Surfacing Knowledge through Athletic Embodied Methods to Inform Teaching and Learning

Advancements in qualitative research highlight the importance of interrupting positivist reductionism and allowing for full-bodied sensory experiences as knowledge generating activities. Such embodied research can be empowering for participants as they bridge research with teaching and learning. Yet in the U.S., traditional quantitative and qualitative methods predominate in education. While useful, relying on traditional methods alone is limiting because people experience the world in multidimensional, multimodal and embodied ways. Life in school is a full-bodied experience, and embodied methods can richly describe teachers’ and students’ school lives.This paper explores embodied cognition via athletic embodied research methods. It is guided by two broad questions, “What knowledge do our bodies hold about learning? How might listening to our bodies during athletic activities surface this knowledge and inform our future practice as educators?” Each author examined their embodied knowledge through a chosen athletic activity (swimming, running, tennis) to generate new understandings about the role of the body in learning. Together, they illuminate how multi-sensory experiences engage the body and mind within the world, forge connections between physical activity and mental well-being, and enhance cognitive processes to allow for deeper understanding of what knowledge is and where it comes from. The insights gleaned from this research can be used for innovating learning activities and assessments to afford students opportunities to learn with and express their learning through their bodies. They also demonstrate the usefulness of embodied methods for educational researchers, especially teacher researchers, to gain a fuller sense of what students know about learning that their bodies experience but they might not easily articulate in words alone. Students can engage with learning through their bodies as sites of inquiry to connect with their knowledge from beyond the walls of the classroom.