From the Teaching Newsletter (Chronicle of Higher Education)
August 18, 2022
Let’s Move
Susan Hrach has long enjoyed offering students a variety of activities in class and encouraging them to move around the room. Those practices made class interesting and fun. It was only when she was researching her recent book, Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning, that she really thought about why those strategies are effective, she told me in a recent interview. Our brains respond to novelty and social cues; our blood circulation keeps us alert. As Hrach, director of the faculty center and a professor of English at Columbus State University, in Georgia, puts it in her book, “knowledge is constructed through embodied experience.”
As Hrach has shared in this newsletter before, the pandemic’s emergency remote instruction made that mind-body connection more salient for many professors. How might they put it into practice in this new semester?
Hrach says it’s helpful to scope out the space where you’ll be teaching before class begins. “Get familiar with your space,” she says, “and what options are open to you.” Many classrooms are designed for the kind of passive listening Hrach’s work discourages. Lots of instructors have made a habit of pushing against this — one common practice is to move the chairs into a circle in a smaller room. Another idea, Hrach says, is to request oversize sticky notes to use in place of whiteboards, if a room isn’t already equipped with them.
Hrach then asks herself before each class period: “How could we encounter this material in a way that would make us get up and move?” That helps spark the variety of classroom experiences she knows promotes learning.
This doesn’t have to be elaborate. Students can move to different stations, do a classroom gallery walk, or even just get up and take their handout to a group across the room instead of passing it around. Simply moving about the room helps students feel as if they belong there, Hrach says, and helps them feel connected to their classmates.
It’s also important, Hrach notes, to explicitly tell students that you’ll be expecting them to move around — and why. The idea that a college class means sitting down and listening to a lecture is deeply ingrained. Students might resist doing something different, and offering them an evidence-based explanation would go a long way.
“It might be a pleasurable experience for you to sit there and let my words wash over you,” Hrach says. But actually learning the material takes effort — the student’s effort. It’s better to do some of that work in class time, she adds, than to struggle through it alone afterward.
There are so many forms that moving around during a class might take. To help professors think through those options, Hrach will be working on an embodied-learning tool kit, one of the projects she’s undertaking during a Fulbright research year at Carleton University, in Canada. She welcomes questions and ideas from our readers: You can write to her at [email protected].
