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A rich and honest conversation about professors' lives and the absurdity of trying to separate the personal from the professional.
These highly personal essays from a range of academic settings explore the palpable moments of discomfort, disempowerment, and/or enlightenment that emerge when we discard the fiction that the teacher has no body. Visible and/or invisible, the body can transform both the teacher's experience and classroom dynamics. When students think the teacher's body is clearly marked by ethnicity, race, disability, size, gender, sexuality, illness, age, pregnancy, class, linguistic and geographic origins, or some combination of these, both the mode and the content of education can change. Other, less visible aspects of a teacher's body, such as depression or a history of sexual assault, can have an equally powerful impact on how we teach and learn. The collection anatomizes these moments of embodied pedagogy as unexpected teaching opportunities and examines their apparent impact on teacher-student educational dynamics of power, authority, desire, friendship, open-mindedness, and resistance.
“The Teacher’s Body enriches the ongoing conversation about best practices in teaching and learning by utilizing critical body theory to analyze the role that teachers’ bodies play in shaping implicit and explicit learning objectives.” — Teaching, Theology & Religion
"The Teacher's Body is an insightful and interesting read. It is particularly useful for new teachers entering the classroom for the first time and others interested in the practicalities of pedagogy." — Association for Feminist Anthropology
"...I...celebrat[e] a curriculum at every level of education that acknowledges the existential realities of its teachers and students. These teachers make themselves present so that their students may be present as well, and in that presence integrate their anxious, sweaty, sublime ideas and feelings with the stuff of texts and theories." — from the Afterword by Madeleine R. Grumet
"This book brings up issues that have been generally off limits in discussions of pedagogy, and this should help push the field into a more overt grappling with these concerns. A substantial contribution to our comprehension of the relationship between embodiment and pedagogical theory." — David Mitchell, University of Illinois at Chicago
Contributors include Jonathan Alexander, Simone A. James Alexander, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Michelle Cox, Brenda Daly, Cortney Davis, Carolyn DiPalma, Betty Smith Franklin, Diane P. Freedman, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Amy Spangler Gerald, Allison Giffen, Madeleine R. Grumet, Diane Price Herndl, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Petra Kuppers, Rod Michalko, Debra A. Moddelmog, Ray Pence, Richard Radtke with James Skouge, Scott Andrew Smith, Katherine E. Tirabassi, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, and Pam Whitfield.
Diane P. Freedman is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and the author or editor of several books, including most recently Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Martha Stoddard Holmes is Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University at San Marcos and the author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture.
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