Disembodiment in Learning Physics: Toward Remedy and Repair

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:30 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Racialized Feeling in Mathematics and Science Classrooms (Table 9)

Abstract

In response to AERA’s call to reflect on educational practice toward repair and remedying historic and ongoing harms, our study addresses an ideology of disembodiment that is deeply ingrained in physics teaching and learning. We position disembodiment as a myth that relies on an assumption of an “ideal” body—a myth that serves to reaffirm objectivity and to conceal white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, ableist, etc., norms of physics practice. By analyzing physics classroom recordings and interviews with introductory physics students and instructors, we claim that an ideology of disembodiment is a mechanism by which physics culture reduces people to “what their minds can do,” advancing the myth of meritocracy, pedagogies of assimilation, and marginalization of the body.

Authors

• Tra Huynh, Western Washington University

• Amy Robertson, Seattle Pacific University

• Verónica Nelly Vélez, Western Washington University

• Lauren Catherine Bauman, Western Washington University

• W. Tali Hairston, Equitable Development LLC