Critical and Ethical Perspectives on the Role of Embodiment in Learning

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

While education research more commonly concerns itself with cognitive and social dimensions, human bodies play an important role in learning. Scholarship of embodiment in education, often found in educational psychology and cognitive sciences, usually focuses on the role of bodies in disciplinary learning. However, this work has tended to produce disembodied bodies, detached from histories and meanings that they carry. In this presidential session, we follow growing efforts to recontextualize the “learning body” through studies of race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and disability, to name a few. We forward alternative orientations to embodiment toward more critically and ethically theorizing the learning body. Remedy and repair in research must fully consider the role of the body within any trajectory toward education renewal.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University

Participants

• Maisie L. Gholson, University of Michigan

• Molly L. Kelton, Washington State University

• Miwa Aoki Takeuchi, University of Calgary

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

Discussants

• Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama

• Josephine Pham, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Aireale J. Rodgers, University of Wisconsin - Madison