U.S. schooling tends to be mentalistic, meaning there is a division between mind and body wherein the former gets privileged (Macedonia, 2019). This privileging of mind is problematic because it legitimizes docile bodies (Bánovčanová & Masaryková, 2014), regulating not just movement and physical engagement, but BIPOC bodies in particular. This separation is also racialized as it valorizes the White knowing subject while simultaneously disciplining and punishing social and cultural practices that center the body and its expression. In other words, this dualism functions as a form of management and control. To disrupt dominant educational practices, it is therefore important that training teacher educators receive does not reinscribe this split at the expense of whole-body learning.
Thus, in this current study, we focus on how the adoption of an embodied systemic functional linguistics (SFL) praxis (Authors, 2019) in our teacher education courses assist future educators in supporting language learners to gain access to disciplinary areas in ways that value and build on what they know and can do with multisemiotic resources. Specifically, we examine how enrolled students themselves became immersed in physical, material, and semiotic activities while generating disciplinary knowledge. We explore how students responded to a shift to embodied curriculum, the strengths of learning new disciplinary content through embodied practices, and challenges students faced when engaging in artistic, embodied, and multimodal activities.
The presentation begins with a description of our theoretical orientation. Then, it illustrates how focal participants deepened disciplinary literacy knowledge through embodied activities such as using found objects or materials to recreate and represent new disciplinary concepts. The data presented-including artistic, creative artifacts and post-course interviews with artifact creators-comes from a semester-long course at a large research university in the U.S., where students explored how content area curricula can be designed and assessed in artistic, embodied ways to meet sociocultural and linguistic interests of all language learners. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interview data, we found that students, through placing their bodies at the center of thinking, first went through a process of unlearning dominant educational practices that centered text and cognition. While students were initially uncomfortable with resituating bodies at the center of their thinking, they experienced an opening and deepening of knowledge through whole-body sensemaking (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016). Findings demonstrate the invaluable role the body played in being, doing, and knowing by highlighting the ways it was entangled with semiosis. Implications include the need to disrupt normative educational practices and unlearn dominant ways of knowing perpetuated through conventional education by moving through a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) and slowness.
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Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2016). Embodied sociolinguistics. In N. Coupland (Ed.). Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates (pp. 173-197). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Macedonia, M. (2019). Embodied learning: Why at school the mind needs the body. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1-8.
