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embodied learning
TEXT BY JOSH A. HALSTEAD
April Coughlin is an educator, scholar, and self-identified “wheeler.” Bearing an apparent disability, Coughlin has experienced discrimination throughout her career as a high school and college professor. One morning, a seventh grader in her English class remarked, “We don’t have to show you respect like other teachers, because you’re in a wheelchair.” Shaken, Coughlin searched for a response while suppressing the pain. This student didn’t know that she was a first-year teacher. They didn’t know she’d been staying up until 4:00 a.m. every night working on lesson plans. And they couldn’t possibly know how challenging it was for a new teacher fresh out of grad school to manage thirty-five students. Didn’t she deserve a little respect? Apparently not. She was different.
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Alas, Coughlin’s story is not unique. La- teef McLeod, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tobin Siebers, and many others have written about the politics of corporeal orthodoxy and dissent. In this essay, I join this lineage and foreground embodiment as a tool for self-knowledge and design insight.
To be embodied is to understand ourselves as undivided and reflexive body-mind-spirit-social-relational beings. The body gives us direct access to embod- iment and, in so doing, becomes a locus for learning. Internal proprioception (cogni- zance of the movement and composition of one’s own integrated body) grants us access to our emotions, sensations, and desires. To acknowledge these sensory modes of knowledge is to resist binary oppositions like subject/object, mind/body, and nature/culture.
Coughlin was objectified and devalued early in her career for appearing different from other teachers, but she later realized that this experience had shaped her, and she cultivated an embodied pedagogy that challenged dualist modes of knowing. On field trips, she and her students ride the subway together. If an elevator is out of service, the students join in carrying her up
and down the stairs. In the process, they learn about physical access and social jus- tice issues firsthand, not merely thinking or reading about the topic but through direct, embodied experience. Coughlin teaches through her body—not in spite of it.
Like Coughlin, I had to learn to value my body unapologetically. When I first moved to San Francisco, I took a longer route to work just to avoid catching a view of my stiff gait in the glossy towers on Market Street. I wasn’t exactly ashamed of my body, but I’d internalized the ableist nar- rative that by graduating from college and moving to a city on my own, I’d somehow escaped disability. My reflection was a constant reminder that I hadn’t.
As my career progressed, I had the op- portunity to teach an introductory graphic design course at UC Berkeley Extension. Like many first-time teachers, I threw my- self into hours of research and preparation. One evening, while building a lecture on postmodern design, I came across Barbara Kruger’s 1989 silkscreen (Untitled) Your Body is a Battleground. Kruger—artist and fierce feminist—devised this piece for the Women’s March on Washington in 1989 in the wake of mounting US antiabortion laws.