All references are found in the final post
The aim of this project is to use dance-based practice to add to understandings of how embodied pedagogies can support social justice in HE.
Since starting this PG Cert, I have taught on courses where the majority of the students used English as an Additional Language and a high number had specific learning differences. In Unit 1, I noted the difficulties students experienced with having to give immediate responses within class discussion, linking these difficulties with the colonial dominance of English and neurotypical assumptions about language processing speeds. In this unit 1 post, I expressed a desire to find ways of facilitating engagement that were not predicated on the rapid, debate-style response that still dominates HE, while retaining a sense of immediacy and shared presence.
My teaching practice is rooted in dance and somatic approaches that generate knowledge from embodied experience. I work praxically, drawing on dance researchers such as Sheets-Johnstone (2009) and Fraleigh (1987). While I have always used embodied tasks in my teaching, it is through my more recent teaching with PG students in non-dance disciplines that the social justice implications of this work have become more evident.
Drawing on this work, this project asks
How can embodied pedagogy, and specifically movement-based tasks, be used in HE in ways that resist the dominance of language and support more socially just forms of participation?
In broad terms, embodied pedagogic practices align with social justice aims because they bring into question what counts as knowledge in HE and how we arrive at it in class. In this sense, embodied pedagogy intersects with critical pedagogy, feminist epistemologies, care discourse, and indigenous pedagogy: practices that celebrate the situated nature of learning and knowing.
As Sara Ahmed’s work on institutional power highlights, some bodies are more ‘at home’ in universities than others (Ahmed 2012:13), and expectations around speech, confidence and comportment can marginalise those who do not conform. By legitimising movement, sensation and lived experience as sources of knowledge, embodied pedagogies challenge narrow definitions of academic rigour that often exclude neurodivergent, disabled, and multilingual students.
Wagner and Shahjahan argue that embodied ways of knowing are a vital component of ‘anti-oppressive pedagogy’ (2015: 245) within HE, tracing this lineage through critical pedagogues such as Freire (1970) and hooks (1994). This trajectory is extended by Clughen (2023), who calls for a shift towards embodied learning as a key future direction for HE. Similarly, Hegna and Ørbæk’s (2024) literature review identifies a rapid growth in publications addressing embodied teaching in HE. However, they also note that ‘this emerging field appears fragmented, with limited discussion and knowledge-building across publications’ (Hegna & Ørbæk 2024: 420). Clughen also observes that while ‘embodiment may be everywhere’ (2023:736), it remains poorly understood within learning and teaching cultures in UK higher education. As a small contribution to developing this understanding, the next post begins by reviewing how I have used embodied pedagogy across several years of teaching in HE.