Embodying Physics: Reconceptualizing Science Learning as an Embodied, Relational, and Culturally Sustaining Practice

• In Event: Designing for Affect and Embodiment: Ethical Attunements in the Futuring of Education

Abstract

We examine the design and enactment of learning activities in an embodied physics learning lab where Black youth explored scientific concepts through dance-making and multimodal expression. We explore how listening palettes and dance-making functioned as embodied, affectively attuned practices of teaching and learning, offering youth opportunities to bring their full selves—culturally, emotionally, and physically—into science learning. We analyze these activities as sites of collective becoming that make space for doing science that center cultural sustainability and ethical relationality.

Youth explored concepts such as wave behavior, resonance, and frequency through embodied exploration, kinesthetic experiences, and dance-making, drawing on their cultural and embodied resources to make meaning (Authors 2022). Movement activities were positioned as core components of disciplinary learning that allowed youth to articulate understandings that might be constrained in conventional academic forms (Varelas, 2012). Two interrelated design activities—listening palettes and dance-making— supported students in exploring and expressing physics concepts through multimodal, embodied forms. Listening palettes asked youth to express their thinking by attending to their noticings using embodied and creative modes of expression. Through dance, youth created choreographies to represent scientific ideas. These enactments were embodied futuring practices, reorienting science learning toward joy, creativity, and collective meaning-making (Vossoughi et al., 2020; Paris & Alim, 2017).

Youth collaborated to translate physics concepts into the language of the body to develop, refine and express their ideas, while rooting scientific sense-making in their lived cultural experiences. These embodied experiences invited youth to engage conceptually while also expressing frustrations, breakthroughs, hesitations, and joy, cultivating affective and relational dimensions of learning often neglected in dominant models of science education. Through the process of co-creating and performing dances, youth listened to one another—attuning emotionally and physically to group dynamics, timing, and intention. These embodied and affective dimensions were not peripheral; they were central to the dialogic, iterative process of making sense of science together. The lab became a space where youth learned to read and respond to each other’s expressive cues—gestures, rhythms, emotions—as part of collective inquiry. These practices made visible the collective and ethical nature of learning (hooks, 1994), as youth embraced vulnerability, improvisation, and mutual respect in order to make meaning together.

Youth did not simply simulate scientific practice, they transformed it. They engaged in learning in ways that were authentic to their ways of moving, being, and meaning-making. Whether through double-dutch footwork, polyrhythmic clapping, rap, or choreographed storytelling, dance-based activities positioned their cultural practices not as mere engagement strategies, but as legitimate epistemologies (Paris & Alim, 2017; Bang et al., 2016).

This paper theorizes learning as something that is felt, moved, and shared—a process enacted through the body and attuned to the affective dimensions of community. Through it, we ask what kinds of futures are possible when youth are invited to learn as their full selves—not stripped of culture or affect but steeped in them. We argue that designing for affect and embodiment through culturally rooted practices like listening palettes and dance-making offers a powerful model for reimagining science education—not as transmission, but as transformation.

Authors

• Dionne N. Champion, University of Florida

• Folashade Cromwell Solomon

• Machienvee Lammey, TERC