ERIC Number: EJ1477520
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1356-2517
EISSN: EISSN-1470-1294
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Transmitting Awareness from the Body into Writing: Bringing the Feldenkrais Method into the University Classroom
Teaching in Higher Education, v30 n5 p1084-1099 2025
We propose inviting the body into the university writing process through somatic pedagogical practices. This study investigates an effort to write from our body and through our body in a course where students used the body as a site of creation. Challenging mind-body dualism and the erasure of bodily ways of knowing, students participated in Feldenkrais exercises to enhance awareness through movement by heightening habitual perception. Subsequently, students' writing revealed increased admittance of uncertainty and reflexive engagement. They reflected on their own positionalities while considering the perspectives of hypothetical others, invoking augmented senses of social responsibility. In essence, they transferred physically experienced agency through functional movement to personal agency within hierarchical systems of power. This study suggests that somatic pedagogical interventions have the potential to activate reflexivity, foregrounding causal relations that begin with self-guided, felt realities in the body.
Descriptors: Human Body, Writing Processes, Writing Instruction, Perception, Reflection, Personal Autonomy, Power Structure, College Students, Student Attitudes, Teaching Methods
Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Communication Studies, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA; 2Ethical Leadership, Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI, USA