Embodied Learning and Words

I have been thinking a lot about embodiment, but also about how much words and writing have been so impactful to my lived experience, and can reflect embodied reality of folk we share eduspace with. After STLHE and during my bit of time off for Pride, I have been thinking about how I want to return to writing more about what I studied for my dissertation and what continues to preoccupy me: the sensory, tactility, pedagogy, and the architecture of learning spaces, because I think we are at a moment in education where these topics are even more important than they have been since the end of emergency remote teaching. 

This is why I noted that I want to do a series of blog posts over the summer that focus on the sensory and pedagogy and accessibility. But it occurred to me that before I started such a series it would be important to kind of frame where these thoughts are coming from, in a citational justice origin story context sort of way if you will. Because my focus on embodiment and the sensory which has informed my accessibility and inclusion work, hasn't come from no where. Many of you have heard my Ruskin dissertation story, but the more I reflect on embodiment I realized that way before Ruskin has been me and my words, so many words, in journals, on scraps of paper, on knapkins, literally written on my body in ballpoint pen (more often than I can count as a teenager). The importance of writing has been one of the defining features of who I am as a person, and those words have carried for decades.

When I do land acknowledgements as part of workshops I facilitate I always mention how I believe our geographies inform who we are as people, our morals, and our values. The places we have lived, or even moved through, become part of who we are - geographies are embodied, tactile reminders of our journeys. Sometimes we tend to extend those lived experiences through words, a textual way to also remember and retrieve, to save for posterity. 

In order to process my lived experiences I started to write, often, and in different ways since I was about 12 years old or so. Not just journalling, but also poetry, so much poetry, still so much poetry. The writing and poems always becoming the markers of lived experience, but I also spent time lately thinking about why that is. What made me choose words as expression instead of other ways? And upon further reflection I realized that the words were in fact a way to model resistance based on how and where I grew up. So for almost 40 years I have been writing to resist, using words to mark what was already embodied by the socio-geographies I navigated, and this is probably very true of so many folk in your eduspaces, the learners, but also the teaching team or staff members. Let me explain.

You see I grew up in a place where language use and choice of language spoken publicly had very embodied implications especially around safety. This is where you say, wait Ann, didn't you grow up in Canada, and I say yes, but I grew up at a time and in province where language was politicized (as always) and where language choices could be violent. Often when I would mention this to my students they would be confused until I explained Bill 101, how my mother's incomplete schooling determined the language of the school I could attend through the magic of paperwork, and what would happen to those who chose to speak English publicly in the 80's and 90's where I grew up. I will not get into the violent descriptions here, that is not the point of this post, but what I will express is that living your formative life years being hypervigilant of the words and language you use in public does a thing to your bodymind, and very much informs your values going forward. I don't think I realized how much until recently.

It does a trauma thing that also becomes multiplied in certain ways if your lived experience also includes being a member of other equity-denied groups. Because queer, disabled, BIPOC folk for example understand the embodied nature of belonging and exclusion. Belonging is felt deeply, and acknowledged quickly when one engages in different spaces. Spaces can feel safe or dangerous instantly, and this is important to remember in our pedagogical conversations. Perspicaciousness is strong with folks in equity-denied space because it has to be. Sometimes it is the architecture that creates a sense of inclusion or not. Sometimes it is who is represented in spaces in visible ways, knowing that there may be so much representation that is not visible or discussed actively, that also creates feelings of fear. The "there be dragons" vibe is real, and even if one queer/disabled/BIPOC person may feel a sense of belonging in a space it may be because it is not unsafe for them in that space yet. It is that "yet-ness", that keeps me thinking. It is that possibility of exclusion at any time that drives my work, and wanting to support a more holistic view of possible barriers created in eduspace.

We carry so much with us. Our spaces inform the relationships we can or cannot build for safety reasons, our sensory reality is carried in every space, on-campus or virtual, that we navigate. The spaces teach us the words that feel comfortable in our mouths, the words we sign, the languages that are safe or unsafe to speak in context, as an edu-snapshot of and in time. I remember first-year physics in undergrad and the smell (I was not anosmic yet) and sound (I did not have tinnitus yet) of H216. That embodied feeling carried as proximal awareness when 19 years later I taught Women's Literature in H215, my body knowing each day how close I was to first-year physics feelings, the sensory of that physics space so very different to the sensory and learning space I was trying to foster right next door. The yet-ness of possibility that this space could sensorily turn into the space I experienced next door 2 decades previous.

These thoughts I put into words for this post today, thoughts that I first reflected on as I sat on my deck, then put into my little notebook as bullet points to edit, and now translate into a draft as I body double with a friend working on a project. These thoughts embodied in open space, in textual space, in shared space, having meaning at each turn in each context. Words and language have been so important to me for over 40 years. It is why I blog, it is why I write articles, it is why I write chapters, it is why I create resources, it is why I facilitate workshops, it is why I have a podcast. Because I know and have felt at many times in my life what happens when words are silenced, when decisions are made to not say a thing or how quickly I need to leave a space for safety reasons; so many of us have felt these feelings. Collective and community embodiment of traumas are historically, systemically, and socially upheld. These decisions, the way that our bodies carry so much, that words can also carry what our bodies carry, these are important to be aware of in pedagogical design choices. This is why I want to talk about the sensory and accessible pedagogy this summer. Because those sensory and embodied pieces are often forgotten or taken for granted and it's only by putting things in words that those embodied realities can exist and be understood for others. As I have written about many times in my dissertation, articles, and grey literature I produce, the "tactile residue" of learning exists, and in a time of large language models, it is more important than ever to trace the origins of the learning that clings to us. This is why I write.