Teaching as bodily enactment: relational formations of touch and movement

ABSTRACT

This paper explores a common representational form of teaching that has reappeared in current educational theory: the figure of the teacher as one who points. Informed by Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics I outline how the form of pointing is actually a relational formation that invites students into certain relationships with objects of study as well as with teachers themselves. Focusing on relational encounters as central to teaching, I argue in the second part of the paper that movement and the dynamics of touch are key to reframing teaching as bodily enactment. Drawing on the work of Erin Manning, I explore how movement and touch are generative of educational relations and how they enable students and teacher to co-create educational spaces together. Teaching as bodily enactment enables us to understand how physical bodies matter in and to our educational practices as well as our representations of them.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching
• aesthetics
• bodies
• relations
• movement
• touch
• Bourriaud
• Manning
• encounter
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In on-line photographs of conventional western classrooms, students are frequently portrayed as either sitting still or sitting with their arms raised – a paradoxical form whose skyward trajectory belies their earthly presence in the room. Students seem to signal through such a gesture their anticipation of acceding to something the teacher already has access to.

2 This is not to suggest that other mathematical models cannot engage with the body more dynamically. See for instance, the discussion in de Freitas and Sinclair (2013) which suggest the ways mathematical concepts and bodies are entangled. I wish to thank one of the reviewers of this paper for pointing this out to me.

3 To be clear, I am not speaking here of formation in the sense of socialisation, of someone becoming ‘formed’ by and through social norms. Rather, I am referring to the processes and relations that constitute things, objects, and others, including ourselves. See Bourriaud’s (2002) discussion of form, drawing on Epicurus and Lucretius (p. 19).

4 Specifically, they conceive of these practices within notions of suspension and profanation (Masschelein & Simons, 2013, pp. 31–41), and I will be discussing suspension in more detail below. Also, my focus will be primarily on the practice of attention since teaching is closely bound up with directing it in Masschelein and Simons’s view.

5 See my discussion in Todd (2021).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.