Center for Bodylore and Learning - Sara K. Schneider Bio

The Center for Bodylore and Learning
Director Bio

Dr. Sara K. Schneider completed her undergraduate education at Yale and trained at New York University in Performance Studies, the nexus of cross-cultural studies and arts theories and practices. As artist, social scientist, and author of Vital Mummies: Performance Design for the Show-Window Mannequin, Concert Song as Seen: Kinesthetic Aspects of Musical Interpretation, and Art of Darkness: Ingenious Performances by Undercover Operators, Con Men, and Others, Schneider has written extensively on the meaning of the body in expressive and material culture. As an entrepreneur, she founded and served as artistic director of the New York movement-theatre company Chaparral and as principal of Sara K. Schneider, Ph.D. & Associates, a organizational learning and ethnographic consultancy. Her creative vision has been realized not only in her writing and in the companies she has founded, but also in original works for the stage: In Peerage Out; Reprehensible Shoes; or, Poetry/(Because Names Die); and Color Story, sponsored by Pantone, Inc. She is experienced at managing boards, budgets, and marketing, and skilled in building support from government, foundation, and corporations.

Assistant Professor of Integrated Studies in Teaching, Technology, and Inquiry in the National College of Education at National-Louis University in Chicago, Schneider has also taught and consulted at the forefront of learning innovation projects at the University of Washington and Andersen Consulting, among others. While at then-Andersen Consulting (now called Accenture), Schneider consulted to project teams on the development of story, script, and character ideas for multimedia training products for line consultants. In her own practice, sample consulting projects have included a U. S. feasibility study for a Canadian mannequin manufacturer; a pro¬gram evaluation for the pilot of a national arts organization-urban school system partnership (Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Hubbard Street Dance Company, and Chicago Public Schools); meeting designs for deep engagement and widest participation, using her model of the “arc of experience” of participants; a pharmaceutical-industry offerings evaluation for a major international consulting firm; and a scenario-planning project for a foundation, for which she co-facilitated the philanthropy’s research process and its stakeholder dialogues about the impact globalization would have for its programs and strategy. From these facilitated dialogues, she authored narrative scenarios about the “future of identity, community, and belonging” in America, which helped the philanthropy re-define its strategy and program offerings for unaffiliated young adults in its identity group. As a result of this project, she was recognized for achievements in branding and invited to serve on a public panel dealing with challenging branding issues.

Current activities include the direction of a five-week Summer Research Expedition for Middle and High School Teachers in 2009. For this Expedition, Schneider has assembled a stellar core team of committed local and national specialists in social studies education, Islamic studies, museum studies, oral history methodology, anthropology, and performance studies, with visiting specialists in ancillary disciplines. “Muslim Lifeways” takes as its subject matter the bodyways of four different living ethnic Muslim communities living in the Chicago area—African-American, Arab, South Asian, and African. The Expedition’s 25 proposed middle and high school teacher participants, assembled at and staying close to the National-Louis University’s Chicago campus for a five-week period during the summer of 2009, will learn social science methodologies, and begin to conduct fieldwork with these four ethnic Muslim communities during their time here.

The Expedition is designed to help teachers create original primary materials that will be make available, not only back to the Muslim community members, but also, with their releases, over the Internet to an international educational audience, in the interest of increasing American teachers’ and schoolchildren’s understanding of Muslim lifestyle and spiritual practices, as well as their sophistication in differentiating one Muslim cultural group from another. From the primary documents they have created teachers will work in grade level-related teams to design lesson plans for their students. In doing this, the teachers will contribute little-documented subject matter to an electronic archive of world physical practices. The project is also designed with the intention of identifying a national group of middle and high school social studies teachers (at that point already trained in fieldwork methods) who will want to continue a multi-layered program of collaborative fieldwork and scholarship that will eventually embrace their own students across the country in the research team.

Schneider has conducted plenary workshops at conferences of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, and has been invited to share her approach to teaching comparative somatic spiritual practices at Esalen Institute. She has worked on kinesthetic methods in education with teachers in DuPage and Cook Counties, and is preparing publications based on her action research on teacher professional development in kinesthetic methods with Oak Park teachers. She has traveled and conducted field research in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, with the Tibetan exile community in northern India, and with practitioners of kalarippayattu, an indigenous martial art in South India. She practices and teaches yoga in Chicago, and is active in the world dance and music communities.