Orienting Bodies in Space: Riding the Bus in Teacher Education

• In Event: What Is the Body Doing in Educational Theory and Justice-Oriented Pedagogy? Taking the Body Turn

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate the theoretical and pedagogical significance of bodies in teacher education. We argue for scholars and pedagogues to recognize the body as sense-making and tend to body orientation in justice oriented teacher education.

Theoretical Perspectives
Bourdieu (1990, 2000) and feminist Bourdieu scholars (e.g. Reay, 2004) are fundamental to this inquiry as well as contemporary feminist geographers. Bourdieu’s constructs of habitus, field, and nomos will be defined in the presentation and are central to our understandings about how a body comes to articulate preferences and distinction and therefore positions itself to perceive other bodies in particular ways. We also draw on feminist geographers Gibson-Graham (2006) because of their attention to sociopolitical and economic spaces and how bodies produce such spaces through physical movement – embodiment. The space of education where persistent underachievement of children and youth from groups marginalized in the larger society is the space we ultimately aim to change. But we argue that bodies must populate that space differently from the ways they have in the past in order for transformation to occur – including the ways they perceive their own and others’ bodies.

Methods
This three-year study of undergraduate teacher education is characterized as critical feminist teacher research. The professor and co-designer of the course under study aimed to engage the mostly white and middle-class women in her courses (90 participants) with a critical feminist pedagogy to orient the students’ bodies toward critique and social change. Course assignments, in-class discussions, informal conversations and correspondence, self-assessments for the course, and fieldnotes were produced in three separate semesters. These data were read by the two authors against the theoretical framework, discussed at length during in –person meetings, written about independently and then shared, and re-written several times in an effort to present analyses that were as rich, nuanced, and complex as the bodied experiences of the students during and after the city bus ride.

Data Sources and Results
This paper uses students’ ethnographic memos, in-class discussions, and references made about one class assignment: riding a route on a city bus. In this small city in the South of the United States where public transportation is limited and presumed to be used by those without other alternatives, the bodies on the bus were frequently read as those who need to use public transportation. This perception of need became conflated with economic struggle and then dually conflated with unhappiness. These dangerous perceptions were complicated by students’ ideas about how community bus riders perceived them as privileged and untrustworthy, broadening and deepening understandings about power and privilege in different sociopolitical spaces.

Scholarly Significance
Teacher education bodies spend most of their “learning” time in the four walls of classrooms where Bourdieu’s nomos operates most effectively: university or k-12 classrooms. Recognizing how bodies are oriented in such spaces and expanding teacher education into diverse sociopolitical spaces where a schooled nomos is nonsensical (e.g. a city bus) is essential for orienting critical teaching bodies.

Authors

• Stephanie R. Jones, University of Georgia

• Rachel Monette, University of Georgia