Embodied Pedagogies in Religion

Embodied Pedagogies in Religion: Transforming the Classroom 

In contemporary American culture, the predominant assumption is that the transformation that takes place in the classroom is the transformation of a disembodied intellectual subject. If we are honest with ourselves, when we look at the typical university or secondary school classroom and the ideas that undergird the practices that take place there, more often than not we see this assumption manifest. 

In this vein, our pedagogical practices have largely evolved to quiet the body and address and train a mind that resides in a head for whom the body is an instrument. And yet students and faculty increasingly hunger to integrate critical scholarship with constructive and creative ways of knowing and engaging with reality. There is thus a growing desire for teaching and learning that activates the imagination by taking seriously and exploring forms of embodied experience that do not fit the dominant model.

In fact, many are coming to consider that developing “informed understandings of belief systems and worldviews” other than our own, one of the more basic goals of the academic study of religion, may not be possible if that knowledge is always only understood as the process and property of a disembodied subject. 

This project will aim to accomplish two deliverables: submit a complete edited volume to Routledge Press, and organize a symposium for teachers (professors and instructors) of religious studies to discuss ways in which they think about and engage the embodied dimension of teaching and learning and how they have created a curriculum to make this manifest. 

It will offer other faculty and graduate students the opportunity to engage in experiential workshops designed to model embodied learning in the classroom. It will also offer all participants the opportunity to discuss the possible place of embodied pedagogy in different kinds of institutions, public and private, religious and secular. 

Project point person: Sravana Borkataky-Varma, Research Associate