Audience

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

• Methods for, and experience of, working with yoga and other body modalities to help students calm, focus, energize, or work cooperatively with others

• Instruction in using theatrical rehearsal, simulations, expeditionary learning, improvisation, and other sophisticated kinesthetic strategies effectively for learning across the curriculum
• Follow-up technical support and coaching in teachers’ classrooms
• Social studies workshops on innovative topics (see bottom of page), for developing students’ body-based intelligence, social-emotional learning, and critical thinking
• Training for teachers to participate, along with their students, in constructing a study of students’ own communities. Participants’ students document the physical dimensions of their local cultures through photos, digital video, and interviews.

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 Social Studies Topics for Specialized Workshops Using Body-Based Intelligence

• 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.”