialogue in alternative settings—helps to better engage the mind as well.
My poster consisted of several elements demonstrating embodied pedagogy. For me, this term means two main things: 1. paying attention to the role of our bodies in teaching and learning and 2. incorporating factors from outside the classroom relevant to our lives into class plans, activities, and assignments. Making these efforts has netted positive feedback from students, who often say they better relate to material that previously seemed irrelevant to their daily lives and other studies. This is especially heartening for those of us who teach gen eds full of students simply looking to complete a requirement rather than students excited to delve deep into challenging philosophical concepts.
Embodied Assignments
In all my courses, I incorporate at least two assignments that I consider “embodied” in some way in what is often referred to as “experiential learning.” My definition is a bit more expansive; embodied pedagogy involves doing but also being-with in the phenomenological sense, which implies direct interaction with others and our environments. The “field assignment,” which I give in lieu of a mid-term, asks students to choose an embodied activity relevant to course themes and materials for at least 15 minutes for five consecutive days. They write short reflections after each session and then a longer 3-page reflection on the experience as a whole, using citations from course assignments or outside research. In my Reorienting Asian Thought class, students can elect to do something like cooking, meditation, yoga, or martial arts, all of which are activities based on their reading assignments. In my Human Nature class, which is grounded in Western philosophy, having them do their own version of Descartes’ Meditations can lead to fascinating reflections on mind/body dualism.
This idea can be applied to any course that may not seem amendable to such an exercise. For example, if I were able to teach an upper-level seminar on Kierkegaard (an avid flâneur), I would require students to walk and think before documenting both their reflection on the material for the week and how their reflection was influenced (or not) by the walking. Doing this encourages students to think beyond the small realms of their screens and notebooks in order to engage more explicitly and directly with the world.
The other embodied assignment is a flexible final that can take the form of a traditional paper or a creative project. I have received much inspiring work, including: makeup looks influenced by the Four Noble Truths by a gender studies major; an online, interactive meditation session coded by a computer science major; a podcast interview with a local rabbi regarding COVID restrictions clashing with religious requirements by a communications major; a choreographed, performed, and filmed piece based on religious and spiritual engagement with nature by a dance major; the list goes on. At a school like SUNY Purchase, which cultivates artists of all kinds (dancers, painters, graphic designers, musicians, etc.), both assignments provide ample opportunities for students to apply their extant skills to our course and, in turn, better understand how topics in philosophy and religious studies are relevant to their work. Adapted approaches can be successful for other demographics as well, the idea being that students not only do the things they’re reading and thinking and talking about, but also experiment with best practices in terms of study habits and exploratory scholarship. As I have written elsewhere in relation to this kind of assignment, embodied pedagogy can also be a means to subvert scholastic trends that tend to repeat the same kinds of voices at the expense of others.
Embodied Activities During Class
Since philosophy is couched in dialogues and commentaries, I find it imperative to always involve students directly in class time. This includes open discussions as well as activities that encourage both time to think and time to engage with others. In my online classes, I utilize Google Docs enabled with the “comment” feature so students can respond to questions and add commentary to both my lecture notes (displayed live) and specific places for them to respond. In my in-person classes, I utilize group discussion time so students can share their ideas with each other. When I teach longer classes, though it may seem trivial, I encourage students to get up during our short break and move around a bit. I almost always find we are all more refreshed upon our return. In addition, I have each student plan their own presentation for a chosen class that they sign up for at the start of the semester. They have the option of working solo or in a group with another student, and they can create a class- or group-oriented activity or slideshow. This is a great opportunity for students to practice soft skills and it tends to help them feel more comfortable facilitating discussions with their peers.
Embodied pedagogy can be a general method of teaching and learning as well as the focus of a class. I had the opportunity to teach a course called Embodiment: (Re)Defining the Human in the fall of 2023 as a Teaching Scholars Fellow in the Columbia Religion department. In addition to the assignments described above, I incorporated an embodied exercise at the start of every class to correspond with the theme of the day. For example, to start the class on “Monsters” (for which students read Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s introduction to Monster Theory: Reading Culture and the amazing comic book series Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda), we played a game of “exquisite corpse.” In groups of three, one student draws the head of a monster and folds the paper over. The next student draws the torso, folds the paper over again, and the last draws the legs. At the end of the exercise, the group has a composite monster they can then give a story to and relate back to the topic at hand. Similar activities can be drawn from theater and performance studies courses that often utilize such methods to great effect for student engagement.
Branching Out
One of the common conversations I had with others at the 2024 conference revolved around how embodied pedagogy can be incorporated into courses that seem less obviously suited to it as a methodology. Though my interests and style directly pertain to embodied pedagogy, I firmly believe it is simply a matter of figuring out our own interests with those of the students and coming up with creative ways to apply abstract material to the “real world” and vice versa. The most successful class in my Embodiment course was thanks to guest speaker Mike Araujo, Parkour Instructor for The Movement Creative in NYC. He gave a demonstration and hosted a fantastic Q&A during our week on built environments and disability studies on how to consider our surroundings in the forefront rather than the background of our attention. Leveraging the expertise of others is a great way to expose students to ways of thinking, doing, and being that can help expand their understanding of what is relevant to their lives in the context of a particular topic.
Another idea is to utilize field trips or give assignments that require students to visit local sites or businesses that pertain to themes of a class. In big cities, this might mean encouraging students to take advantage of museums or walk around neighborhoods. In small college towns or on campuses in more rural areas, this might mean visiting parks or trying a new activity outside. The point is to get students to think with their whole selves, not just their minds. Doing so ensures we do our best to prevent academic siloing and Ivory Tower contemplation, leading to education that can help us all try to make a better world for ourselves and future generations.
Suggestions for further reading:
Sarah Rose Cavanagh – The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion
Matthew B. Crawford – Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Carla Hannaford – Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All in Your Head
Sara Hendren – What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World
Susan Hrach – Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning
Tim Ingold – Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture
Paul A. Kirschner and Carl Hendrick – How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice
Annie Murphy Paul – The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
Ben Spatz – What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research
Emily FitzGerald
Emily is currently finishing her dissertation at Columbia University. She has been teaching in the Philosophy and Critical Thought Department at SUNY Purchase for three years and will soon be Assistant Professor of Humanities at Utah Tech University. Her embodied interests include phenomenology, deconstruction, Buddhist philosophy, and martial arts.
This is a really cool post. I shared it with my department. Thank you.
This is a great post, that made me think about how my studies went under a different light. I think that if this approach were to be mainstreamed though, it could turn into something especially violent for some students, unless massive changes were brought to academia and school systems, to a degree that they would become unrecognizable.
I have studied sociology, and there has been a lot of embodiement due to having to seek out people to talk to them and observe them. We had field trips since day 1. What happened is that we were judged on having the right embodied experiences, as our teachers were obviously asked to grade us eventually. I am a minority in more than one way, and unsurprisingly, my embodied experiences were of the wrong kind. This would eventually leave me speechless when trying to speak of them, as I lacked the relevant categories to do so, especially in my field. Or if I did speak up anyway about my embodied experiences, especially about disability, I would pass for a liar—this eventually turned into the basis for moral harassment from several of my professors.
In other words, I seems to me that emboddied pedagogy within a context of oppressions—and academia certainly is full of them—would only further hermeneutic and testimonial injustice. As students are asked to be both open to the knowledge they are taught, and good at giving out the expected kind of answer, if this process embeds not only broad ideas that are oppressive, but also highly specific judgements, from a highly legitimate source, about how their lived reality and them themselves specifically are wrong, bad, or do not exist, then it would have massive negative downstream effects on the psychological wellbeing of the students who are already the most discriminated.
How can approaching the embodied—which due to being closer to reality, risks refuting everything from how teaching is organized to the very theories being taught—be reconciled with the institutional need to judge the students for a grade, especially by teachers who were selected by an unjust system that precisely excluded minorities, along with their embodied experiences?