Scenario: Consider a group of working-class Latino students in a public high school in Southern California engaging Ellie Wiesel’s Night in an English class. Only 20% of each graduating class goes immediately to college.

Key: TS: Traditional Schooling; EL: Experiential Learning; M-BOD: Embodied Learning

In the context of TS, students would have to find their way (with or without the teacher’s help) to certain (“content”) realizations about the meaning of the Holocaust, the importance of literature/story-telling, the ethics of passivity, etc. Students would be quizzed on plot details to ensure that they had “at least” read the assignment. Ideally, during class discussion, students would follow a teacher’s careful unfolding of the book’s themes, p.o.v., techniques of narration, and historical context/significance. Throughout this “lesson plan,” students would probably not have to have a serious (personal) stake in the book or the historical events referenced in the book.

Following an EL model, students would take a very different journey which might activate a good deal of their own thinking about History, ethnicity, passivity, or whatever else surfaces in the initial engagement with the text. For instance, in providing their own historical context for the book, students might play around with different time lines for identifying the “beginning” (or cause) of World War II. Was it WWI? Was it the first time an ethnic group was persecuted? Was it the invention of the Fordist assembly line (and the 20 th century aesthetic of progress)? Inviting students to write (debate) History is “experiential” (or “constructivist”) because it places discussion and composition at the center of knowledge-making. Students in an EL class might also write poems or draw illustrations about what’s good about being “passive” and, taking their best line or image, co-author a group poem or collage about the merits of obedience that the class as a whole then uses to push back against the text’s obvious “message” about conformity being a (banal) form of evil. This is EL again because students are creators—not just passive readers—of the central text(s) and questions of the classroom.

These EL scenarios may or may not create M-BOD moments, as Gee imagines them, because this pedagogy does not carefully address how to

  • immerse learners in (increasingly difficult) challenges
  • invite learners to enact some aspect of the drama of persecution or ethical response
  • require that learners build their own meanings around what emerge as key questions/terms/concepts/situations (except in the “write-your-History” exercise)
  • allow learners to cultivate, to some degree, their own “appreciative system” (assessment schema) for evaluating individual and group productions

Even without this planning, the EL classroom described above might still catalyze M-BOD; without a doubt, the pedagogy is more auspicious for deep learning than what is offered through TS. But a lesson plan explicitly designed for M-BOD with Night might contain some of these sequences:

  • Before reading Night, students journal or freewrite in class on questions like: Who is the “historian” in your family? Are there any disagreements about who preserves the important memories for the family, or about particular memories? How does the family history (whether single or multiply-voiced) influence current dynamics? After students have shared their responses, a reading of Night is used to clarify, confirm or question the individual and group’s findings about the role of History in shaping the Present. Then, students compose, individually or in groups, a didactic or inquisitive presentation (they would have to decide what was rhetorically appropriate) for an outside audience (other classes, the Administration) on the questions raised in the class about the use of History.
  • Before reading Night, students journal or freewrite about the high school phenomenon of bullying: how/where/why does it occur? What’s obvious about bullies/victims? What’s not obvious? Students then write poems or create visual collages about bullying. In class, students do a walking dance (moving slowly in random patterns around the room) and then stop (at the teacher’s cue) and recite the best line of their poem OR strike a pose that captures some aspect of their collage. After doing this a few times, students form groups and create short (30 second-2 minute) ensemble choreographies using their individual pieces and then showcase those works for each other. At the close of this assignment, students journal or freewrite in class about what it feels like to be persecuted for your difference or to punish others for their ‘weakness.’
  • Students create their own “time lines” of 20th century war, plotting some of the events referenced in Night but others found in their own research, and place them around the school. They interview or survey people in the school on their reactions to the installations. From those interviews, students create individual or group presentations on the (ir)relevance of History. As with the scenario above, Night is not conceived as information to be gleaned and demonstrated; it is a catalyst for dialogue and kairotic rhetoric.
  • Students do any of the above sequences and also design their own assessment rubrics for journal/collage exercises and class presentations based upon the value they find in these activities.

The M-BOD scenarios sketched out above differ from those described in the EL section in that the former take seriously the role of desire in student learning. In the M-BOD scenarios, students resource their creative and dramatic selves to become their own guides in working out the meaning(s) of History, ethics, bullying, etc. This learning is “deep” because it involves the body in several ways:

  • Sometimes bodies actually get up and move through space (i.e., the walking dance or doing field research)
  • Students are prompted to respond to situations more than follow directions; these situations require them to “read” other people and multiple texts and contexts
  • Students’ formal presentations (their strategic, other-directed productions) elicit actual responses from people, which (whether good or bad, or a mix) then require some expression and reflection

Back to Discussion of "Situating M-BOD"

     

Preface

One: Situating Embodied Learning

Two: Case Study: Oliver

Three: Implications for the Literacy Autobiography Assignment