Corporeal
Treating lectures as the pinnacle of academic and professional learning experience, higher education is overly verbal. It usually involves sedentary bodies who talk and listen and watch. Other senses as well as motor skills are most often excluded. However, many learners are kinetic types, who learn best by moving and through movement. Sedentary position also inhibits emotions and contributes to the cartesian mind - body dualism. These are some of the reasons many different methods look for ways to involve bodies, emotions, movement, smell, and touch. They expand sensory horizons of learning and engage different learning styles and approaches.
Methodologies
Kinesthetic learning
Kinesthetic learning methods come in many forms, shapes and sizes. Some kinesthetic approaches are more about dealing away with the stress of sitting (in which situations students can use standing desks, or fidgets for their legs or hands), while others are using kinesthetic approaches as a core of a teaching method. 1. Take one theoretical claim or empirical finding that can be represented by a graph or scale. ; 2. Present finding or a theoretical claim to learners; 3. Ask them to imagine a classroom (or a part of it that is not occupied by chairs) as a graph; 4. Ask them to stand up and assume one position in the graph that corresponds with their experience or situation or attitude or belief; 4. Ask (some of) them to explain their position. How does it feel to occupy such a social situation or why do you assume such an attitude?; 5. Encourage them to question one another about their explanations; 6. Possibly, ask them to reconsider their position and assume another place.
Cuerpo-territorio
Cuerpo-territorio is a participative knowledge sharing method rooted in South American practices, as well as indigenous, decolonial and feminist ontologies which understand knowledge, bodies and territories as united and interconnected. The methods use hands-on, visual ways to co-produce knowledge among participants. Namely, participants draw the territory on their bodies, in ways that take into account both their knowledge of the territory and their experiences of living in it. It can be used as a method to reflect on experiences among participants, share them and advocate for changes, but it can also be used as a participative research method. It is specifically well suited when dealing with sensitive political topics, with experiences of trauma, as well as with those in which participants should connect their bodies and feelings to wider surroundings and territory.
