Pedagogy and Human Movement: Theory, Practice, Research (review)

As interdisciplinarity’s favor within the academy grows, it becomes increasingly necessary for university educators to develop their abilities to communicate with their colleagues in other fields. Richard Tinning’s Pedagogy and Human Movement offers theatre and dance educators a glimpse into the ways that their peers in human movement studies (HMS) have to date approached education by, for, and about the body. Given the centrality of bodies to the teaching and theorization of performance practice, this exogenous perspective sets the stage for a rich interdisciplinary conversation about the epistemological assumptions that underlie teaching and learning in physical-training situations.

Tinning begins by identifying a tendency within the scholarship on teaching and learning (SOTL) to use the term “pedagogy” synonymously with instructional methods, teaching style, curricular design, and educational outcomes. Arguing for a less compartmentalized understanding, he suggests that pedagogy be considered as “a purposeful encounter between teacher, learner, and subject matter [in which] the purpose is to (re)produce knowledge.” This framework allows him to explore the complex interplay that occurs between what teachers want students to know, and what students enter a learning environment already knowing or valuing. Acknowledging the messiness of this exchange, he introduces the idea of pedagogical work to describe the consequences of pedagogy, both intentional and unintentional. Tinning uses the remainder of the book to examine the pedagogical work produced in HMS relative to physical activity, bodies, and health.

It is a wide net that Tinning casts. Among the many topics he considers are the coaching of elite athletes, the politics of body measurement, and the disciplinary attributes of early twentieth-century exercise equipment. While always interesting, the relevance of these subjects to theatre and dance pedagogy is not always intuitive. From an interdisciplinary perspective, his work is most provocative when it highlights disciplinary assumptions about the nature and desired function of the body that emerge in pedagogical practice. In the third section of the book, for example, Tinning argues that HMS educators frequently uncritically reproduce methods of instruction that they have inherited from their forebears. This results, he notes, in a disproportionate focus on the body as a “biophysical thing” that obscures the role culture plays in shaping the body both literally and metaphorically. Seeking to redress this imbalance, he advocates adopting what he calls a “modest critical pedagogy.” An orienting way of thinking rather than a prescriptive strategy of doing, this pedagogical approach would engage prospective teachers in reflection on their beliefs and dispositions. Challenging the dominant model of the body that circulates in HMS, he suggests, will require an approach that marries personal anecdote and marginalized perspectives with more traditional scientific articulations of the body.

Tinning’s thoughtful interrogation of pedagogy within his field prompts the outside reader to ask: In what ways do we as theatre and dance educators reproduce the methods by which we were taught? What are the unacknowledged assumptions of these methods, and what bodily possibilities do we erase for our students by perpetuating them? A similar generative correspondence might also be found in Tinning’s discussion of how “problems” like obesity are treated in the HMS classroom. He notes that in recontextualizing research findings for instructional purposes, ambiguity and disagreements are smoothed over, making “science seem more certain than it actually is” (166). Is there an analog in our field? In privileging clarity and accessibility, what debates do we keep from our students, and what might they gain from encountering this kind of epistemological uncertainty?

Pedagogy and Human Movement is commendable in its focus on diversity. Tinning repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to the multiplicity of ways that bodies and their behaviors can be understood, and gestures to the manifold effects these framings can have on student learning. Unfortunately, in seeking to undermine dominant Western models of thinking about bodies, he defaults to an overly simplistic juxtaposition of Western and Eastern approaches to the body (in chapter 8) that problematically conflates the West with Aristotle and...