By Steve Raulston, Department of Spanish and Italian
This well-known 14th-century Italian manuscript illumination by Laurentius de Voltolina, depicts the delivery of an ethics lecture in a gothic hall at the University of Bologna. The professor addresses the class from a raised, throne-like lectern. With one exception, the overachievers in the front rows sit erect, gazing raptly at the master or dutifully following along in their texts. Their colleagues in the back rows, only one of whom has taken out a textbook, look around, whisper to one another, scribble notes likely unrelated to the lecture, or doze off altogether. The learning dynamics of the medieval classroom will strike many 21st-century university professors and students as familiar; all that’s missing in this illumination is a smartphone.
Susan Hrach, professor of English and director of the Faculty Center at Georgia’s Columbus State University, traces the origin of a university classroom model in which students are expected to focus for long periods while seated to two sources: the Cartesian body/mind dichotomy and the Industrial Revolution. Voltolina’s little painting reminds us that the model is really as old as the university itself—born in the 12th-century cathedral schools of Europe—, and that for many students it has never worked particularly well. Those with long enough experience at Sewanee will remember that, until late in the 20th century classrooms on the upper floors of Walsh Ellet had a raised dais at one end with an ornate seat for the professor, and rows of long, narrow tables with stiff wooden chairs for the students. Those spaces, and, indeed, the tradition of the gown on this campus, are the residue of a time when movement was not a feature of the university classroom, where engagement and learning took place from the neck up. Since its founding, Sewanee had espoused a vision of education as the development of the whole person—intellectual, spiritual, and physical. But in practice the pursuit of that holistic goal was compartmentalized, each of its facets confined, respectively, to the classroom, the chapel, and the playing field.
Professor Hrach is one of a generation of pedagogues who take aim at the teacher-centered classroom and the notion of students as “brains on sticks.” Drawing on an array of recent research in phenomenology, kinesiology, linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience, she argues that the human brain is not an independent thinking device but one organ within a system of interrelated and interdependent parts which are in constant motion and dialogue. The brain cannot think and learn except in concert with the rest of the body; cognition is necessarily an embodied process. And from recent research on embodied cognition Hrach distills 6 key principles.
1. Bodies are in a state of constant motion. Our hunter-gatherer past and our physical evolution have primed us for physical activity, for movement, and for acute awareness of ourselves and our surroundings. Our brains interpret information from internal organs (interoception), from external sensory perception (exteroception), and from our limbs about our position in space and motion (proprioception). All three work together to make us able to absorb new ideas and experiences, to learn.
2. Our bodies prize energy efficiency. Long ago, under precarious conditions, our bodies evolved to survive by delivering bursts of physical exertion necessary to find food or elude danger and also to withstand periods without sustenance. Our brains have evolved to monitor our changing environment, but, instead of exhausting scarce resources carefully monitoring every detail, they have learned to do so efficiently by predicting what we may expect based on past experience. Because they’re based on experience and not on current observation, our mental predictions may not be true.
3. Our bodies extend their perceptive capacities by engaging tools, technology, and other people. In other words, our learning can be extended and conditioned by our environment and the people around us.
4. Each of us affects the embodied ecosystems of others. If we can use other people in order to learn, they can also use us, which renders learning an inherently social experience. A supportive environment, a network of friends, a sense of belonging to place or community are all components that facilitate and enhance deep learning.
5. Knowledge is constructed through embodied experience. If our bodies shape our perceptions (see # 2 above), then the latter statement must be true. And if it is true, we should find ways for students to use their bodies in the acquisition of deep knowledge.
6. Our bodies reward learning. Humans are naturally inquisitive. The brain rewards with endorphins the satisfaction of curiosity and the experience of interpreting novel events and ideas in the context of past experience.
Having laid out and explained these principles in a long introduction, Hrach devotes six chapters in three sections to exploring their implications for the college classroom. These include a thoughtful discussion about optimizing the physical classroom to facilitate movement- and sensory-based learning, and a sustained exploration of the benefits of holding class outside; the importance of sensory perception in the learning process and ideas—beyond audio-visual media—for including sensory experience in the classroom; the fundamental importance of movement in the learning experience, and the inclusive and community-building value of moving as a group.
In advocating a physically active learning environment, Hrach is sensitive to the inclusion of students with physical limitations, acknowledging the challenge of incorporating and accommodating them in ways that are inclusive and not stigmatizing, and making suggestions for ways to accomplish that. Citing research, she also makes the provocative argument that the need of students with disabilities constantly to negotiate a natural and built landscape that challenges them may have already made them more neurologically inclined to and primed for deep learning.
Of Hrach’s six principles, the one whose implications seem to me most important for our contemplation as instructors in a liberal arts college is the second: Our bodies prize energy efficiency. The brain’s tendency to conserve energy by reading present situations and predicting events based on past experience rather than on perpetual, alert observation means that when our unconscious predictions are confirmed not much happens. It is when events defy expectation, when we are confronted with something novel that must be accounted for vis à vis our memory and be assimilated, that our perception is broadened. Learning happens amid the discomfort of having to accommodate the new within the landscape of the familiar. If we know that our students are going to enter our classrooms in a state of natural, evolution-induced autopilot, then an important role for us as instructors is, even subtly, to introduce into the classroom experience elements of novelty or surprise that create a beneficial degree of discomfort. We should be benevolent disruptors of students’ unconscious predictions. Indeed, Hrach dedicates her final chapter to discussion of the importance of pursuing what she calls “a pedagogy of discomfort”—our students’ and our own as creators of it. Productive novelty in the classroom can be as simple as altering the layout of the learning space, introducing a new activity, going outside, incorporating movement or sensory experience—anything that tells a learning community’s efficient brains, “This is not yesterday’s class; you don’t know what comes next; perk up.”
Hrach’s consideration of the kinds of spaces that are conducive to movement and physically-engaged learning should also prove provocative to Sewanee instructors. Consider, for example, our Center for Teaching, a large, well-lit space with an intimate, static lounge area, thoughtfully designed projection and whiteboard space, and a large open area in which collapsible tables and stackable chairs can be configured for almost any kind of meeting or class. When teachers designed a space for teachers, they opted for comfort, practicality, and, above all, flexibility. Yet many of even our mostly recently renovated classroom spaces are filled, sometimes crammed, with space-eating individual desks or other furniture that seriously impedes movement and any reconfiguration of the space.
Finally, Sewanee faculty who read Hrach’s book are likely to experience a strong sense of affirmation, recognizing how many of her principles we and our colleagues already employ. This is so not only in dance, theater, choral and instrumental music, lab sciences, studio arts, and field-based courses, where physical engagement and sensory experience are part of the discipline. Embodied learning happens in many, often innovative forms in more traditional fields in the Humanities. And Hrach’s principles and suggestions are compatible with other pedagogical developments like physical response and story-telling in foreign-language acquisition and the institutional initiative for inclusive teaching practices that informed the afternoon discussion, handout, and shared resources of this semester’s Faculty Gathering.
Minding Bodies reminds us that active learning is a practice in which Sewanee excels. The new research behind its principles of embodied learning should also prompt us, as individuals, to continue to clarify or to reimagine our roles as instructors and, as an institution, to assess the appropriateness of our learning spaces, old and new, for research-based best practices.