Term of Award

Spring 2006

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Curriculum Studies (Ed.D.)

Document Type and Release Option

Dissertation (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading

Committee Chair

John A. Weaver

Committee Member 1

Bill Reynolds

Committee Member 2

Marla Morris

Committee Member 3

Toby Daspit

Abstract

I began thinking about the topic of this dissertation at first in 2003 when I found myself expecting a third child while teaching full-time and pursuing a doctoral degree, and in earnest later that year at Bergamo, where I began to see a connection between my own interest in desires and bodies as they relate to education and the work of several of my colleagues. I began to think about the role of the body in the curriculum. Every day that we enter the classroom we bring our bodies and our desires along with us. We educate and learn from gestating bodies, ill bodies, able and dis--abled bodies, bodies that shape who we are as students and teachers. And yet, it seems that in many ways, the body becomes unimportant, if not invisible, in the traditional classroom. What I hope to accomplish with this dissertation, then, is to examine what I perceive as the disembodiment of curriculum, and bring the body into the educational practice and discourse in a way that is meaningful to the everyday practice of teachers and relevant to the future of curriculum at large. This project is not an attempt to reconceptualize physical education, although the binary we have constructed between kinesthetic and academic education is relevant. This study is also not a rearticulation of kinesthetic learning theory; the decision to utilize bodily movement as a way of helping students internalize concepts might be considered an initiative to involve the body more in the curriculum, but this study is more about what we do to, and from, and in our bodies than with them. I want to understand in what ways the body and pedagogy are intertwined, to explore how the ways we have thought about the body have shaped how we are as students and teachers, and to imagine an embodied curriculum that reflects the ways that the postmodern, posthuman body and the curriculum act with/in, on and against each other.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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