Stories of School Yoga: Narratives from the Field ed. by Andrea M. Hyde and Janet D. Johnson (review)

This book investigates the incorporation of yoga programs into K-12 public schools. More specifically, the editors contribute a set of qualitative data about school yoga programs to an academic field that they contend is dominated almost exclusively by quantitative studies. In so doing, their larger purpose is two-fold. First, following a feministrelational approach (25), they seek to provide a space for school yoga teachers themselves to contribute to the academic conversation on school yoga. Because of this, all of the essays in this volume are written by the yoga teachers who design, implement, and run yoga programs in and for K-12 public schools. Second, the editors aim to highlight for the reader not only how beneficial these yoga programs are for K-12 students, but also just how logistically complex it is to get the programs up and running in public schools, despite their success with students. For this reason, too, the editors chose to give space to the yoga teachers' own voices: not only because their stories provide the closest personal accounts, but also because their struggles—and the lessons they learned from them—can inspire ways forward for other aspiring public school yoga teachers. In this regard, the book's aim is both scholarly and instructional, as the editors themselves state: "this book," they write, "could be seen as a hybrid of research, first-person narrative, and howto advice" (32).

The book offers a unique structure in order to accomplish its goals. The majority of the book comprises nine substantive chapters, all of which are first-person accounts written by yoga teachers themselves. Although these chapters are broken into three sections—Yogis on School Staff, National Programs, and Working with Marginalized Populations—the accounts presented read in similar ways. For example, each is written by a woman, and each tells the story of how she—after having a life epiphany of sorts upon beginning a yoga practice—endeavored to incorporate yoga practices into the public school system for the betterment of over-taxed and over-anxious students. One of the strengths of these chapters is the nuanced picture that each paints about the inner working of the public education system in the contemporary United States, particularly in terms of the mental health of the students (and teachers) who are constantly stressed and bewildered by a system that attempts to prepare them for an (over) abundance of tests. Further, from the accounts presented in this book, it does seem that school yoga reduces the anxiety levels of both students and teachers alike, and that it does so across different regions, class types, and classroom settings.

Besides the yoga teachers' own accounts, Stories of School Yoga is framed with an Introduction, two methodological chapters, and a conclusion—each of which is written by the book's editors. Additionally, all of the substantive chapters conclude with an editor's "coda," or set of remarks that summarizes the teachers' personal accounts in order to situate them in light of broader contexts and analyses.

In the introductory chapters, the editors contextualize the book in broader academic debates, such as the scholarly criticism that such programs participate in the colonization and whitewashing of yoga (12). I found myself wishing that these debates were discussed in more depth and detail and with more critical analysis, although I understand that the editorial ambition was to give as much space as possible to the yoga teachers' own accounts.

I felt the same way as I read the codas, which I found to be, on the whole, critically thin. For example, in each of the substantive chapters, the yoga teachers discuss the struggles that they face in attempting to successfully build and run yoga programs in public schools. These struggles include various forms of opposition, many of which derive from parental, administrative and other parties' fears that yoga is religious...