It is important to decide what should be done at each stage by reading the particular way each human being tries to evolve. If I have educated this way until puberty I have educated so that with every look, every movement, the human being says to me, 'You have accomplished something with me; and my freedom has been left whole'. -Rudolph Steiner |
The Hebrew word daat means embodied knowledge, the knowledge that comes through experience, what you know in your bones, in your gut, by heart. -Carol Gilligan
Embodiment studies curriculum and pedagogy
Embodiment-themed residency workshops 1-2003 to 2-2005 are listed on a page linked on the left.
For bibliographies see links on pages for
potential study areas.
Curriculum design suggestions
We're making up embodiment studies as we go so I wouldn't say there is an essential bibliography already created. There's definitely a little pile of books the students I have been working with respond to most strongly, and they could be considered core bibliography for parts of embodiment studies: Gilligan, Sewall, Griffin, Woolf, Gendlin, Henderson, Rich.
To open up the much larger framework that few students have yet taken on as a whole, I would suggest including something from each of the following four areas:
Knowing I, Knowing II, Being and Doing:
>Knowing I: intro to mind-body wholism
- cognitive science
- evolutionary theory
- ecopsychology, compatible therapeutic theories
- intro to organic rather than mechanistic scientific models
- culture and body
- language and body
>Knowing II: understanding the will to disembodiment
- motives
- mechanisms
- consequences
- critique of dualist manners of speaking about mind, soul, spirit
>Being: physical practice
- physical discipline, eg, yoga, tai chi, authentic movt, extreme sports, long-trail walking, craft work such as weaving, sense-based art, construction
- reflection emphasizing phenomenology of skill, perceptual expansion
>Doing: community practicum
- informed thinking-through of implications in some practical area (eg. agriculture, physical design and construction, development economics, ecological and other politics, queer studies
- community involvement to act on these implications: organic community gardens, ecosystem conservation and restoration, art that teaches sensory expansion, peace and other activism)
Within this curriculum Goddard students have been developing strengths mainly in II. and III., and those make sense as starting places, because given the gaps in the culture they've grown up in, they urgently need to figure out how they actually work as bodies. I. and IV. are very important though; I. because it gives them a way of coherently understanding all the rest, a sort of unified theory of body; and IV. because when they are reconnected enough to know and feel more of what they actually know and feel, it starts to be urgent to have a way to do something.
To demonstrate how organically the whole Knowing I, Knowing II, Being, Doing outline can work together, here is an actual student's one-semester plan:
- > for Knowing I was doing Embodiment
neuroscience (reading cognitive science and philosophy as well as some
physics);
- > for Knowing II was doing Tantric phenomenology, (reading and writing about tantric practice in relation to sex and grief);
- > for Being was studying Applied postmodern poetics (tracking and summarizing her experience with poets such as Olds, Graham, Heaney, while struggling to write most of her own long packets in poetic meter and doing original research on breath, pause, gaze and meter in the poetic line by transcribing those elements in relation to a videotaped personal narrative);
- > for Doing, gave 10 volunteer days to Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, teaching yoga and facilitating groups.
Hard-working students could follow this pattern through each of their first three semesters, and then bring everything together in their fourth.
Notes on a general pedagogy for embodiment studies:
My strategy so far has been to take different topics, often topics the students have been independently interested in, and demonstrate how that topic would be understood within an embodiment framework.
Residency workshops offered so far:
- The unconscious
- Cognitive ecology
- The cognitive significance of birth
- Minicourse on philosophy of seeing
- Minicourse on language as embodied
- Minicourse on embodiment and 'spirituality'
- Minicourse on Gendlin's focusing method
- Cognitive ecology
Embodiment studies workshops offered by other faculty:
- Embodiment and cultural studies (Karen
Campbell)
- Virginia Woolf and embodied writing (Lise Weil)
- Overview of embodiment theory (Karen Campbell)
- Virginia Woolf and embodied writing (Lise Weil)
Q: A framework needs to be framed and it can't be done all in one residency.
I think actually it can, in the sense that a student can have the aha moment in one residency.
In the language minicourse (2-2004), Speaking bodies I was a cognitive science primer on language and the nervous system; Speaking bodies II an introduction to cognitive linguistics and conceptual analysis; and Speaking bodies III a discussion of applications in writing practice or for instance TLA. What was most valuable for the students was, I think, seeing how the cognitive science carried across into linguistics and practice. It wouldn't make sense to introduce these areas at different residencies, because what is important and new is to see demonstrations of their interrelations.
Looking at the curricular framework given above, I would say, as an illustration, that the Speaking Bodies minicourse addressed:
> Knowing I: neuroscience, evolutionary theory, intro to organic rather than mechanistic models, culture and bodies, language and bodies.
> Knowing II: dissociation mechanisms, conceptual analysis of dualist language in conventional linguistics, some therapeutics of reconnection.
> Being: speaking and writing practice
- > Doing: TLA
The main thing from my point of view is to maintain enough flexibility so students can learn by working with instances.
It might help to spell out my pedagogical assumption here. It is that instructing a paradigm shift can best and probably only be done by example. If you just hand students a list of principles and say this is what embodiment studies is, they won't get it. If they work through a particular subject area like language or perception across (what could be imagined as) the layers of cognitive science, conceptual revision, and practical application, they start to twig. Then doing it again in a different subject area in the next semester they get it a bit more. And so on.
This is a fast list of aspects of embodiment studies that could be tracked individually or mixed:
1. psychology attachment and object relations theory - origins of perceptual/emotional and other forms of body shut-down in difficulties of early love
2. cognitive science mental/emotional abilities and response seen as structural modifications of bodies - perceiving/acting in the world as basis of any sort of intelligent function
3. philosophy realist metaphysics, epistemology, ontology that assume real existence of material world and human bodies, and also assume our evolved ability to be in accurate-enough contact with (to 'know') these things
4. philosophy of mind re-conceiving mental abilities in nondualist ways - attention to manners of speaking - reframing discourses about mind and intelligence
5. evolutionary theory structures of human bodies gradually formed by contact with physical and later social/cultural world
6. ecology human bodies understood as embedded in world body (along with many other kinds of bodies)
7. environmentalism defense of place, ecologies, world body
8. anthropology nature-cultures as ways of forming bodies, human artifacts forming social/cultural evolutionary niches
9. education dewey's educational philosophy of knowing/doing/being updated in terms of evolutionary theory, dynamic systems analysis, neuroscience, etc
10. politics, social action social struggle to acquire and control what we need to flourish as bodies
11. art/writing understanding intuitive and other art-specific forms of intelligence valued almost only in art contexts ie understanding how bodies/brains from and exercise such knowledge, and what it is good for
12. communications, media studies, etc understanding communications media and cultural artifacts as ways of altering the structure of bodies, transiently or long term
13. religion nondualist understanding of soul, life value revaluing of perception/action capabilities which are a body's means of contact with larger, or simply other, entities
14. consciousness studies bodily basis of differences between conscious and nonconscious function - nature and scope of nonconscious kinds of knowing
15. developmental studies importantly including prenatal and perinatal events development seen as life-long
16. queer studies, gender studies, diversity studies range of differences and commonalities of bodies understanding of complex and subtle interplay of genetic and epigenetic influences in creation of these differences and commonalities epigenetic influences seen as including social/cultural influences
17. cultural critique urgent need to take account of dangers to human and nonhuman bodies (including the world itself) of current technologies, cultural values, manners of speaking (structural metaphors, terminologies, dichotomies), etc.