Mediated Bodies and Learning Space

Abstract

Heather Greenhalgh-Spencer’s essay, “Re-thinking Bodies in the Traditional Classroom,” applies Michel Foucault’s framework of discipline and surveillance to analyze contemporary debates regarding online education. The essay suggests the need “to take a closer look at the ways bodies are actually used/produced in schooling spaces” (emphases added). To do so, Greenhalgh-Spencer interrogates “four practices/objects of the traditional classroom: the gaze, the chair, the desk, and the ability to move and touch” (emphasis added). Moreover, the author aims to dispel the myth that traditional classrooms are “automatically more humanizing” (emphasis added) than online schooling spaces and the assumption that physical bodies together in social space necessarily lead to individual and collective educational benefits. Indeed, Greenhalgh-Spencer employs insights from diverse theoretical traditions (post-structural history, visual culture, and somatics) to illustrate how classrooms deploy disciplinary techniques of normalization in everything from attention, bodily movement within the room, and physical comportment. While the effects of these techniques may or may not have educational benefits, they are nonetheless quite “harmful” (at least physically) to the (student) bodies that must conform to these regulatory practices. The author concludes that these harmful effects of the “traditional classroom” threaten the potential for “humanizing” spaces of education. In contrast, then, she offers an (admittedly) brief speculative discussion of the potential for online schooling to provide students opportunities for embodied learning through the “freedom” and “choice” of movement. This form of embodied learning, she argues, may ultimately allow for a type of schooling that is “more empowering.”