Literacies of the Body: Opening the Doors of the Mind Through Embodied Learning and Imaginative Processes

Introduction: Defining Directions

The world is changing as this chapter is written. It will have changed further by the time it has been published and read. Educators no longer talk of literacy but of literacies, literacies which are multimodal (combining two or more modes of meaning, e.g. writing and image), and at times subject-specific (Hodge & Kress, 1991; Meyer, Coyle, Halbach, Schuck, & Ting, 2015; Ting & Serrano, 2018), cultural literacies, intercultural literacies (Hirsch, Kett, & Trefill, 1988; Heyward, 2002) and even sensory literacies (Mills, Unsworth, & Exley, 2018). For the classrooms of today and those of tomorrow are multicultural, multilingual and multimodal, whether educators are prepared for them or not. And many will agree they are not. Education is at a transitional point where pedagogies need to address the challenges of the complex, diverse and progressively interconnected world outside their walls.

Today’s adults need soft skills just as much as hard skills (Robles, 2012; Singh, 2018) and technological skills as well as writing skills (Maceli & Burke, 2016). Competence in more than one language is an essential rather than an additional requirement (Tinsley & Board, 2017), requiring emotional intelligence just as much as cognitive intelligence (Aki, 2006). How can educators prepare today’s students for a future that is impossible to imagine? How can educational leaders ensure that their staff are interculturally competent... in both the staff room and classroom? How can each and every student become competent in different literacies in bilingual classrooms?

This chapter will begin to answer these questions by advocating the return of the arts and embodied learning to classrooms. Research presented suggests that embodied learning through educational drama, sociodrama and creative, imaginative and culturally responsive pedagogies can directly address these challenges by stimulating cognitive, social and emotional behavioural development. Put simply, when students act ‘as if’ in an imaginary world in order to access the real world (Courtney, 1990) visualising the world through others’ eyes, whilst bringing to that vision their own lived experiences and hybrid identities, moving between the fictional and the real, making time for both active and reflective learning, their embodied experiences reach a new level (Mayhew & DeLuca Fernández, 2007; Lee, Williams, & Kilaberia, 2012). When these experiences become literacies – multimodal texts in a foreign language – new dimensions of learning and competency are reached.

In addition, the chapter will open up wider debate as to how, by promoting empathy, by sensing and trying to understand the feelings, emotions and thoughts of others, knowledge of oneself occurs and intercultural competence is fostered. It will propose that with proper attention paid to empathy that motivation, self-esteem, trust and the willingness to take risks will follow; stimulating the type of linguistic, metalinguistic and cognitive understanding that comes with the flexibility of considering various approaches and honest self-expression.

In the very nature of the diversity of modern educational establishments, the chapter will consider interdisciplinary academic research from the fields of education, psychology, medicine, image processing and computer vision. The author is aware that different academic and professional fields have their own perspectives, values, assumptions, focal points and concepts and that in summarising there is a risk of oversimplifying. However, cross-disciplinary research brings exciting new insights. Take the example of how knowledge in neuroscience helps educators devise pedagogies to help students understand difficult scientific texts (Ting & Serrano, 2018).