Entrance Slip: Embodied Learning

This excerpt is rather inspiring to me, as I am looking for ways to bridge physics and earth science with art as well personally as a teacher. Having been so disinterested in physics in grade school to discovering how it really applied to me in life through cross-curricular studies in university, I very much believe in bridging the gap between my own teachables and other subjects. The idea of using bodily experiences to teach and learn seems at first thought, very reasonable and achievable to a certain extent. On the surface, using movement and other bodily experiences seems, at the very least, more engaging for students than the traditional model of the talking head teacher and students taking notes. There are so many kinds of bodily experiences that can be practiced in the realms of earth science and physics that are helpful for students to understand concepts within those two subjects. Within the subject of earth science, the sensory experiences that come with shaker tables when examining earthquakes, exploring how water affects the Earth's on-land with surface stream modelling boxes, and bodily demonstrations using students to illustrate the way different seismic waves affect the Earth, are just a few examples of how movement can be examine and demonstrated. Physics itself is often generally thought of as the study of movement - by examining movement and how input of forces on objects etc. affect those objects in experiments and demonstrations, students are learning the concepts of physics through inquiry of why objects /particles move or are influenced to move a certain way. Based on the reading, it is rather possible to bridge the gap going both ways with math and art with the embodiment of movement and sensory experiences - it stands to reason that the same pairing can be made with art and other subjects as well, given that purposeful activities are incorporated into lessons. A final thought on the usefulness of gestures in teaching and learning: one of my most memorable high school lessons was on the subject of how atoms can move, via translational, vibrational, etc. movement. This memory and the associated concepts has never left me, because my chemistry teacher used gestures and her body to demonstrate all of the ways an atom could move, with her finishing on telling us that in her younger days, she would demonstrate rotational movement by means of a cartwheel. Even without her performing the cartwheel, this lesson has always remained distinctly fixed in my mind and I have yet to have trouble recalling how atoms can move based on her embodiment of atom movement! Sorry about getting this in a bit late, Susan - its been a rather busy few days for me!