Center for Bodylore and Learning
2008-09 Professional Development Offerings for Educators

• Single or series of professional development workshops for teachers of grades 5 and above, offering methods for developing students’ body-based intelligence, their capacity for social and emotional learning, and their critical thinking as they experience the “bodyways,” or movement patterns, of global cultures.

• Follow-up technical support and coaching in teachers’ classrooms.

• Training for teachers to participate, along with their students, in constructing a study of students’ own communities in Chicago. Participants’ students document the physical dimensions of their local cultures through photos, digital video, and interviews. Students will have the opportunity to contribute to the Cultural Sculpture Project’s web archive of world physical practices.

• In coming years, opportunity for teachers and students to participate in short-term learning expeditions abroad: something like archaeological “digs,” these will be cultural excavations of movement practices in everyday and specialized settings.

Audience

Teachers and principals of grades 5 and above; especially appropriate for teachers responsible for social studies, science & health, special education, and physical education.

Approach

Workshops and Coaching can be Used to:

• Support teachers who want to teach to one of the more challenging of the multiple intelligences, the kinesthetic, or body-based;

• Increase physical activity, and health, in the general education classroom;

• Permit innovative cross-curricular programming between the general education classrooms and physical education;

• Help teachers and students understand and experience physical diversities;

• Cultivate respect for other cultures’ modes of dress, deportment, custom, and religious observance;

• Bring alive a health-sciences curriculum;

• Place scientific discoveries and claims about the body in historical context; and

• Enable teachers and students to use physical inquiry as a mode of discovery across the disciplines.

Selected Topics

• Virtuosity and Body Limits (How far can our human bodies go in balance and flexibility? (examples include yogis, circus performers, Chinese gymnasts, Euro-American ballet dancers, and women worldwide in high heels);

• Becoming male and female in different cultures;

• Showing off and the experience of being seen cross-culturally;

• Body image;

• Reconstructing what it was like physically to have lived in ancient or historical cultures (examples include ancient Mayan, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian; medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and Romantic-era European);

• How bodies adapt to altered circumstances, such as a new disability or illness;

• Physical expressions of assimilation in immigrant cultures;

• Consumption and material culture (examples from different American regions: New York City upper class; middle class in Appalachia; lower class in Memphis, as well as societies moving toward or adapting aspects of capitalist systems e.g., in Eastern Europe and Vietnam)

• The body’s role in spiritual practice in different traditions;

• Understanding different cultures’ approaches to death and dying; and

• How medical, geographical, and astronomical systems overlap in different cultures’ “body cosmologies.”