Teaching Through Embodied Learning

Dramatizing Key Concepts from Informational Texts

Margaret Branscombe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429871269
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching Through Embodied Learning positions drama as an under-utilised but valuable tool for enhancing the learning of information in primary science texts. Creating a 'tableau' is an established drama practice for exploring key moments in fiction texts and historical events but less frequently applied with non-fiction texts. Based on doctoral research that studied the impact of having students create a tableau in response to reading informational texts about the solar system, it presents the idea that using drama with informational texts causes students to read purposefully and respond aesthetically; thus, positively impacting reading behaviour, comprehension and social behaviour.

The book addresses the neglect of the body in learning and positions this against a narrow curriculum that is focused on print and 'seated learning'. Within a current context, it acknowledges increasing concerns by educational leaders and academics of the need for a 'broad and balanced curriculum' and pedagogical practice. In support of these concerns, the book places tableau as an embodied learning mode that broadens curriculum experience and discusses recent research that highlights the role of drama and the body in enhancing cognition.

Teaching Through Embodied Learning will be essential reading for academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of education and drama education. It will also greatly appeal to teacher educators, drama teachers and academics in literacy departments.

1 And then we focus on their heads

Setting the scene

More than a decade has passed since Sir Ken Robinson delivered his TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” and yet it remains the most watched talk to date. When shared with groups of teachers in training, I have observed how the content of this talk unfailingly touches a pedagogical nerve of significance as he dissects the institutional and historical ways in which schools have dulled the creative potential of their students. Robinson, presumably along with many of those who have watched and shared the talk more than once, believes that many schools are indeed guilty of killing creativity, and a central thesis of his argument rests with the hierarchical structure of the curriculum schools deliver:

At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. I think maths is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we?

(Robinson, 2006, 8:28)

Robinson’s rhetorical question here is followed by this critique, “Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads”. The ‘focus on their heads’ description of education in 2006 has become an even more fitting indictment in 2018, and I believe the seemingly obvious recognition that we do all have bodies is needed now more than ever. In the United Kingdom presently, secondary schools are reporting declining numbers of students enrolling for programmes of study that give particular focus to the use of the body, i.e. dance and drama (Adams, 2017; Turner, 2017). Geoff Barton, former Head Teacher and general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has been a vocal critic of Government measures which he believes have resulted in students not selecting arts subjects for study at Key Stage 4 (2017). Barton advocates for the arts as a “birthright” (2018) with particular benefits for young people with additional needs or who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. He recalls an experience from his time as a Head Teacher observing four hearing-impaired boys participating in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) dance course,

What I saw was not the boys who were deaf. They were simply the humans who danced. Liberated by movement, by that mix of creativity, self-expression and discipline that dance brings, these young men inspired the school, its staff and its pupils.

(2017)

Barton’s allusion here to freedom through movement speaks to growing concerns about a curriculum that is increasingly restrictive in terms of content and modes of learning. Some of these concerns were somewhat alleviated by the chief of Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), Amanda Spielman, appealing for a “broad and rich curriculum” (2017), but it is worth noting her conception of breadth was in regard to curriculum content alone and made no mention of a curriculum broad in methodology and pedagogical practice or what Greene calls “Differentiated modes of expression” (1995, p. 17). In this publication, I argue that a curriculum focused on ‘heads alone’ and without regard for the fact that we do all have bodies, is a narrow and deficit curriculum. In proposing an alternative vision for a “broad and rich curriculum”, I offer findings from personal research and teaching practices about what can happen when we stop focusing on heads alone and use our bodies to learn.

Embodiment

Embodiment has been defined as “the enactment of knowledge and concepts through the activity of our bodies” (Lindgren & Johnson-Glenberg, 2013, p. 445) and in the study at the heart of this book, students ‘enacted’ main ideas about the solar system using their bodies. Essentially, the embodiment theory is the understanding that the brain is not disconnected from the rest of the body and solely responsible for cognition, but an organ occupied with processing perceptions experienced in the body. If this were not the case, cognition would be an extremely limited mechanism for knowing the world about us, as Sanz, Gomez, Hernandez and Alarcon vividly explain, “Brains in vats are just that: brain in vats; they could produce mentality but only to the extent of the enormously limited mind-body relation that such a limited body could sustain” (2008, p. 400). The stark imagery of ‘brains in vats’ returns us to Robinson’s observation about an education system with a narrow focus on ‘heads alone’ and when noted neuroscientists and philosophers draw our attention to studies which confound a binary view of mind and body (Immordino-Yang & Singh, 2011; Johnson, 2015), the message is clear – a reductive education system that ignores the role of the body in learning restricts our ability to know the world in its fullest sense.

‘Knowing the world in its fullest sense’ would be a fitting mission statement for the teaching of drama in schools. One of the most highly respected drama in education practitioners, Dorothy Heathcote, evoked the unique insights to be gained through drama, when she wrote that quite simply, instead of talking about an issue, “children shall think from within an issue” (1984, p. 119, italics added). One of the ways that students accomplish this is by assuming roles and “putting yourself into other people’s shoes and, by using personal experience to help you understand their point of view, you may discover more than you knew when you started” (p. 44). However, despite the many claims about the benefits of drama that have been made over the decades, it has been argued that its diminishing presence on the school curriculum indicates research has failed to make a significant impact on educational policy (Omasta & Snyder-Young, 2014). To counteract this, drama researchers and practitioners are being urged to advocate for the impact of drama within an evidence-based framework. However, as Darlington observes, research that tracks the impact of drama on learning over time does not fit within an impatient educational “climate of league tables and results” (2010, p. 112). But there is hope for drama teachers, practitioners and researchers in a growing body of neuroscientific research that supports their advocacy for the unique attributes of drama as a learning medium, “What artists and educators have surmised for centuries is now the stuff of National Science Foundation grants and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies” (Duffy, 2014, p. 89). Artists and educators are particularly encouraged by neuroscientific research that presents learning as a physically immersive, i.e. embodied, and affective experience. For example, “We contend that the relationship between learning, emotion and body state runs much deeper than many educators realize” (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007, p. 3). Focusing on the role of bodies specifically, Abrahamson and Lindgren state they “have everything to do with learning” (2014, p. 358) and they present the scenario of a preverbal infant sitting in the middle of a seesaw, shifting her weight around and knowing in her body the ‘scientific jargon’ of forces and movement that she may read about later in a school textbook. The authors also suggest “she is building an embodied sense of equivalence that will one day inform her moral reasoning about social justice” (p. 371). In other words, the value of this nonverbal and embodied learning will not only strengthen her understanding of ‘scientific’ principles but will cross over into broader areas of learning about life itself.

Hybrid spaces/chiasm

The idea of ‘crossover’ between learning experiences leads to one of the central features of the classroom study – the integration of science with drama. I have used drama in the classroom for many years, finding it to be a flexible teaching tool and yielding rich learning across the curriculum. However, science and drama may be viewed as a particular unlikely partnership (Darlington, 2010) because of traditional associations between science and fact (rationality) and drama and fiction (emotionality). Heathcote opposed such stereotyping as inaccurate and limiting,

I’ve always been uncomfortable pushing art rather than, say, science, as if one were more or less imaginative or in need of brain power, than the other … . We seem to have progressed better in study skills related to object knowledge than to experience knowledge, which often is the basis of our developing world view.

(1984, pp. 178–179)

Darlington views the association of science with facts alone as a missed opportunity for exploring the creativity that has played such a crucial role in scientific discoveries and problem solving (2010). Darlington, a science teacher who uses drama in her teaching, has observed how “Using a wide range of pedagogical techniques helps energise lessons through mutual enjoyment of the tasks and the positive feedback received from the pupils” (p. 109). A reluctance to employ a range of learning experiences limits opportunities for enhancing ‘subject knowledge’ as does an inattention to the knowledge that the students bring to school with them each day. After reporting on a study where “children’s whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing the imaginary scientific world” (p. 320), Varelas et al. wrote, “Dramatizing creates hybrid spaces where students bring into the classroom their own everyday funds of knowledge” (2010, p. 304). These words invoke a view of learning as a fluid and overlapping dynamic between the ‘outside’ world and the ‘classroom world’. Such a view coalesces with a theory of embodiment developed by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Elevating the role of our bodies in perception and rejecting the primacy of consciousness as the source of all knowing, Merleau-Ponty places the whole human body as a tool of cognition because it is the instrument through which we intertwine with the world in a phenomenon he calls “chiasm” (1968). The origin of the word is to be found in the Greek letter name ‘chi’, which resembles the shape of an X. In the letter X, the two lines intersect at a specific point to form the letter as we have come to know it and in ophthalmology, a chiasma refers to the intersection of the two optic pathways resulting in a singular image. Applied to the lived experience, chiasm describes an integrated existence, reconciling humans with the material world, with each other and most significantly with themselves by dismantling a mind/body binary. Merleau-Ponty describes h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 And then we focus on their heads
• 2 Becoming literate
• 3 Embodied cognition
• 4 Learning through group process
• 5 We all have bodies, don’t we?
• Index