Sensual Curriculum: Making Educational Sense Through the Senses

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

Residing at the intersection of the interdisciplinary fields of sensory studies and curriculum studies, this symposium demonstrates the possibilities and power of studying how we make sense through our senses. Panelists examine the relationship between the sensorium and peoples ways of knowing and being from a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. Because the senses lie at the paradox of the human experience—as irrevocably individual as our anatomies and inexorably contextualized by broader sociocultural norms and values—scholarship that explores what is learned through the senses and to whom such meanings count is integral to an understanding of educative processes such as teaching and learning. Such questions also demonstrate the inescapable connections between the political and the aesthetic.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies

Chair

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University

Papers

• Using the Senses in Reflective Practice: Preparing School Leaders for Non-Text-Based Understandings - Christa A. Boske, Kent State University

• Bringing Curriculum Down to Earth: The Terroir That We Are - Wanda Hurren, University of Victoria; Erika L. Hasebe-Ludt, University of Lethbridge

• The Disembodied Schoolchild: A Casual Tyranny - Sheri L. Leafgren, Miami University

• Exploring the Curriculum of Museums Through Phenomenological Touch - Elee Wood, Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis; Kiersten F. Latham, Kent State University

• The Visceral Imagination: A Fertile Space for Nontextual Knowing - Sean P. Wiebe, University of Prince Edward Island; Celeste N. Snowber, Simon Fraser University

• Sound Spaces: The Otology Educational Ecologies - Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University