Neurodecolonisation in the Classroom

Roxana Ng and Qigong as Embodied Pedagogy

Remy Y.S. Low

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040424735
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

This book extends on the scholarship on decolonising higher education by focusing on classroom pedagogies that can transform students' embodied affects and habits as conditioned by coloniality.

It does so by offering a historical case study of how one exemplary educator – Canadian activist and scholar Roxana Chu-Yee Ng (1951–2013) – drew on traditional Chinese medicine philosophy and Qigong practice to offer an embodied pedagogy that had profound effects on many of her students.

This book brings together scholarship from critical education, contemplative pedagogy, the neuroscience of stress, mind–body medicine, and embodied cognition to make the case for the importance of embodied pedagogies in any project for decolonising higher education. An innovative contribution to embodiment and decolonial studies, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring interdisciplinary methods.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: “A different world apart from the one we live in”
• 1 “Stored in the Body”: Stress and the settler colonial structure
• 2 “Disrupt common sense ideas and practices”: Qigong against Cartesian dualism in higher education
• 3 “Change both ourselves and society”: Neurodecolonisation through embodied pedagogy
• 4 “A transformation of their own thinking, knowing, and living”: Roxana Ng’s pedagogical legacy
• Appendix A: Course outline for “Health, Illness, and Knowledge of the Body”, Fall 1991
• Appendix B: Course outline for “Embodied Learning and Qi Gong”, Fall 2001
• Index