Bodies of Knowledge E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B ACE Single Issue Adult & Continuing Eeducation
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Explore the multiple ways adults learn through their bodies.Embodied or somatic learning is a way of learning that relies onthe body's knowledge. Our most basic form of learning inchildhood is preverbal; however, traditional schooling forces us tocheck our bodies at the door, requiring us to sit at a desk andraise our hands, focusing primarily on cognition to the exclusionof other ways of knowing. By the time we reach adulthood,"being in our bodies" is a foreign concept and a sourceof discomfort for many of us. This volume challenges the dominant paradigm of how knowledge isconstructed and shared. Embodied learning is examined through avariety of practice contexts, including higher education, communityeducation, health care, and the workplace, and through multiplemethods, including dance, theater, and outdoor experientialeducation. This is 134th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterlyreport series NewDirections for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted forits depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interestto instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in abroad range of adult and continuing education settings, such ascolleges and universities, extension programs, businesses,libraries, and museums.

Leseprobe

Contents

Editor’s Notes

Chapter 1: Intuitive Knowing and Embodied Consciousness

Intuition

Embodied Learning by Any Other Name

Integrated Ways of Knowing

Consciousness

Getting in Touch with Embodied Knowledge

Feminism and Resistance: Valuing the Body as a Way of Knowing

Embodied Pedagogy

Conclusion

Chapter 2: Embodied Learning and Patient Education: From Nurses’ Self-Awareness to Patient Self-Caring

Definition of Embodied Learning

Patient Education as Context

A Role for Adult Education

Re-Visioning Patient Education as Embodied Learning for Health

Clinical Action Pedagogy

Embodied Clinical Action Pedagogy Outcomes

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Embodied Learning at Work: Making the Mind-set Shift from Workplace to Playspace

Making Room for the Play of New Ideas

Embodied Learning in Action

Implications for Practitioners

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Embodying Women’s Stories for Community Awareness and Social Action

Embodying the Possibilities

Embodying the Risk

Embodying Collective Engagement

Embodying the Performance

Embodied Ways of Knowing

Implications for Adult Educators

Chapter 5: Outdoor Experiential Education: Learning Through the Body

Experiential Learning: Bringing the Physical into Learning

Experiential Education and the Extension of the Embodied Experience

Experiential Education as it is Defined Today

Kurt Hahn and the Founding of Experiential Education

Current Practices in Experiential Education

Experiential Education in Practice

Reflective Learning from Experiential Education

Chapter 6: Dance as a Way of Knowing

Dance as a Birthright

Embodied Knowing

Dance and the Lived Body

The Play of Dance—the Dance of Play

Dance and Literacy

Dance as a Way of Inquiry

Chapter 7: Embodied Knowledge and Decolonization: Walking with Theater’s Powerful and Risky Pedagogy

Defining the Territory

Embodied Knowing and Decolonization

Witnessing and Embodiment

The Safety and Power of Fiction

Implications for Adult Educators

Chapter 8: Coming Full Circle: Reclaiming the Body

Body Wisdom

Role of the Body in Holistic Learning

Awareness of Self and Others

Experiential and Transformative Learning

Body Pedagogy

Challenging Dominant Ideology About the Body

Coming Full Circle

Index

Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Learning in Adult Education

Randee Lipson Lawrence (ed.)

New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no. 134

Susan Imel, Jovita M. Ross-Gordon, Coeditors-in-Chief

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Editor’s Notes

Everyone has a body. This is a known fact. While we don’t all speak the same verbal language, the universal language of the body is something that all human beings share. The body has wisdom and knowledge of its own.

Embodied or somatic learning is a way of learning that relies on the body’s knowledge. Our most basic form of learning in childhood is preverbal; however, traditional schooling forces us to check our bodies at the door, requiring us to sit at a desk and raise our hands, focusing primarily on cognition to the exclusion of other ways of knowing. By the time we reach adulthood, “being in our bodies” is a foreign concept and a source of discomfort for many of us.

This volume challenges the dominant paradigm of how knowledge is constructed and shared. When Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century proclaimed “I think therefore I am,” he started a movement privileging the mind as the sole source of human dialogue (Miller, 2007). This volume contests the Cartesian dualistic belief of the mind being separate from the body by calling attention to the body as a source of learning.

Embodied learning, while beginning to gain attention in adult education literature (see Merriam, Caffarella, and Baumgartner, 2007; Boucouvalas and Lawrence, 2010), is the least discussed method of learning. Previous volumes of New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education have focused on spiritual knowing (English and Gillen, 2000) and affective knowing (Dirkx, 2008). This volume complements those previous publications by exploring the multiple ways adults learn through their bodies.

This volume views embodied learning through a variety of practice contexts, including higher education, community education, health care, and the workplace, and through multiple methods, including dance, theater, and outdoor experiential education.

In Chapter One, I explore embodied knowing as an intuitive process. I begin with a discussion of how embodied knowing comes into our conscious awareness and introduce a model of intuitive knowing that situates the body as the foundation for other interconnected ways of knowing. I then discuss how to access and use embodied knowing in practice.

Chapter Two focuses on embodied knowing in the health care professions, particularly as it relates to patient education. Ann L. Swartz offers stories from her own experience as well as those of her patients and nursing students to illustrate how, when people learn to listen and connect more deeply to their body, they can be guided to what the body needs to get healthy.

In Chapter Three, Pamela Meyer describes how workplaces can be transformed into playspaces. She describes a case study of an organization where embodied practices are a way of life. These practices improve relationships among the workers, generate high energy and engagement, and facilitate collaboration that extends into the workday. Meyer offers suggestions for facilitators to engage in playful embodied learning.

Yolanda Nieves shares a community awareness project in Chapter Four. In a Puerto Rican community in Chicago, she created an ensemble theater piece that embodied the stories of women’s subjugated knowledge. The performance was created as an adult education tool to promote awareness and social action.

Outdoor adventure education is introduced in Chapter Five. Eric Howden discusses this form of experiential education, where mind-body connections are made explicit. Participants are faced with an increasingly challenging set of experiences that bring the body and mind into direct conflict. Powerful learning occurs as these conflicts are resolved.

Chapter Six focuses on dance as a method of inquiry. Celeste Snowber explains how the embodied nature of dance reconnects us to our true selves. Snowber connects dance to literacy, critical thinking, and other learning processes. Dance is a way of grappling with and making sense of a complex world.

In Chapter Seven, Shauna Butterwick and Jan Selman discuss popular theater as a powerful tool for disrupting forces that colonize and oppress. They offer examples from their practice of how participants can use theater to embody their stories and emphasize creating a safe and respectful environment.

Chapter Eight provides a summary and synthesis of the major themes in the previous articles, emphasizing ways to reclaim the body as a source of knowledge.

The contributors to this volume are in a sense pioneers. They have dared to espouse a way of knowing that has been all but absent in adult and higher education. Perhaps the lack of embodied practice is because educators are still steeped in “epistemologies of ignorance” (Malewski and Jaramillo, 2011), meaning a blind adherence to the canon or dominant discourses in education. Perhaps they are fearful of the body, or perhaps they just have not been exposed to other ways of knowing. It is our hope through this volume that educators in all contexts will reconsider what is means to know, what body wisdom has to teach us, and how embodied learning can help learners to fulfill their human potential.

Randee Lipson Lawrence

Editor

References

Boucouvalas, M., and Lawrence, R. L. “Adult Learning.” In C. E. Kasworm, A. D. Rose, and J. M. Ross-Gordon (eds.), Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010.

Dirkx, J. (ed.). Adult Learning and the Emotional Self. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no.120. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.

English, L. M., and Gillen, M. A. (eds.). Addressing the Spiritual Needs of Adult Learning: What Educators Can Do. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, no. 85. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Malewski, E., and Jaramillo, N. (eds.). Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age, 2011.

Merriam, S., Caffarella, R., and Baumgartner, L. Learning in Adulthood. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Miller, J. P. The Holistic Curriculum. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Randee Lipson Lawrence is an associate professor of adult and continuing education at National Louis University in Chicago.

1

Intuitive Knowing and Embodied Consciousness

Randee Lipson Lawrence

This article explores the role of intuition as a preconscious embodied state and its implication for adult education.

Imagine you are walking down a dimly lit street in an unfamiliar neighborhood. It is just before sunset and the streets are fairly deserted. Suddenly you hear a loud noise that might be a car backfiring, or it might even be gunshots. Your heart starts racing, your breathing becomes shallow, and you feel as if you may start to hyperventilate. Some instinct tells you to run and leave the area as quickly as possible. You don’t stop to think or reason or figure out what is happening, you just follow your body’s cues and move toward safety. You rely on your intuition.

Intuition

Intuitive knowing is one of the most complex and misunderstood ways of knowing. It is difficult to put into words and verbalize. Intuition has been defined as “the ability to perceive or know things without conscious reasoning” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary); “a way of knowing that transcends intellect and reason” (Vaughan, 1979, p. 111); and “a realization of wholeness which is simultaneously internal and external, it is an event which is both experiential and cognitive” (Blanchard, 1993, p. 10). According to Jung (1964), intuition is one of two ways to gain access to certain experiences or events that are not part of our conscious awareness.

Intuition is spontaneous, heart-centered, free, adventurous, imaginative, playful, nonsequential, and nonlinear (Lawrence, 2009). We access intuitive knowledge through dreams, symbols, artwork, dance, yoga, meditation, contemplation, and immersion in nature. Most of these processes call upon embodied knowing. This chapter examines embodied knowing as an intuitive process and discusses how embodied knowledge comes into our conscious awareness, how embodied knowing is connected to other ways of knowing, and how educators can incorporate an embodied pedagogy into their practice.

Embodied Learning by Any Other Name

In addition to the word embodied, there are other terms that relate to learning through the body. In his well-known taxonomy, Bloom (1956/1984) discussed the psychomotor domain of learning, which he differentiated from the cognitive and affective domains. Learning in the psychomotor domain includes using one’s body to perform tasks or engaging in physical activity such as throwing a ball or constructing a building. Gardner (1993) talked about bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as one of the nine multiple intelligences that human beings possess. According to Gardner, we all have one or more dominant intelligence areas. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence involves learning by doing, as in building and making things, muscle movement, dancing, and athletics. It is the preferred mode of many surgeons, builders, and others who work with their hands. Kinesthetic learners prefer to take a hands-on approach to learning as opposed to hearing a lecture or observing.

In a critique of Gardner, Parviainen (2010) argued that bodily-kinesthetic intelligence cannot be separated from spatial intelligence. Dancers and other performers need to perceive and interact with the spaces and others around them, so movement cannot be looked at in isolation.

Freiler (2008) defined somatic learning as “learning directly experienced through bodily awareness and sensation during purposive body-centered movements” (p. 39). Her research participants spoke about “‘being in tune’ to or with their bodies, ‘listening to’ the body as it talks to them and tells them something and ‘being more aware’ of attending to body experiences and one’s surroundings.” Similarly, Stuckey (2009) defined body/somatic knowledge as “learning that comes from the body through engagement with the senses and an increased bodily awareness” (p. 33). Although some writers distinguish between these terms, this chapter uses the term embodied knowing with the understanding that it also encompasses these other terms.

Integrated Ways of Knowing

I have been interested in holistic knowing or knowledge at the intersections of body, mind, heart, and spirit and their relationship to intuition for the past decade (see Lawrence, 2008, 2009; Lawrence and Dirkx, 2010). I have developed a working model to help explain these ways of knowing (see Figure 1). The model shows an upside down triangle.

Figure 1. Intuitive Holistic Knowing.

Heart (affective knowledge) and mind (cognitive knowledge) are at the two points at the top of the triangle. The body is at the bottom, and spiritual knowledge is “grayed out” in the center, as it is difficult to grasp but is at the center of all knowledge. Embodied knowing is at the bottom because it is foundational. The most primal way of accessing knowledge is through the body as our earliest forms of knowing are preverbal. Babies know in their bodies when they are experiencing distress or discomfort months or years before they learn the words for these feelings. As babies become toddlers, they explore their world first through touch. While they may hear a parent’s warning not to go near the cactus plant because it can be dangerous, it is not until they experience the prickly sensation directly that they learn to stay away.

Knowledge is present in the body before it reaches our conscious awareness. For example, tension is first experienced in the body as a stiff neck, queasy stomach, or tight jaw. If we examine the sources of this disease, we may be able to trace it to a particular experience or event.

Many of our strong emotions include a physical component. When we are sad or depressed, we feel a heaviness that is palpable. Fear may be experienced by a quickening of the heart rate or hyperventilation. As Parviainen (2010) pointed out, the words motion and emotion have the same root. When we have strong emotional reactions, we describe the experience as being moved.

The spiritual domain “reflects a sense of the sacred, mystery or awe, and is deeply connected with our emotions and our bodies” (Lawrence and Dirkx, 2010, p. 149). For example, a profound spiritual moment may be experienced by unexpected chills, tears, or a felt sense of well-being.

Even cognitive knowledge that appears to be wholly rational on the surface often has affective and somatic components. Mezirow (2000) described disorienting dilemmas, such as death or job loss, that create opportunities for transformative learning. While Mezirow suggested that reflective discourse is the way to move toward transformative learning, these dilemmas always come with emotional and physical dimensions that beg to be resolved at least in part in embodied ways.

Consciousness

Although we can talk about these ways of knowing as separate domains, they are very much interconnected and intuitive. Intuitive knowledge exists even before it comes into our conscious awareness. As mentioned, we first experience this knowledge in our body. Crowdes (2000, p. 27) used the term conscious embodiment, which “implies an integrity of mind, body and action accompanied by some awareness of the nature of these connections in the broader social context.” Our bodies and the sensations we feel are with us at all times, yet these sensations are often not part of our consciousness. When we are ill or in pain, our attention is drawn to what our body already knows (Stuckey, 2009). For example, most of the time I don’t think about having a nose or the ability to breathe freely. When I have a cold and my nasal passages are blocked, suddenly breathing is all I can think about. According to Ortega y Gasset (1969), there are certain truths that we come to rely on even though we may not have immediate conscious access to them.

When we discover them for the first time, it seems to us that we have always known them, but had not noticed them; there they were before us, but veiled and covered. . . . [P]erhaps truth is no more than discovery, the lifting of a veil, or a cover from what was already there and on which we were counting. (p. 50)

Damasio (1999, p. 4) defined consciousness as “an organism’s awareness of its own self and surroundings.” We come into consciousness first through our bodies. “Consciousness emerges when . . . the story of an object can be told using the universal nonverbal vocabulary of body signals . . . from that moment on we begin to know” (pp. 30–31).

Stanage’s phenomenological model (1987) includes feeling, experiencing and what he called consciousing. Feelings are prereflective. We have feelings and sensations before we are consciously aware of them. Feelings are not yet knowledge, but they are the foundation for knowledge. Experiencing includes both feeling and embodiment. Stanage coined the term consciousing, which he used as a verb. Consciousing, or the process of becoming conscious, encompasses both feeling and experiencing and involves reflection and action or praxis. Embodied knowledge can come from conscious engagement with our bodies such as in yoga or dance (see Chapter Six), or it can emerge from our unconscious states, coming into our awareness through intuitive bodily sensations that give us clues to what we know.

Getting in Touch with Embodied Knowledge

Intuition is often expressed as a “gut feeling” or knowledge that is unexplainable. We just know. As there is no rational explanation for how we know, in Western cultures our intuition is often dismissed or not taken seriously. Sometimes this knowledge is just below the surface of our awareness. Getting into our bodies through artistic forms of expression can be a way to get in touch with this hidden knowledge. For example, Stuckey (2009), searching for a way to understand her diabetes, created metaphors to express what her body intuitively knew. “Expression though metaphor is not only a matter of language, but a powerful way to understand the lived experience of the body” (p. 31).

Dance educator Sherry Shapiro wanted her students to understand the concept of women’s silent voices, not only from a conceptual perspective but also from their own experience. She asked them to dance their experience and then reflect on what they learned from their bodies. “The power of drawing upon body-knowledge gave the dancers a new understanding of what this might mean. Rather than their bodies being objects for technical proficiency, they became the vehicle for critical understanding of their life-world” (Shapiro and Shapiro, 2002, p. 37).

Butterwick and Lawrence (2009) discussed how telling stories through popular theater can be a way to surface strong emotions, providing a way to discuss difficult subject matter and even “creating alternative realities” through dramatization. Similarly Horsfall and Titchen of Australia (2009) used performance ethnography as a way to analyze and present research data in a collaborative inquiry of rural women. The issues that came forward were those that had been formerly “swept under the carpet and included domestic violence; indigenous issues; suicide; and sexism in family farm transfers. The unsay-able became said” (Horsfall and Titchen, 2009, p. 157).

These examples illustrate how embodying an experience can be a way to make knowledge accessible, particularly knowledge that is painful or undiscussable. While these processes can be powerful tools, societal forces mitigate against them.

Feminism and Resistance: Valuing the Body as a Way of Knowing