Embodied practices, in broad terms, stem from an understanding that the body and mind are not distinct entities, and that thinking/learning is an embodied process (Fraleigh 1996).
I began this research practically by reflecting on my own experience of using embodied practices over 25 years of teaching in HE. Whilst much of this work involved dance/performance students, it has increasingly involved students from other disciplines with no dance experience. This work also draws on my practice as a socially engaged researcher, using movement practices with people with no movement background.
One review takes a detailed look at a singular workshop focused on ‘arriving’ that I have delivered in a range of HE contexts. The other offers an overview of practices used in MA Performance: Screen Unit 4B teaching in Autumn 2025.
Embodied arriving tasks – reflection
Embodied teaching practices used in MA Performance: Screen Unit 4B- reflection
What I notice following this research is that the tasks
a) encourage an awareness of the felt sense (Gendlin 1962) of the body as a form of knowledge
b) encourage an awareness of the learning environment as something situated and changeable
c) require a developed capacity to move between embodied response and abstract thought.
I was struck by the emphasis on spatial practices in the work. Much of it focuses on changing the body’s relationship to space, offering the learning space as a space of movement, rather than fixity and stillness. These spatial tasks draw ‘attention to the ways that our presence and environment shape what we know, how we act, and how we learn’ (Timperley 2021:148), encouraging an awareness of the situated nature of learning. I used this observation to refine the research question and focus the design of the Unit 3 intervention workshop.
How can embodied spatial practices be used to resist logocentric forms of teaching and promote social justice in HE?
Whilst embodied pedagogies take many forms in HE, the literature points to a focus on two main branches. The first involves sensory engagement (attention, objects, mindfulness), which often aims at increasing students’ wellbeing. In Clughen’s article, ‘Embodiment is the future’ (2023), for example, all three examples of embodied pedagogic practices concern sensory ways into increasing student wellbeing and regulation. The second involves a reference to students’ lived experience and the socio-cultural context of their work, which is used more explicitly towards social justice aims and intersects with feminist epistemologies and pedagogies of discomfort (Zembylas & Boler 2002).
The use of movement as a form of knowledge generation, where my practice sits, is less represented in the literature, and this points to scope for greater exchange across dance-based research, practice-based research, and embodied pedagogies. One reason why there is so little dance in the literature review is that they are only reviewing literature and not practice, and practitioners do not always write about what they do.