Moving Ideas: Multimodality and Embodied Learning in Communities and Schools ed. by M.L. Katz (review)

This collection of essays on embodiment in learning is a wonderful addition to the work, in the last few decades, on embodied ways of knowing. Moving ideas: Multimodality and Embodied Learning in Communities and Schools, edited by Mira-Lisa Katz, is a diverse anthology of different perspectives from a variety of teaching communities, which addresses both the theory and practice of integrating embodied and multi-modal ways of learning. Its strength is its inclusion of a diverse collection of educators, practitioners, and scholars, whose views are informed by neuroscience, the performance arts, literary scholarship, and gesture theory. It is an important contribution to the work on embodiment and learning that builds, especially, on other work also published by Peter Lang; however, there are both presences and absences that make this book unique.

The research on embodiment has made significant headway (or I should say bodyway) over the last two decades, in the fields of curriculum theory, arts-based research, and somatics. But the contribution of this research to the discourse of embodied ways of knowing, teaching, living, being, and writing is seldom mentioned outside these fields. The problem that different parts of the academy ignore each other is as significant as the ever-shifting oppositions that have constructed and reconstructed the relations among body, intellect, and emotion, over the years. An understanding of embodiment that recognizes the many fields to which the body is of value is needed in the face of dominant paradigms where the head often is taken to be superior to the body. What this book truly brings is the added insight that embodiment is important to a multiplicity of ways of learning and teaching. Where other scholarship addressing embodied ways of knowing has attended more closely to ways of writing through the body or to the visceral and poetic expression of language, Moving Ideas is a big idea book, tracing the interconnections of work in many disciplines.

The 12 chapters, from contributors notable for their difference from one another, explore the scholarship of embodiment in a variety of semiotic modes and discuss its impact on learning. The importance, for audiences in the fields mentioned earlier, of a perspective that addresses the relationship between cognition, on the one hand, and emotion, biology, culture, and the body, on the other, and that highlights multi-modality, cannot be over-emphasized; and, the different chapters present a thoughtful and engaged exploration of the connections between body and mind.

Yet, it needs to be noted that the language of the mind still has primacy in the way these connections are articulated. Thus, while the book may convince scholars from fields that rely on data, the messy, visceral, sensual body is absent from the language that forms the text.

What Moving Ideas does offer is a descriptive analysis of ways of interconnecting body and mind, while examining the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of educational practice. Its value lies, in part, in its exposition of the diversity of ways in which corporeal literacies can be put into practice – from making grammar relevant, to creative dance, to self-defence, to using gesture as a teaching tool, to integrating dance into the treatment of those who have Parkinson’s disease. The contributors are leaders in their fields who speak with eloquence on integrating theory and practice, and the variousness of their interests adds to the book’s complexity. The depth and breadth of the knowledge the editors bring to bear is tremendous, and readers are invited to share the fruits of long years of expertise. Moving Ideas is a significant contribution to the work on embodiment and will be of interest to scholars working in many fields. It truly will move ideas into new spaces, give them flesh, and make them breathe as it returns them to their place of origin in the body.