Education Commons^™

Becoming A Badass: Developing Positive Embodiment In Women, Nicole O'Connor

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Becoming a Badass: Developing Positive in Embodiment in Women Nicole O’Connor Abstract Almost everyone hates their bodies (normative discontent), but women and girls are most likely to engage in extreme behaviors to adjust their appearance. The United States’ history as a heteronormative, white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society contributes to myths about weight and health leading to anti-fat bias and harm on fat bodies. A focus on body image has limited the scope of research and Niva Piran’s Developmental Theory of Embodiment offers an alternative framework for healing normative discontent. As a woman living in a large body, the author interviewed …

Peeling Away The Taken-For-Grantedness Of Research Subjectivities: Orienting To The Phenomenological, Melissa Freeman, E. Anthony Muhammad

Department of Curriculum, Foundations, & Reading Faculty Publications

Qualitative research is a multidisciplinary field of practice that acknowledges and values the situatedness and subjectivities of the researcher. Therefore, reflexively accounting for one’s subjectivities is a crucial part of a research report. Less discussed is how subjective understandings are historically, culturally, and socially mediated, often challenging researchers’ abilities to orient themselves critically to this self-reflective undertaking. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach investigating how phenomena such as subjectivity are constituted in experience. This makes phenomenology an essential resource for understanding how complex subjective responses manifest differently depending on one’s orientation to the situation. This paper aims to familiarize qualitative research …

Peeling Away The Taken-For-Grantedness Of Research Subjectivities: Orienting To The Phenomenological, Melissa Freeman, E. Anthony Muhammad

The Qualitative Report

Qualitative research is a multidisciplinary field of practice that acknowledges and values the situatedness and subjectivities of the researcher. Therefore, reflexively accounting for one’s subjectivities is a crucial part of a research report. Less discussed is how subjective understandings are historically, culturally, and socially mediated, often challenging researchers’ abilities to orient themselves critically to this self-reflective undertaking. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach investigating how phenomena such as subjectivity are constituted in experience. This makes phenomenology an essential resource for understanding how complex subjective responses manifest differently depending on one’s orientation to the situation. This paper aims to familiarize qualitative research …

A Qualitative Case Study Of The Role Of Reflective Practices In Pre-Service Dance Teachers' Development Of Pedagogical Content Knowledge And Critical Consciousness, Josey Marie Pickett

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative case study investigates the ways stakeholders in a senior/seminar teaching practicum construct and engage in reflection. It also explores the ways these modes of reflection intersect with pre-service dance teachersâ?? development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and critical consciousness (CC). Specifically, the study contributes to the minimal amount of literature on the use of reflective practices in dance teacher education by using the theoretical framework of reflection-in-action and embodiment to bring greater attention to the informal, social, dialogical, and embodied dimensions of teaching and learning. Themes identified related to pre-service dance teachersâ?? development of PCK and CC in …

Incarcerated Bodies – Embodied Autoethnography In Prison, Shulamit Kitzis‬‎

The Qualitative Report

Prison is a study field in which everyone – inmates, guards, and prison researchers – experiences powerful sensory stimuli comprised of sounds, sights, and smells in a crowded, closed space. Yet traditional academic research has socialized researchers to “wash away” their physical and emotional feelings for fear they would jeopardize the scientific nature and validity of their studies. Nevertheless, at times in a prison setting, the researchers’ bodies are the only tool that enables them to document what goes on; so much so that ignoring their bodies and emotions leads to a loss of valuable information. Using embodied autoethnography (EA), …

Becoming An Artist: Embodying Emergent Art Making Practices, Kate L. Wurtzel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Absract: Written in layers, this creative essay invites the reader to consider the relationship between one’s own becoming and emergent practices in the teaching and making of art. Weaving between a discussion on the theoretical concept of becoming and emergence, along with a personal narrative presented with images, the author tries to demonstrate what emergence might feel like in the body while creating alongside-and-with her own child. From points of disruption to points of harmonizing with material and material bodies, this essay examines emergence through the lens of an embodied relationality and offers up potential ways to experience such practices.

An Educator’S Reflection On The Importance Of Embodiment, Imagination, And Liberation, Ashley N. Gibson

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

This reflection piece offers an interpretation of the years 2020-2021, through the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial awakenings in the US. Writing at the intersections of race, gender, and religion, this piece is part essay, part spoken word, and part treatise. The ultimate call to action is threefold; we must lean into embodiment as a habit for living, use our imaginations, and seek liberation for ourselves and one another if we are to hope for a better future. While many aspects of life now seem bleak, there is hope if we consider these three principles for …

(Re)Engaging The Body In Being & Becoming Teachers Of Writers, Sarah J. Donovan

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article offers a framework by which writing teacher educators can offer secondary preservice teachers a way to engage lived writing histories with pedagogical content knowledge of writing (PCKW) through embodied practices. Building on antiracist creative writing scholarship and genre theory, two practices from a semester-long course (Teaching Writers) are offered that acknowledge the still-evolving implications of writing education during the pandemic on preservice teachers’ writing development and the writing development of high school students, some of whom spent the past three years only writing physically isolated. The author offers initial observations about the ways she sees embodied PCKW as …

New Ways Of Being And Knowing: Women Ph.D. Students Exploring Embodiment Through Feminist Phenomenological Photovoice, Anna Fox Reilly

Doctoral Dissertations

Being a Ph.D. student is a privilege in many ways, and it is not easy. Mind-body dualist patterns of thought and behavior within academia ignore the embodied experiences of being a woman Ph.D. student. Mental health, sexual harassment, family planning, and social relationships are among the challenges that women are often expected to handle on their own or are ignored altogether. With 20 women Ph.D. student participants, this feminist phenomenological photovoice project answers the questions: For those who self-identify as women, what is the essence of the embodied Ph.D. experience? To what extent does the experience of being in a …

Drama Therapy Interventions That Support Students With Asd During Covid-19, Olivia Reyes

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that began in December 2019, many people experienced traumatic losses, environmental stressors, and overall daily challenges. One of the populations most at risk during this time were those with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those with mental health illness and developmental differences are experiencing the pandemic in different ways. Individuals with ASD tend to have both developmental differences and mental health challenges that motivate individuals to seek medicinal and therapeutic help, along with other services to support their daily needs. This literature review addresses the negative and positive impacts COVID-19 has had on the …

An Embodied Drama Therapy Approach To Restorative School Practices: A Method, Sarah Harmer

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Restorative School Practices offer schools a circle structure to shift the punitive mindset and power dynamics commonly found in America’s schools, to a model that focuses on relationship, connection, and mutual respect. Drama therapy interventions utilize embodied or active work that engage the entire person. The purpose of this thesis was to create a method to explore the addition of embodied drama therapy techniques to deepen the experience of the restorative school circle process. Three community-building and social emotional learning focused circles, in a second, fourth, and sixth grade class, were compared using the traditional scripts and then the same …

Almost Like Being There: Embodiment, Social Presence, And Engagement Using Telepresence Robots In Blended Courses, Karen G. Hickenbottom

Education Dissertations

As students’ online learning opportunities continue to increase in higher education, students are choosing not to come back to campus in-person for a variety of personal, health, safety, and financial reasons. The growing use of video conferencing technology during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed classes to continue, but students reported a sense of disconnectedness and lack of engagement with their classes. Telepresence robots may be an alternative to video conferencing that can provide learning experiences closer to the in-person experience, which also provides a stronger sense of embodiment, social presence, and engagement in the classroom. This study explored the use of …

Need Finding For An Embodied Coding Platform: Educators’ Practices And Perspectives, Tommy Sharkey, Robert Twomey, Amy Eguchi, Monica Sweet, Ying Chun Wu

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Eight middle- and high-school Computer Science (CS) teachers in San Diego County were interviewed about the major challenges their students commonly encounter in learning computer programming. We identified strategic design opportunities -- that is, challenges and needs that can be addressed in innovative ways through the affordances of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). Thematic Analysis of the interviews yielded six thematic clusters: Tools for Learning, Visualization and Representation, Pedagogical Approaches, Classroom Culture, Motivation, and Community Connections. Within the theme of visualization, focal clusters centered on visualizing problem spaces and using metaphors to explain computational concepts, indicating that an AR/VR coding …

A Question Of Affect: A Queer Reading Of Institutional Nondiscrimination Statements At Texas Public Universities, Sarah Dwyer

English Faculty Publications

Grounded in my embodied experiences as an openly-queer faculty member at a Texas public university and drawing from Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and institutional diversity, I argue that nondiscrimination statements at Texas public universities are affective objects which serve as straightening devices on the queer bodies that they affect, even as they purport to and often do protect them. The goals of my critique are twofold: 1) to support the work of those tasked with writing revisions to these policies by offering a few practical suggestions to allow for greater enforcement of the nondiscrimination practices that these policies espouse; …

Snake Church, Sue Hall Pyke

Animal Studies Journal

This paper imagines Snake Church as a post-secular worship practice that reaches with and beyond the vilified serpent held within the limits of Judeo-Christianity. Snake Church offers a devotional practice enlivening enough to shift the languish of a post-secular world where the reasonableness of Enlightenment has crumbled into numbers like 440ppms and 1.5C. The Western empire has been revealed as stark naked, vulnerable, an old skin that cannot hold my world. Snake Church offers me a sacred opiating hope. As I approach a nascent liturgy, here, in the settler-ravaged Stony Rises, home to the Eastern Maar tiger snake and Eastern …

Incarnational Literacy: Multimodal Explorations Through Virtual Reality And Transformational Autoethnography, Csaba Osvath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Incarnational literacy is a multimodal, maker-centered, arts-based literacy engagement. As an emerging method and theoretical orientation, it incorporates core principles and transformative tools from the domains of creativity, arts-based inquiry, literacy, and spirituality. This experimental, multimodal dissertation chronicles the conception and ongoing development of incarnational literacy through a series of autoethnographic narratives, demonstrating the existential benefits of the integrated practice of artmaking and literacy engagements. This study also highlights the role and function of videogames and virtual reality experiences, revealing the benefits of introspective gameplay as tools of inquiry and meaning-making - further enriching the developing practice and domain of …

Phraseological Anthropocentrism As An Integral Object Of Scientific Study In Linguistics, Iroda Mamarasulova

Mental Enlightenment Scientific-Methodological Journal

This article expands the concept of "anthropocentrism" in linguistics based on the data obtained. The author analyzes the movement of phraseological arrangement of adjective (subjective) lexemes from the point of see of anthropocentrism in terms of dialect and its marvels. Anthropocentrism was shaped as a course that aimed to approach dialect and its marvels from the viewpoint of the human factor. The rise of anthropocentric introduction is related with a deeper study of man in science, the method of portraying etymological movement in conjunction with the identity figure. Anthropocentric consider of dialect implies to appear the mentality of a specific …

Peer Mentorship In An Undergraduate Health Professional Education Program: An Embodied Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study, Helen F. Harrison

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Student peer mentorship, in which a more senior student mentors a more junior student for at least one term, is on the rise in health professions education programs. The research presented adopts an embodied hermeneutic phenomenological approach to investigate student peer mentors’ perceptions of teaching, learning and relationships within peer mentorship interactions in the context of one collaborative nursing program in Ontario, Canada.

This dissertation is composed of five integrated manuscripts, in addition to introductory, body-map findings, and conclusion chapters. The first manuscript describes the theoretical foundations of the doctoral research, drawing on phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of embodiment, intersubjectivity …

The Embodiment Of Discovery: An Adapted Framework For Qualitative Analysis Of Lived Experiences, Helen B. Hernandez, Laurie P. Dringus

The Qualitative Report

We reflect on our process of working with an adapted framework as an effective strategy for analyzing and interpreting the results of our qualitative study on the lived experiences of insulin pump trainers. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was applied as the overarching research methodology and was encapsulated into a framework adapted from Bonello and Meehan (2019) and from Chong (2019). We describe this framework as the “embodiment of discovery” to posit the researcher’s tangible experience of discovering the meaning of data that also brought transparency to the researcher’s process for data analysis and interpretation. We present challenges the doctoral student …

Weather Bodies: Experimenting With Dance Improvisation In Environmental Education In The Early Years, Jo Pollitt, Mindy Blaise, Tonya Rooney

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This paper reports on insights gained from incorporating dance improvisation into a broader early years environmental education ethnographic research project. Findings are reported from a two-day workshop where a dancer was invited to work with young children to attune to the weather through their bodies. In these workshops, the practice of dance improvisation was used as a deliberate interference to disrupt the disconnected and disembodied ways in which weather is often taught to young children. The paper argues that when children attune with weather through the embodied and relational practice of dance improvisation, this challenges the common practice of learning …

Write Yourself Awake: The Double Pursuit Of Mindfulness Meditation And Writing, Alysia M. Hegg

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Contemplative pedagogy involves teaching methods designed to cultivate deepened awareness, concentration, and insight. Contemplative practices work to undo the Cartesian mind–body dualism that says that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. This project focuses on an understanding that our internal world includes communication with one’s self, acts of imagination and visualization, and recall and memory. These internal experiences foster many things, such as compassion and kindness, as well as resilience and sustainability through connection.

“McMindfulness” is a term that refers to when mindfulness is used for self-serving and ego-enhancing purposes. Symptoms of …

The Power Of The Mindbody: Collective Somatic Learning In Community Organizing Groups, Jessica Roadman

Adult Education Research Conference

Embodiment theory posits that learning is not limited to the cognitive functions of the brain, but is the adaptation resulting from multi-system responses to inputs. Somatics offers techniques for increased awareness of response mechanisms, which allows for more controlled self-regulation. This paper explores the benefits of engaging in somatic practicing as a tool for individual grounding catalysed for change in the context of the organizing group the Powerful Moms Who Care. It focuses on the emergence of connected activism through trauma processing, gaining body autonomy, and unconstrained visioning of the future as a result of integrating somatic practices.

Countering The "Phenomenology Of Whiteness": The Nation Of Islam's Phenomenology Of Blackness, E. Anthony Muhammad

Department of Curriculum, Foundations, & Reading Faculty Publications

The Nation of Islam (NOI) has intrigued American society since its inception in 1930. Historically, the religio-nationalist organization has been the object of admiration for its uncanny ability to reform the lives of downtrodden blacks. At the same time, the NOI has garnered condemnation for the controversial, racialized and divisive doctrine that it espouses. This condemnation has led to a dismissal of the NOI’s doctrine as reactionary, bigoted, and fanciful myth-making. In recent decades however, scholars have begun interrogating the doctrine of the NOI. Rather than dismissing it, scholars in various fields have recognized the critical and phenomenological nature of …

The Structure, State, And Stream Of Mary Consciousness In The Quest For The Knowing Body, Christine Dennis

Journal of Conscious Evolution

The science of consciousness has traditionally situated knowledge creation in the mind, and thus, marginalizes the knowing body. Returning to the body requires a decolonization of consciousness in Euro-Western research paradigms and in our bodies. This research is grounded in the spirituality indigenous to my Latinx matrilineage known as Mary consciousness, which frames the body as an epistemic pillar of knowledge creation. A feminist fleshing of the knowing body displaces the centrality of the mind by elevating indigenous ways of knowing. Material feminist worldviews contribute by expressing the degree to which the body has been marginalized as a valid source …

Understanding Heath Viscerally: The Role Of Kinesthetic Experience In Defining Health, Lisa M. Perhamus

Peer Reviewed Articles

This article examines how health promotion is experienced by students, their families, and their teachers. Experiential aspects of health point to the embodied and sensory dynamics of health meaning-making. Findings of this qualitative study indicate that (1) people make sense of health kinesthetically, and (2) when needs are high and resources are low, schoolbased health promotion takes the shape of crisis management. The first finding foregrounds the role of viscerality, illustrating the intimacy of health; the second finding points to the importance of context, demonstrating the contingency of health. Also introduced are the theoretical frame of kinesthetic circuitry (the somatic …

“In Our Very Flesh, (R)Evolution”: An Exploration Of Secondary Education Teachers, Otherness, And Embodiment, Ryan Ambuter

Doctoral Dissertations

In education, the proliferation of a mind/body dualism leaves the pedagogy of the body undertheorized, and its impact on education disregarded. While there is not an absence of research on the body within the field of education, what exists is limited in scope. Little has been written about the connections between teachers’ bodies, pedagogy, and politics at the level of secondary education. This research specifically focuses on teachers who are visibly other, critically conscious of their bodies, and find power in their difference. The purpose of this study is to make meaning of the stories, experiences, and potential of teachers …

Reading Autoethnography: The Impact Of Writing Through The Body, Katarina Tuinamuana, Joanne Yoo

The Qualitative Report

In this paper, we explore alternative ways in which academic writing can have impact, specifically in how it can move from the clearly measured to the deeply felt. We do this by writing a creative nonfiction narrative of our experimentation with autoethnography, detailing our responses to four published autoethnographic articles. We found that reading and engaging with these papers meant that we also had to listen and reconnect to our bodies in ways that initially seemed foreign to us as academics. But we persevered, and this project strengthened our resolve to create time/space to engage writing/research that deeply moves and …

Measuring The Additive Effects Of Multimedia Social Cue Principles On Learners’ Cognitive Load, Emotions, Attitude, And Learning Outcomes, Smruti J. Shah

STEMPS Theses & Dissertations

Multimedia principles are developed and employed to design effective multimedia instructions that foster learning. Specifically, multimedia principles such as personalization, voice, and embodiment principles are developed based on social cues to promote deep learning. Most researchers in the past have investigated the individual effects of these principles on learning. The goal of the present study was to investigate the additive effects of these abovementioned principles on learners’ perceived cognitive load, emotions, attitude, and learning outcomes (i.e. retention and transfer of knowledge). Sixty college students participated in this study. Participants were asked to complete two short instructional modules and a short …

Dancing My Way Through Life; Embodying Cultural Diversity Across Time And Space: An Autoethnography, Nan Zhang, Maria Gindidis, Jane Southcott

The Qualitative Report

In this paper, I research how my background, in different times and within diverse spaces, has led me to exploring and working with specific Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programs. I am forever motivated to engage students learning second languages by providing them with possibilities to find out who they are, to know other ways of being and meet diverse peoples, to maintain languages more effectively and maintain culture(s) more authentically. I employ autoethnography as a method to discover and uncover my personal and interpersonal experiences through the lens of my dance related journeys. The method of Interpretative Phenomenological …

The Manifestation Of Stereotypic Repetitive Behaviors In Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder In School Environments, Heather Anne Kurto

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) affects one in 59 children in the United States (CDC, 2018). ASD is defined as impairments in communication, socialization, and engagement in stereotypic and/or repetitive behaviors (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Much attention is given to the deficits in communication and socialization while stereotypic repetitive behaviors (SRBs) are the focus of interventions to extinguish these behaviors with little understanding of what role these behaviors play for people with ASD. The engagement in and function of SRBs is less prominent in the literature. Stereotypic repetitive behaviors vary in engagement, function and topography. This study examines how SRBs manifest …