Some Thoughts on Bodies and Teaching

Molly Robinson Kelly, Associate Director of the Lewis & Clark College Teaching Excellence Program

“You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Ta Nahisi Coates, Between the World and Me

The other day when I arrived in my classroom, I found several of my students sitting in the back corner of the room. This was unusual. Ever since the first day of class, we had been arranging our desks in a small circle close to the front of the class, near the whiteboard. They often moved the desks into place before I arrived. When I saw my students grouped in the back corner, I felt oddly disoriented by their changed position and quickly asked, “Is everything OK?” They laughed, perhaps a bit sheepish at my unexpected reaction. They explained that they had done it to be silly, curious what would happen if they moved from our usual geography.

Another day, some time ago, a student met me outside the classroom just as the midterm was about to begin. She said she was struggling that day with terrible anxiety and asked if she could take the midterm another day. As she spoke, I noticed that her hands were shaking noticeably.

A colleague of mine mentioned to me recently that she had not known what to do when one of her students showed up in class, visibly high.

Finally, a couple weeks ago, in the middle of teaching a 3-hour stretch of classes, I suddenly felt terribly hungry. I gave my students an activity to do and returned quickly to my office in search of a Kind bar. I ran back to class and resumed teaching, not wanting to waste any more time. Then, realizing that I still needed to eat, I opened the Kind bar while I taught, but felt embarrassed by the spectacle that was my eating: the loud crinkle of the wrapper; the crunch of my teeth on the bar; the difficulty of talking with the bar’s stickiness in my mouth; the possibility that pieces of food might be stuck in my teeth.

What do all these stories have in common? They reminded me that I have a body, that my students have bodies, and that the movements, needs, and troubles of these bodies can have significant impact in the classroom.

This may seem a rather obvious point. It IS an obvious point.

And yet, somehow, this notion—that teaching and learning are embodied phenomena— has stayed with me over the past weeks. I’ve been thinking about the many ways in which our bodies interact with us, interfere with us, and just plain make themselves known to us as we go about the business of teaching. As Toni Morrison wrote in Beloved, “In this here place, we flesh.”

Our bodies impose themselves in spaces of learning in so many modes: through ailments and afflictions like illness, disability, hunger; but also through the many ways they carry our identities and articulate our sense of ourselves in the world. By entering the classroom with our bodies, and not just our minds, we and our students lug with us, like middle schoolers toting backpacks half their size, an enormous number of valances and signifiers. Every single one of us enters the classroom with our gender, our race, our ethnicity, our size, our body type, our accent, our hairstyle, our clothing choices, and our voice. Our bodies are out there for everyone to see, to notice, to wonder about. We can’t escape them, just as we can’t escape the various bodily ailments, visible and invisible, that affect our ability to teach and to learn: a vision or hearing impairment, a bad cold or a headache, a neurological difference, or simply stress, anxiety, hunger, or fatigue.

The classroom is a space of the mind – a cerebral place. Unless our discipline lends itself to it, we professors do not think of ourselves as people dealing with bodies. We professors do truck with minds, and we can forget to make room for the body in our teaching. But sometimes, the body gives us little choice in the matter.

There is benefit to gaining awareness about bodies in our classrooms. Our bodies, and theirs. Following are just a few ways in which this might happen:

1. We could become more mindful and intentional about how the classroom set-up and geography – the positioning of our bodies – lend themselves to better (or worse) learning.
2. We could find more mercy for ourselves and our students by embracing the reality of our bodies. Some days, we are tired, or sick. Other days, they are. When class goes badly, it may not mean that you were inept that day. Maybe your students were simply exhausted, or fighting off the latest epidemic to afflict the dorms.
3. We could open ourselves more intentionally and with greater generosity to the ways in which students’ bodies impact their sense of themselves and their place in the world. They, like all of us, cannot get away from their race, ethnicity, gender identity, size, economic access to “the right” clothes, style, etc. We forget how tenderly one feels about one’s body and appearance when one is young. We can be better teachers and mentors if we remember.
4. We could use our body’s positioning to include and empower, rather than exclude and disempower. For example, one of the most powerful things we can do for our students is to make eye contact with each and every one of them during class. It is surprising how easy it is to exclude someone from the environment, simply by not including them with your eyes. 

Other easy but essential tips:

• Don’t turn your back to the class and talk (for example while writing on the board or looking at the screen). Any hearing-impaired students will not be able to read your lips, and everyone will have a harder time hearing you.
• Write clearly on the board, in letters large enough to be seen from the most distant chair.
• Make sure no student occupies a seat that keeps them looking at your back.
• Make sure no student occupies a seat removed from the rest of the group.

Consider implementing practices that cater to the body. Some ideas:

• For long classes, or those happening at night, consider creating a “snack calendar” and asking students to take responsibility for bringing snacks to at least some of the classes.
• Give students a brief break if the class lasts longer than an hour.
• My colleague Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell asks her students to take responsibility for a 3-minute “health break” during longer classes. Students take turns leading a short activity of their choice, with the only requirement being that it contributes to a sense of health and well-being. Jerusha reports that these activities, ranging from yoga, to meditation, to listening to music, to watching a cute cat video, have proven quite popular with her students.
• Devise activities that allow students to move their bodies during class: working at the board, regularly changing small groups or discussion partners, standing and circulating around the class to interact with different classmates.