A Praxis of Perception: Embodied Learning and Relationality in an After-School Tinkering Program

• In Event: Historicized Bodies-in-Place: Toward a Political and Relational View of Embodiment in Learning

Abstract

Analyzing ethnographic data from a social design experiment (Colleage & Author, 2010) on after-school learning and educational justice, this paper describes the transformative shifts that emerged when researchers and educators co-developed new ways of seeing embodied learning. I describe our shared analysis of the dynamics of power and possibility indexed by the coordination of participants’ hands, eyes and voices within hands-on scientific and artistic practices—a teacher carefully using her hands and words to offer students the feel of working with a new tool, a student shifting her body so that a peer can better observe her project (or shifting to block others from seeing her work), a young adult explaining a mechanism while keeping the artifact close to a child’s eye level. I trace the process through which participants came to perceive these seemingly small moments as windows into deeper ethical and pedagogical values, and how this perception reorganized pedagogical practice.

Research on embodiment closely attends to the ways diverse semiotic resources (gesture, gaze, prosody) are mobilized by participants in learning interactions (Goodwin, 2000). While critical, feminist and decolonizing theorizations similarly question mind/body dualities, they also attend to power, social reproduction and resistance (Butler, 2011; O’Laughlin, 2006; Smith, 1999). As Cruz (2001) asks, “How does a regime of a given society become inscripted onto the bodies of our youth?” Bringing these theoretical traditions into conversation can help to forge new lenses for studying the intersections of learning and educational justice/injustice in moment-to-moment interaction.

This paper is grounded in an extensive set of ethnographic data that includes 30 field notes (co- authored by educators and the researcher), video recordings of joint activity (70 hours), photographs, interviews with students, parents and teachers, and 30 recorded staff debriefs. The afterschool program was a partnership between a science museum and an after-school center serving youth from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds in a working-class community.

As educators co-analyzed photographs and video-recordings of hands-on scientific and artistic activities, they began to trace the coordination of children’s and adults’ hands, eyes and voices, and inquire into what these interactions meant to the learner. This newfound perception brought into relief the embodied forms of pedagogical intervention that either stifled or cultivated students’ thinking and agency, and engendered a sustained practice of reflexivity and intentionality among educators. I argue that pedagogical assumptions and decisions involving the body therefore play a powerful role in questions of learning and educational dignity.

Building on foundational social-interactional research (Bremme & Erickson, 1977; Goodwin, 2000; 2003; McDermott & Raley, 2011), I also argue for interweaving micro- interactional analysis of embodiment with political understandings of what it means for teachers and students to embody more just social and educational possibilities. This research troubles the persistent analytic privileging of subject-object relations (participants’ engagement with disciplinary content, for example) over and above subject-subject relations (participants’ relations with one another) (Colleague & Author, 2016). This paper examines what becomes possible analytically and pedagogically when subject-subject relations are equally privileged, thereby grounding embodied learning in axiological concerns (Bang, et. al., 2015).  

Author

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University