Moving Ideas: Multimodality and Embodied Learning in Communities and Schools

Edited by Dr. Mira-Lisa Katz, Peter Lang Publishers, 2013

 

The initial inspiration for Moving Ideas sprang from a desire to bring my parallel lives as dancer and teacher educator into conversation. After decades of fitting dance into the nooks and crannies of my academic career, I wanted to turn my researcher’s gaze to what teaching and learning look and feel like in the context of dance – something I already understood a lot about as a dancer myself. I began taking notes, keeping a dance journal of helpful comments my teachers made, or noting small epiphanies I wanted to recall, and I started videotaping dance classes (with permissions). After amassing dozens of hours of videotape and transcribing numerous interview and focus group sessions, Moving Ideas began to take shape. 

Real World Applications

I have been blessed with a host of highly gifted dance teachers and colleagues since I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. When I began the research in the early 2000s that eventually became Moving Ideas, I hoped to consider how these skilled educators’ embodied approaches to teaching and learning might enhance more traditional classroom settings. How, I wondered, might the bodily learning and the unique social structures and teaching conversations that I observed and experienced daily in dance classes help classroom teachers at all levels, from pre-K to college, re-imagine how learning is organized in ways that could better serve diverse learners’ needs? Each chapter in Moving Ideas answers this question in a slightly different way. 

What is in the book?

In addition to four chapters on teaching and learning dance, the twelve authors in Moving Ideas explore the embodied dimensions of teaching and learning in music, physical theater, women’s self-defense classes, groundwork with horses, massage therapy, and in college writing and teacher education classrooms. The chapters on dance include: “Growth in Motion,” by Mira-Lisa Katz, “‘All the World’s a Stage’: Musings on Teaching Dance to People with Parkinson’s,” by David Leventhal, “36 Jewish Gestures,” by Nina Haft, and “A Trio: Combining Language, Literacy and Movement in Preschool and Kindergarten Community-based Dance Classes,” by Jill Homan Randall. 

One notable aspect of Moving Ideas is that the authors are experienced practitioners of the corporeal forms they so eloquently describe. Because not all practitioners are inclined to write – many are busy doing and teaching their craft – it was important to me as the book’s editor (and co-author in some cases) to create a collection in which these outstanding educators could share their work in their own words. The chapters on the arts are at once imaginative, chock full of teaching savvy, and deeply sensitive to the varied needs of each practitioner’s particular students. There are also many ideas across chapters for how to bring movement – and conversations about embodied learning – into more traditional classroom settings and teacher education programs. 

My interests/passion

As an educator and dancer, I am deeply interested in and committed to the five following ideas: 1) offering teaching artists a space to describe what they do in their own language; 2) understanding learning from both teachers’ and learners’ perspectives [if we, as teachers, take the time to ask, learners will tell us a great deal about their experiences that can, in turn, help us become better teachers]; 3) integrating effective arts- and community-based education practices to augment classroom teaching; 4) blurring the ubiquitous and harmful mind/body split that characterizes not only our educational worlds, but also our other public institutions and discourses; 5) using embodied approaches to democratize learners’ access to whatever information or material is being taught, from physics, photography and basketball to literature, algebra and gardening. 

Who will want to read the book? 

Anyone involved in dance education, embodied learning, language and literacy, arts integration, teacher education, K-16 education, and/or multimodal learning and instruction. 

Might there be a second volume of Moving Ideas? 

Yes. I am in the early stages of developing a new collection, Moving Ideas, Volume 2, which will focus on teachers and teaching artists in both the visual or performing arts, dance, somatics or some combination of these. Have an idea? Please get in touch! 

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Dr. Mira-Lisa Katz (dancer/choreographer/researcher/writer/editor) is a member of SoCo Dance Theater and is currently pursuing an MFA in Dance/Creative Practice at Saint Mary’s College of California. In addition to nearly four decades in dance, Mira earned a Ph.D. in Education in Language, Literacy and Culture from UC Berkeley in 1999, and has been a Professor in the English Department at Sonoma State University since 2002. She teaches and writes about dance, literacy/reading, teacher education, college readiness, multimodality, language learning, and applied linguistics. Her book, Moving Ideas, can be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/Moving-Ideas-Multimodality-Communities-Epistemologies/dp/1433122073  

It is also available as an E-text: http://www.peterlang.com/kataloge/Kortext_2015/E-2015/files/assets/basic-html/page7.html 

Mira’s Sonoma State University profile: http://www.sonoma.edu/english/people/mira-lisa-katz.html 

Her SoCo Dance Theater profile: http://www.socodancetheater.org/who/mira 

Mira can be reached via email at dancingwisdom33@gmail.com or katzm@sonoma.edu 

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