An Embodied Approach to Conceptual Learning
While I know that every one of us is experiencing the world in different ways, I tend to forget this as a teacher when I assume that students see what I see and make meaning of it the way I do. I’ve been realizing that many of the concepts I teach are either new for students or still in their surface level of understanding. This is where embodiment comes in for me.
Today, I had my first session with a new group of college students in a reading and discussion heavy course. One of my goals for them is to recognize the nuance to many of the larger issues we study. Did I mention the course is called Schools In Society? We trace the history of how we got the education system we have today, major challenges we face, and considerations for what we might do next. We use sociology, history, and legal cases to make sense of the larger systems. I’ve taught this course for the last four semesters and as much as students want to know what the problem is and the solution is, it’s never that simple.
We’ll read a piece and have an amazing discussion, thinking we figured something big out. Then a new question arises and intersects with what we just learned and it has us questioning it all over again. We learn that more than one thing can be true at the same time and that the truth is often in the “and” not the “or.”
Back to today. We read five different texts that looked at recent events that connect to education but topic-wise were all different. If you are interested you can find them here. We also watched a part of this valedictorian speech. Students worked in small groups to discuss each text on its own and then to try to synthesize them. They were given large sticky notes to jot down ideas they generated across the text set. The overall inquiry questions were what is the purpose of school and who gets to decide? Next week we’ll examine presidential rhetoric about the purpose of schooling across time.
I wanted the students to get some insights into schooling purposes, but I also wanted students to develop proficiency in understanding perspectives. Not just the labeling of who wrote the text and what their position is, but how they see, what they see, and what they don’t see. This is where embodiment came in.
We stood up and did some physical movement to try to understand the concept. First, I asked students to pick a place in the room and walk to it directly in narrow and focused vision. We immediately noticed that in this class of 30 students we all tended to gather together in three spots– the corners of the room. Then I taught them how to go into more wide-angle or peripheral vision where instead of taking in one focal point, they would literally see differently by taking in a larger expanse and to adjust their ideas differently. They walked around the room and back to their seats. I used these images of the mouse and the eagle to reinforce the concept. (Yes, these young adult students looked at images and moved their bodies in class and they enjoyed it. This kind of teaching is not just for young children.)
In reflection, students shared some insights from this embodied experience. They explained how the wide-angle vision felt less comfortable because they tend not to move this way as often. They also described being able to see things that were in their blind spots before the experience. They noticed different details than they normally do. We also didn’t all move to the same pre-determined spaces in the room- there was much more variance.
When asked about the concept of perspective, students understood it with more nuance. They had this movement-based experience that helped them feel, see, move, and think differently. We moved deeper into conceptual understanding and beyond simply labeling someone’s perspective. What if we defined perspective as:
What someone sees
What someone does not have in their field of vision
What they choose to focus on and where they put their attention
How they navigate the world
Where they are navigating
The pace they are moving at
How they feel as they navigate
The learning in our sensorimotor systems created different ways of thinking and understanding. I no longer need to assume we all have the same understanding of what we mean by the word perspective, because we created a shared, embodied experience together which becomes a landmark we can all revisit together. What concepts might you invite your students to embody?