The body doesn’t lie: yoga and embodiment in the higher education classroom

Abstract

Awareness of and response to embodiment as a foundational element of teaching and learning is increasingly lost in the higher education classroom. The widespread shift to online learning prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic only brought this reality into high relief. However, in this conceptual article, we reflect on teaching and learning as inherently embodied processes and link this reality to the teaching skills of presence and observation. As yoga teachers and university professors, our physical practices of teaching yoga and our own scholarly disciplines led us to consider embodiment awareness in higher education. Our experiences teaching through the COVID-19 pandemic, years after we started to consider this question, led us to consider embodiment in new ways. Here, we draw from cross-disciplinary scholarship and our experiences as yoga teachers to illustrate the importance and potential of recognizing the embodied nature of individuals engaged in the teaching and learning process.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• higher education
• yoga
• teaching and learning

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brandy P. Quinn

Brandy P. Quinn is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. She may be reached at [email protected].

Callie Batts Maddox

Callie Batts Maddox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sport and Leadership Management at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA. She may be reached at [email protected].