The following was presented at Spotlight K-State on March 24, 2015 in Forum Hall in the Kansas State University Student Union.
Alas, Poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.
A student of infinite curiosity, of most excellent imagination. Beheaded in his quest for knowledge by educators who promised he did not need his body in order to learn – only his head!
OK, that soliloquy may be a little exaggerated, but I find that many teachers from first grade onward seem bound and determined to leave their students’ bodies out of the classroom or at least tied to their chairs behind their desks.
I wonder if this push to move from embodied learning to bodiless, abstract learning began with a misunderstanding of Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
Piaget’s Model of Cognitive Development
If you remember, in Child Psychology we learned that there are four stages of cognitive development. The first stage is Sensorimotor Learning which we organically begin to use as soon as we are born to find out about the world: we look, listen, touch, taste, smell, and manipulate things to learn.
Next is Pre-Operational Learning — my personal favorite – because we begin using dramatic play and our imaginations to understand the social and cultural world around us. We begin to think symbolically, and we learn how to take on different roles and play them out physically – to see the world from different people’s points of view.
Then we move onto Concrete Operational Learning. During this stage we learn to follow rules and develop a complete theory of mind. We can concretely look at different aspects and levels of a problem, but we are not yet able to think abstractly and hypothetically until we reach the fourth and final stage – Formal Operations. Formal Operations is considered mature thinking – the best kind of thinking – and in secondary and post-secondary school, the best way to use your brain – forget about those lower stages – they are more primitive and therefore, not as good.
When Piaget’s theory is usually graphed, it is not conceptualized as a pyramid, but I am conceptualizing it this way because from years of teaching drama, I know that we don’t move through these stages and leave them behind – we continue using ALL of them. We don’t move through them and jettison them like the stages of a rocket on its way into space; we bring all the stages with us as we age. We never lose that baseline of understanding the world through our body and our senses. We never stop needing to explore the social and emotional content of the world through experimentation and embodied dramatic play. In fact, the ability to ask “What if…?” grows out of dramatic play and is crucial to keep alive in order to remain, open, curious, and engaged in our studies. Each stage remains in our repertoire of learning skills. And look – the ones involving the body are the biggest and the others balance upon them!
When students are only allowed to learn by passively sitting and listening to a lecture or passively sitting and watching a video, they are being limited to only part of the learning tools at their disposal. Even involvement in discussions skims the surface of embodiment.
I believe in the embodied student – and in embodied learning! Students must use their whole selves to experience, test, and totally understand new information – whether it is through an experiment done in a lab or an intellectual concept embodied in a student sculpture!
How can one teach abstract concepts in an embodied way – well, I could explain the steps from an exclusive society to an inclusive, diverse one by lecturing like I am doing right now OR I could share this chart which provides a visual
OR I could get students up out of their seats to explore the concepts with their bodies.
And in each case students would have to problem-solve how to physicalize the concept, they would experience it, evaluate it. and then reflect upon it personally and abstractly, individually and in groups, calling up all levels of learning on my Piagetian Pyramid.
This doesn’t mean I think lectures and discussion and reading and writing are not important educational tools –they are! I absolutely give them their due…but it means that I don’t think they are enough.
Our students deserve to access all of themselves when they are in school, not just proportionally 13%, which is the proportion of the size of the head to the rest of the body. I challenge all educators to include embodied learning in their teaching methods. You are able to do it – unless you have amputated your head from your body – and I can see that you haven’t – because you have access to all of the learning tools that you have gathered from the Piagetian Pyramid, too!