What happens to teaching when you consider the whole body (and not just "brains on sticks")?

"The Alexander Technique is now recognized the world over as the most revolutionary and far-reaching method developed for maintaining the health and efficiency of the body."--Back cover

'Learning Bodies’ addresses the lack of attention paid to the body in youth and childhood studies. Whilst a significant range of work on this area has explored gender, class, race and ethnicity, and sexualities – all of which have bodily dimensions – the body is generally studied indirectly, rather than being the central focus. This collection of papers brings together a scholarly range of international, interdisciplinary work on youth, with a specific focus on the body. The authors engage with conceptual, empirical and pedagogical approaches which counteract perspectives that view young people’s bodies primarily as ‘problems’ to be managed, or as sites of risk or deviance. The authors demonstrate that a focus on the body allows us to explore a range of additional dimensions in seeking to understand the experiences of young people. The research is situated across a range of sites in Australia, North America, Britain, Canada, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of disciplines including sociology, education and cultural studies in the process. This collection aims to demonstrate – theoretically, empirically and pedagogically – the implications that emerge from a reframed approach to understanding children and youth by focusing on the body and embodiment.

This book aims to define new theoretical, practical, and methodological directions in educational research centered on the role of the body in teaching and learning. Based on our phenomenological experience of the world, it draws on perspectives from arts-education and aesthetics, as well as curriculum theory, cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology. These are arenas with a rich untapped cache of experience and inquiry that can be applied to the notions of schooling, teaching and learning. The book provides examples of state-of-the-art, empirical research on the body in a variety of educational settings. Diverse art forms, curricular settings, educational levels, and cultural traditions are selected to demonstrate the complexity and richness of embodied knowledge as they are manifested through institutional structures, disciplines, and specific practices.

"Kids love to move. But how do we harness all that kinetic energy effectively for math learning? In Math on the Move, Malke Rosenfeld shows how pairing math concepts and whole body movement creates opportunities for students to make sense of math in entirely new ways. Malke shares her experience creating dynamic learning environments by: exploring the use of the body as a thinking tool, highlighting mathematical ideas that are usefully explored with a moving body, providing a range of entry points for learning to facilitate a moving math classroom. ..."--Publisher description.

Is the body a mere container of learning processes? Or can we, in a productive way, develop an approach to learning that includes learning as a bodily phenomenon? The authors all work with the development or refinement of theories of 'learning bodies,' and in this anthology they present the state of the art to anybody with an interest in current scientific discussions about the interplay between body, movement and learning. A full understanding of learning in all its complexity requires that the body is taken into account - regardless of whether we are dealing with the neurological foundations of learning processes, skill acquisition, mental health and illness, aesthetics or the physical setting where the learning takes place. Body, movement and senses (in short: corporeality), provide the necessary experiences for change and development in relation to life-long learning. This anthology presents a range of theoretical approaches to learning; neuroscience, psychiatry, sociology, psychology, phenomenology and pedagogy. By presenting this range of approaches, the anthology raises a central question in the philosophy of science: the need for incorporation of different approaches to achieve further insights. The first section of the book, The Learning Body, concerns the learning process from a psychological, neuroscience and phenomenological point of view. In part two, The Encultured Body, gender and aesthetics will be analysed in relation to the body and the community of practice. The third section, The Educated Body, sheds light on various aspects of the body in educational contexts and different body-related conditions for learning. The anthology is of particular interest to researchers and students of education, development, and psychology, and to those interested in body and movement, both biomedical and the relation to social science and the humanities.