Springgay, Stephanie and Freedman, Debra. (2007). Curriculum and the Cultural Body. Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum, Arcadia University

Springgay, Stephanie and Freedman, Debra. (2007). Curriculum and the Cultural Body. NY: Peter Lang. 296 pp.       ISBN 978-0-8204-8686-4 Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum Arcadia University December 19, 2007 Snap this one up before they’re all sold out. Hold it in your hands. Taste it; savor it. Change as it touches you. Unlike so many edited compilations, this one can really be used as an introductory text in educational research and curriculum studies courses. You may even learn a thing or two, if you give yourself the gift of experiencing this book. Embodiment and curriculum has emerged for our field, finally and coherently in this new century, even if Merleau-Ponty and others were deconstructing mind-body dualisms more than 60 years ago. It is mainstream, it seems, to note the place of the body in learning. For example, one can find a host of research studies dating back more than a decade on gesture and learning (Brittan 1996; Field & Olafson 1999; Roth 2001; Cook and Goldin-Meadow 2006), body language and teaching (Daniels, Zemelman & Bizar 1999; Black 1999; Friedman & Gilles 2005; Osborne 1997; Stevenson, Yashin-Shaw & Howard 2007), the situated cognition of teaching and learning (Kirshner & Whitson 1997; Hansman & Wilson 1998; Hedegaard 1998; Moore 1998; Seel 2001; Pitri 2004; Smith & Semin 2007), and the phenomenology of technology (Haraway 1991, 1992; Oberg & McElroy 1994; Plant 1997; Badmington 2001; Oliver & Lalik 2001; Hoogland 2003; Shiling & Mellor 2007). “Body knowledge” as a term is certainly not new (Koren 1994; Elbaz-Luwisch 2004). Indeed, The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing devoted a special issue in 2004 to the theme of “Transgressing the Curricular Body,” edited by Lucy Fabrizio, and including articles by Erin Soros, jan jagodinski, Jackie Seidel, Sharon Rosenberg, Carl Leggo, Mebbie Bell, Brian Hodges, Faith Shields, Peter Taubman, and William Pinar. These other works, however, either perpetuate the false dualisms of mind and body which this new collection avoids, or presume a certain familiarity with the theory that makes them less accessible to newcomers. If there is one theme that this extremely diverse gathering of talented scholars shares, it is an understanding of “body” as meaning, rather than as a container for storing meaning. Each is committed to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” that is, that the body does not and cannot exist independent of the world. The body is always in the world, of the world, with the world, part of the world. “A body” is never taken as material substance; instead, materiality is the intertwining of the body and the world, or enfleshment. We never touch without being touched. The experience of the world, of other bodies, and so on, is part of the enfleshment of our own bodies. In most of the existing literature on gesture, body language, situated cognition, and technology in education, we unfortunately find the Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, self and other, body and world, alive and flourishing. The authors here take a very different position that enunciates a parallel discourse. They do something different from peeling back the layers of skin to reveal ‘true and natural’ insides of teachers, learners, and curriculum goals. The body – whether of a human or of a subject of study – is thought through as a bodied curriculum, an interdisciplinary study of experience. Sadly, one still seems to need to introduce all of the terms of this well-developed phenomenological discourse. In our field, concepts such as enfleshment, inter-embodiment, intercorporeality, even something as innocuous as “cultural body,” are received as exotic and marginal. Hence the authors in this volume each introduce the ideas over and over again. They need to. They cannot assume a minimally educated reader. Rather than seem repetitive, however, this repeated introduction of the ideas serves in this case to be significantly useful as a primer. Each chapter takes such a different stance and works through contexts so different from the others, that the discussion of these ideas rarely gets boring. (Instead, the reader feels smart, understanding and appropriating the ideas by the end of the book. Inter-embodiment, by the way, refers to the experience of being bodied: this experience is always mediated already by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies. Intercorporeality emphasizes the interrogation of difference, a characteristic of the bodied experience that unfolds through the imaginary body that forms and limits how we conceptualize the body in various ways; the imaginary body denotes those ready-made images and symbols through which we make sense of social bodies and which determine their value or status and what will be deemed their appropriate treatment.) While this fundamental critique of a psychologistic view of human experience has been part of the intellectual landscape for more than a century, it serves as a flamboyant challenge to most educational research and practice, which assumes that each actor in the educational encounter is positioned as an isolated individual, and further, that learning is about a collection of minds severed from their bodies. Thus, much of the existent literature on gesture, body language, and situated learning treats the body as a site of investigation, perpetuating the dualisms between mind and body, self and other, teacher and student, and so on, rather than seeking to understand the cultural location and specificity of the body. Likewise, the mainstream discourse renders the body as a stand-alone entity, complete in its duality, a sign of what is written on the body through visual, textual and cultural discourses, in contrast to self-reflexively questioning the isolation of a stand-alone body, or challenging the naturalized, cultural constructions. In mainstream educational theory, bodies are interchangeable – there are universal ‘students,’ ‘teachers,’ ‘curriculum developers,’ etc. The authors in this book work within the alternative tradition where universal identity is subsumed by subjectivity; the body is a signifier of multiplicity existing within a complex web of cultural understandings rather than an immutable signifier of identity. What this enables is the intertwining of what we see explicitly as bodies observing and participating in the world with the less visible and sometimes invisible characteristics of those experiences. Thus, as Yvonne Gaudelius and Charles Garoian write in their chapter, “… the pedagogies of culture and power are not inscribed as curriculum on the body as if it was an empty slate … on the contrary, the body’s biological predisposition is always already implicated in the cultural assumptions that construct it insofar as the body cannot be understood without understanding the cultural conditions with which it is intertwined.”(18) (Furthermore, the historical and social conditions of culture cannot be understood separate and apart from the contingent circumstances of the body.) Knowledge and learning are also transformed in this alternative tradition, from treasures and collectable capital into effective cognitive structures that can only be constituted in and through individual bodies. Knowing becomes something one is rather than something one has. Along these lines, books and curriculum materials do not contain knowledge, but rather evoke, organize, provoke, or perhaps reconfigure knowledge, but only in bodies already capable of reorganizing themselves or repositioning themselves in ways that are consistent with these effects, and only in a world able to produce such bodies. (Equally interesting, of course, is the desire for disembodiment that surfaces in so much of our intellectual work, a form of embodied experience nevertheless.) The book unfolds in four parts: Part I, “Flesh moves: technology and virtual bodies;” Part II, ”Un/Structure: narratives of bodies and schooling;” Part III, “Public spaces: mediating embodied difference across the curriculum; and Part IV, “Intersticial states: performing bodies.” As Madeleine Grumet notes in her introduction, the ordering is not what one would typically expect. Rather than moving from most familiar contexts to more challenging extensions of the topics at hand, the editors begin with an analysis of Gunter von Hagen’s exhibition of plastinated bodies, Bodyworlds, and place the section on technology and virtual bodies before the more pedestrian sections on schooling and curriculum. Grumet “soon discovered that the very defamiliarization achieved by these initial essays is the project of this entire collection and the antidote to the awe and perhaps defensive hypostatization of our early responses to the sight of the body in the room” (xvi). What the careful reader soon finds out, as well, is that the more familiar topics related to schooling are just as deeply informed by these ideas as the earlier chapters with the less obviously curriculum-related titles, so that Grumet’s surprise is redoubled in the experience of reading this book. “Flesh Moves” begins with the chapter by Gaudelius and Garoian, which analyzes the performances of the Australian Stelarc and the Californian La Pocha Nostra collective to develop concepts of embodied pedagogy and curriculum. The chapter does a good job introducing the basic concepts from Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler’s ideas of performance and identity politics, theories of art and performance from Katherine Hayles, Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, Susan Sontag, and Ivan Illich, and applications to thinking of experience as an embodied curriculum. The examples of Stelarc and La Pocha suck the reader right in, and draw out the main themes. Curiously, however, in a chapter on the need for art to avoid representation and interpretation, this one seems to be a counterexample, using the performance art to represent critical concepts of art, technology and the body as a curriculum of experience. Can such representation be avoided? One wonders. The statement from Sontag lingers vividly in my mind: “Interpretations, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is comprised of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article of use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories … To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (“merely”) decorative. Or it may become non-art.” (from Sontag 1966, quoted p.7) Playing with these ideas in my mind, I decided all of the chapters in this book are a clever performances in themselves, avoiding becoming art via representation and interpretation, didactic in its technique, and hence a parody of art as performance. An edited volume is not performance art, and hence cannot void the reduction to use, the telescoping of itself into a mental scheme of categories. I yearn for a collection of performance art rather than a book I can hold in my hand. Or, I ask, what would I experience if this edited anthology were performance art that would be better described as parody, abstract, or merely decorative? Are there other conceptions of “non-art” besides what our culture takes as didactic essays? John Weaver and Tara Britt write on the work of film scholar Vivian Sobchak, and of the bodied experience of film. Debra Freedman, Iris Striedieck and Leonard Shurin explore the bodied experiences of seemingly disembodied on-line learning environments. And Karen Keifer-Boyd interrogates the curriculum of the body via simulation and virtual articulation. Taken together, these three chapters provide a powerful counterpoint to the bodied performance art of Stelarc and La Pocha, working with bodied experiences of bodies apparently disembodied from those experiences through or because of technology. As these authors clearly demonstrate, even so-called technology-mediated experience is richly embodied. Heidegger would be proud that we can see how technologies are ready-to-hand, made part of our being in the world and hence merely transforming our bodied conceptions of that world rather than removing us from that world. Weaver and Britt make this point clearly with Sobchak’s clarification of cinema as transposing our modes of being alive and consciously embodied in our world, our direct experience, without completely transforming those modes of being. Experiencing film is “an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood” (Sobchak 1992, quoted p. 22). They also examine the nature of digital imagery in fostering a post-human experience where one experiences technology as an enhancing or extending tool, the capacity of the body to experience itself as “more than itself” and thus to employ its sensorimotor capabilities to create the unpredictable, experimental and new. Freedman, Streidieck and Shurin provide the strongest case against Luddite worries that technology disembodies. They tell the tale of an on-line university course where bodied experience was central to the unfolding curriculum. The course sought to develop a learning environment reflective of democratic practices, built on trust, inclusiveness, freedom, self-determination, human development, reflection through deliberation and scrutiny, and the consideration of multiple understandings of ideas and experiences. The goals included the experience of a “genuine participation” (49) which moved students to new pedagogical awareness. Moments of stillness allowed for a pedagogical thoughtfulness in this course, a thoughtfulness mindful of the ways that thought and soul become embodied with/in a moment. Further pedagogical attentiveness enabled perception of the ways that stillness causes us to face ourselves. Bodied memories and embodied learning were interwoven through the warp and weave of on-line participation. Meanwhile, Keifer-Boyd’s study of “mutual articulation,” of the body with virtual objects and of the body with simulated environments, points to our cultural moment, where pre-service teachers live in this post-human world but have not had the privilege of a curriculum that helps them to think about its implications for body knowledge. As Sadie Plant (1997) wrote, technology is not a strap-on enhancer of perceptions, nor is it a constraining and isolating device; technology simply changes the bodied experience of humans. As Keifer-Boyd’s students discovered, experimenting with virtual environments helps us to think more reflectively about the nature of this human, embodied experience, just as Sobchak has argued film can do for us if we let it. The possibilities of body-knowledge that might be developed by movement and interaction in simulated and virtual spaces help us as well to consider the role of the interface in the kinds of body knowledge that we live with. Part II of this book, “Un/Structure,” includes contributions by Dalene Swanson on difference and disadvantage, Daniel Barney on a curriculum of art and clothing, and Daniel O’Donoghue on the historical construction of male bodies in boys’ schools in Ireland. Each challenges us to consider the bodies of students and teachers in specific places, and how the location of bodies and the performance of the body is a critical curriculum of a culture. The overt tale of Swanson’s research project is the teaching of mathematics in a South African township school. Her feelings and emotions, and those of the administrator, teachers and students in the school, are the focus of this essay. Her point is that the location of these bodies in this cultural, historical place is critical: experiential, situated, sensory and somaesthetic awareness provide meaning and possibility within sociocultural contexts of teaching and learning, and being in research” (76). Through reflexive narrative that calls upon the social, spiritual, embodied, and emotional domains of experience, misconceptions and prejudices can be analyzed, felt, and innately understood within the terms of a particular set of embodied performances. Unlike the traditional research on situated learning, Swanson’s reflexive narrative allows the body to make visible seemingly incommensurable discourses that collide and confound meanings in situated contexts. Her work makes clear the earlier theoretical points in this book relating performance art with the curricular body: rather than knowledge as representation or interpretation, as things, with the learner as the object of teaching practices, embodied curriculum emphasizes the learner as enunciator of subjectivity. The body is seen here as the site of intentioned and knowledgeable action, which in Swanson’s case offers the opportunity to embrace an understanding of the political and cultural body. Subjectivity in this sense is multiple, fragmented, and situated. It modulates its forms as it is mediated in and across contexts. While Swanson’s primary focus is the processes of research, Barney informs his secondary art classes with these ideas, and O’Donoghue applies the same ideas to the history of masculinity in schools. Barney’s art students were challenged to explore the themes of embodiment and experience via the design of clothing. They were challenged to perform their experiences and commitments through dress, in order to make more explicit how the adornment of the body is critical to everyday experience, but also to help students shift from objects who represent themselves through dress into actors who perform their subjectivities. An essential concept of embodied curriculum revisited in this chapter is the possibility of avoiding the inside-outside dualism so common to mainstream educational discourse. Clothing is an ambiguous demarcation of boundaries: inside and outside of a person, inside and outside of a social group, and so on. Likewise, a body is not a container for the person in the approach that this book takes. Instead, touching is simultaneously being touched; thinking is simultaneously action that sets up social assumptions and ideological perspectives. In the introduction to the book, Springgay and Freedman use Hagen’s Bodyworlds to demonstrate how a common method of investigation, to look inside of something, does not capture knowledge; instead, the knowledge is the experience of confronting the limits of such an investigation for learning about the relationships between inside and outside, among situated contexts and actions, and so on. In the case of clothing, the actual creation of the piece of clothing by a body which becomes marked by the craft of creation, the experience of wearing the clothing, and the performance of someone wearing the clothing are only some examples of the bodied curriculum. Clothing is a component of performance in the historical work of O’Donoghue as well. University students preparing to become primary teachers were routinely judged on their appearance, both sartorial and physical demeanor. A certain set of assumptions about a masculine combination of bodily composure, attitude, dress, and voice constituted a vision of the good teacher, someone who is knowledgeable, able to command respect, and to offer a model of manhood to his students. O’Donoghue analyzes notes from supervisors on how they are grading the teachers in training, and demonstrates the continued construction of a cultural expectation that a teacher perform a particular style of masculinity that many readers will recognize as prevalent beyond the situated context that O’Donoghue studied. Of critical importance is the ways that teaching and knowledge are imbricated with a sense of bodied authority; it is clear here that training for teaching, ostensibly intellectual and disembodied, is actually significantly body knowledge, carrying messages of gender, authority, performativity, and subjectivity. The authors in Part III turn our attention to the curriculum of popular culture and everyday life. Julie Maudlin writes on disability as learned through popular culture; Aisha Durham and Jillian Báez interrogate bodied, specifically gendered and differentiated, enunciations of sexuality; Diane Watt looks at the mass media experience of veiling; Cris Mayo explores the experience of teaching against homophobia without teaching the subject; and Natalie Jolly writes on popular conceptions of the female body and childbirth as articulated and developed in the context of a university course. This third section of the book interrogates the social construction of normalcy and difference in the cultural body. Each of these chapters is a strong contribution to our field, and each deserves a large audience beyond the readers of this book. Maudlin reads a variety of popular film and television texts to locate disability and difference in representations of the body. She argues that isolation and inclusion are transpositions of popular desires for “safe” distancing of our own bodies from difference, constructed in bodied terms. She further notes how this popular curriculum is conservative in character, leading life to “go on” with little change in order not to disrupt normalcy. Durham and Báez make exquisite use of their reading of the Bootylicious phenomenon, brought to the forefront by Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Lopez. This chapter makes clear how the discourse surrounding their bodies, and in particular their booties, is an extension of the overall commodification, paranoia, and policing of the sexuality of women of color. They further ask how these booties represent the national body, in the sense that women represent the additive element as well as the forever-hyphenated ethnicity of Americans that mark them as Other. Media industries use commodified bodies to market difference, since they need to make their products stand out as different. Knowles and Lopez are bodied features of this larger social, cultural, and economic multiplex of connections and combinations. In Watts’ discussion of the media curriculum on Muslims, and in particular the veil, we read echoes of the sartorial and the gendered body, but in this case, the preoccupation with the veil tells us a great deal more about ourselves than about the Other. If we move toward an understanding of ourselves in relation to others, recognizing that no self is possible without an other, in fact that a self does not exist in isolation, then a stereotype based on the others’ bodies becomes more than an instance of power relations; the relationship is also one of desire, in which a sense of “useness” is at stake in how we represent and interact with others. This is for Watts a curricular call: if curriculum provoked readings of self and other that had no closure, open to possibility, then we would not be creating understanding as the wielding of knowledge over others. That is, when we claim to understand another (think of a teacher understanding what a student is thinking, or of a student learning about cultures that are “other” to him or her), we are exercising knowledge over the other. “The other becomes an object of my comprehension.” (160) On the other hand, when we are exposed to the other, we can listen, attend and be surprised, so that the other is affecting us. This model of curriculum has the participants sinking into the lived spaces of difference, where both are present with each other. Such a curriculum is represented in the following chapter by Cris Mayo, who does a delightful calling out of the act of representation itself at the start: after all, in the experience of anti-homophobia education, the representation and confession has been the central crisis of such work, he maintains, brings us back to the central question of how this work can avoid representation and interpretation in the first place. It can’t, says Mayo. Mayo finds solace in a quote from Deborah Britzman: “pedagogical thought must begin to acknowledge that receiving knowledge is a problem for the learner and the teacher, particularly when the knowledge one already possesses or is possessed by works as an entitlement to one’s ignorance or when the knowledge encountered cannot be incorporated because it disrupts how the self might imagine itself and others.” (Britzman 1995, quoted p. 173) I don’t want to give the story away, but when you read this you will see that Mayo uses this idea to move from tales of confession and coming out to tales of accusation and recruitment as pedagogical strategies. Given that a common experience of women is that they have been taught to relate to their own bodies as others, can such accusative and recruitment strategies be useful concepts for a curriculum that centers on childbirth and female bodies? In fact, Jolly finds that university students typically employ a language of choice regarding issues of childbirth and women’s bodies, which enables an avoidance of systematic sociological investigation, and instead removes women’s and babies bodies from culture. She argues that this language of choice prevents students from connecting medicalized birth to larger feminist projects, reconstructing a social curriculum that teachers distrust of women’s bodies. The moral here is that discourses of the female body are negative and distrustful, and undermines women’s body confidence. “Intersticial States,” the fourth and final part of this book, features three contestations of body-self boundaries. The performing body in these chapters is located in performance art. The book ends by examining the construction of embodied identity in both discursive and material senses. Stephanie Springgay writes on body art and intimacy; Barbara Bickel experiments with a montage of curricular inquiries of exile that can be reproduced in this textual and photographic format; and James Sanders finishes off the book with a retrospective on his personal development as a performance artist. Like Watts and Mayo, Springgay is searching for an alternative to curriculum that is based on certainty and familiarity; she wants to nurture a curriculum that is open, responsive, and sensitive, comprised of inter-subjectivities, experiences, and lives. For that sense of intimacy that she wishes to foster, she focuses here on the artistic work of Janine Antoni, and the analogy between Antoni’s body art and art as a metaphor for a reconceptualized curriculum. In body art, most boundaries between self and art are dissolved, in ways that might be analogous to dissolved boundaries between self and knowledge. The key feature of Antoni’s work is intercorporeality, the medium of the art is a site of subjectification where self and other intertwine in an exchange of a mobile and performative process of meaning making. The processes are not static. Bickel turns to trance and ritual as the basis of her work as an artist/researcher/teacher. Trance opens one up to what Bickel considers a rich and provocative dreaming state that allows a person to step outside of the “normal” self; ritual allows someone to move in and out of the trance. Curriculum for Bickel is an invitation. It is an invitation to expanded notions of being, knowing, and doing. She invites sacred awareness into learning environments. Sanders revisits autoethnography as critical curriculum inquiry. He experiences the body as both site and medium through which a broad array of pedagogical possibilities are practiced and presented. “Through shared moving, poetic, and filmic creations we recreate our (self)understandings and (re)position ourselves to encounter out own otherness in and through a cultural bodily (self)recognition that may only fleetingly be known through an aesthetic experience.” (234) Believing or knowing thought the body, “feeling the ever present threat/promise of death,” writes Sanders, illuminates that mysterious absence where all that remains is memory and artifact(s) indefinitely recording an excess(ive) curiosity of isolation. For Sanders, “this continues to be a queer and (dis)comforting journey, one that struggles to acknowledge sexualized differences experienced in shared social and political commitments, estrangement, stigmatization, and yes, pleasure.” (234) Conclusion We’re a far cry from curriculum as a body of knowledge. Yikes, never say that again! Unless you are referring to a common sense notion of curriculum that objectifies knowledge, teachers, learners, curriculum workers, in fact all bodies! By the end of this book our experience of the body and of the curriculum is akin to performance art. It is embodied experience. Embodies experience is curriculum. Technology does not remove experience or embodiment from the encounter. Embodied experience is situated and therefore constitutive of difference and injustice as well as possibility and action. Why performance art? Because it emphasizes an alternative to representation and interpretation as the center of experience. Representation and Interpretation foster objectification of the body as a site, rather than treating the body as a subject, already present and acting in the world. I personally think this is the critical idea to take with you into this book. Many educators and curriculum designers already think about learning as an embodied experience. But they do not necessarily break down the intellectual categories of inside and outside, body and mind, person and other, that are so powerfully assumed in the work featured in the book reviewed here. Instead, such educators and curriculum desigers further construct learning and knowledge as others to the body, and in so doing, perpetuate each individual learner as other to the others in their classroom, indeed alienated from their world. For example, a science educator might create a simulation where students are situated in an imaginary ecosystem and are tricked into engaging in the solution of an ecological mystery (Barab, Zuiker ,Warren, et al. 2007). Much of their design language might be of a situated body in a communal context. But their epistemology is not informed by Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, Jones and Stephenson, or Springgay and Freedman. They remain disappointed in the results of their work, striving to create a new “beta version” of the curriculum that will lead to better performance on tests of learning. Or, a mathematics educator might work to incorporate embodied theories of learning into her work with children learning arithmetic (Murphy 2007). Because her conception of the body is as a tol for conceptual metaphors rather than as an acting subject, she finds the central questions about conceptual metaphor and analogy remain open. In other words, the project of mathematics education research is self-perpetuating as a practice of unsolved questions (Appelbaum 1995) rather than an enunciative engagement with the world; students remain subjects of teaching, unable to become artists of mathematics. Why the chapters on technology and the body? Because technology is so often conceived as prosthesis, expanding perception, or as a tool of disembodiment. It is neither. First of all, strapping on technology does not give someone superpowers to become an enhanced human (Appelbaum 2002; Appelbaum 2007). My one critique of this book is that it too simply embraces Merleau-Ponty and the role of perception as the stuff of human experience. (Gaudelius and Garoian do note the feminist critique; mine is a bit more philosophical.) Is learning nothing more than a perception of something new? Surely we can see that human experience might be better understood in ways different from replacing sight with touch in our model (Appelbaum 2007). Sure, we can see a difference in our model when we realize that touching involves an interconnection, whereas sight is done from a distance. But really, in the end, it’s just a minor shift, And, I would argue, our model for sensory perception is so dominated by sight that we still use sight metaphors to talk about touch or taste or smell, and so on. What if perception is merely a conceptual landscape that we need to break out of in order to creatively explore the curricular body and the body of the curriculum? One might claim I was returning to a disembodied intellectual discourse … I can “see” that one might take the phenomenology of human existence, the enfleshment, to be fundamentally grounded in perception. I am personally not so sure. At any rate, technology might enhance perception but it does not remove the body from the experience of the world. And, finally, why the intersticial body? Why does this book leave us there? Remember that these authors are extending the position of curriculum as artistic practice. Curriculum theory is a performative process, a form of critical pedagogy that engages both the artist and the “engager” in a process of critical citizenship. As I read this, I thought back to the editors; introduction, where they critique Hagen’s Bodyworlds exhibit. This is that traveling exhibit where plastinated bodies are on display. There are many controversies with this exhibit; the editors use it to discuss the ways that the insides of the bodies are used to communicate ideological messages about the outsides, reproducing a discourse of inside and outside. They go on to think through what it would mean to take the phenomenological stance seriously. How would we interrogate the curriculum of the body if we experienced the permeability and mutuality of the inside/outside relationship of the body? Well, I wondered, what if we imagined Bodyworlds to be a parody rather than a mimetic representation? I doubt this was Hagen’s intention, but surely the editors read the exhibit as text in this way? Then in some ways the introduction to this book would be a representation, and not a critique. Instead of an action as artistic practice, this introduction would be a museumification of art! It’s all in the reading, in the presumption of intention, in the placement of the artist as actor in the world, versus the editor as re-presenter of knowledge. As Sontag wrote, parodic mimesis renders the visible invisible and the invisible visible. What if we approached curriculum in this way? We would be performance artists! But watch out. Performance art is not easy nor safe. Stelarc pierces himself with technology, blurring the boundaries of body and world, machine and human. Some would describe Antoni’s body as debased of defaced, as she mops the gallery floor drenched in dye, or pokes her partner’s eye with her tongue. Be ready to feel things, and to realize, as did Swanson, that feelings are indicators that your body is learning about difference and injustice. References Appelbaum, Peter. 1995. Popular culture, educational discourse, and mathematics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Appelbaum, Peter. 2002. Harry Potter's World: Magic, technoculture, and becoming human. In Harry Potter's World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives Elizabeth Heilman (ed). NY: Routledge. Appelbaum, Peter. 2007. Children’s books for grown-up teachers: reading and writing curriculum theory. NY: Routledge. Badmington, Neil. 2001. Pod almighty!; or, humanism, posthumanism, and the strange case of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Textual Practice. 15 (1): 5-22. Barab, Sasha, Zuiker, Steve, Warren, Scott, Hickey, Dan, Ingram-Goble, Adam, Kwon, Eun-Ju, Kouper, Inna, Herring, Susan. 2007. Situationally embodied curriculum: Related formalisms and contexts. Science Education. 91(5): 750-82. Bell, Mebbie. 2004. There’s something about Barbie. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 53-64. Black, Catherine. 1999. Dramatisation et gestuelle: découvrir la culture-cible. Canadian Modern Language Review. 55(4): 548-55. Brittan, David. 1996. Talking hands. Technology Review. 99: 10-12. Britzman, Deborah. 1995. Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. Educational Theory. 45 (2): 151-66. Cook, Susan Wagner; & Goldin-Meadow, Susan. 2006. The role of gesture in learning: Do children use their hands to change their minds? Journal of Cognition and Development 7 (2): 211-232. Daniels, Harvey, Zemelman, Steve, and Bizar, Marilyn. 1999. Whole language works: Sixty years of research. Educational Leadership. 57 (2): 32-7. Elbaz-Luwisch, Freema. 2004. How is education possible when there's a body in the middle of the room? Curriculum Inquiry. 34 (1): 9-27. Fabrizio, Lucy. 2004. Transgressing the curricular body. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 3-7. Field, James, and Olafson, Lori. 1999. Understanding resistance in students at risk. Canadian Journal of Education. 24 (1): 70-5. Friedman, Doron and Gilles, Marco. 2005. Teaching virtual characters how to use body language Source. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 3661: 205-214. Hodges, Brian. 2004. Medical student bodies and the pedagogy of self-reflection, self-assessment, and self-regulation. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 41-51. Kirshner, David, Whitson, James (eds.). 1997. Situated cognition: Social, semiotic, and psychological perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Koren, Bat-Sheva. 1994. A Concept of "Body Knowledge" and an Evolving Model of "Movement Experience": Implications and Application for Curriculum and Teacher Education. American Journal of Dance Therapy. 16 (1):21. Hansman, Catherine, Wilson, Arthur. 1998. Teaching writing in community colleges: A situated view of how adults learn to write in computer-based writing classrooms. Community College Review. 26 (1): 21-42. Haraway, Donna (1991) Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. Haraway, Donna (1992) The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies. London and NY: Routledge. Hedegaard, Mariane. 1998. Situated learning and cognition: Theoretical learning and cognition. Mind, Culture, and Activity. 5 (2): 114-126. Hoogland, Reneé. 2002. Fact and fantasy: the body of desire in the age of posthumanism. Journal of Gender Studies. 11 (3): 213-231. Jagadinski, Jan. 2004. Fallen bodies: On perversion and sex-scandals in school and the academy. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 99-113. Leggo, Carl. 2004. The poet’s corpus: Nine speculations. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 65-85. Murphy, Carol. 2007. The constructive role of the conceptual metaphor in children’s arithmetic: A comparison and contrast of Piagetian and embodied learning perspectives. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal. 22. http://www.people.ex.ac.uk/PErnest/pome22/ Oberg, A., and L. McElroy. 1994. "If a Body Meet a Body...." Curriculum Inquiry. 24 (2):229. Oliver, Kimberly, Lalik, Rosary. 2001. The body as curriculum: learning with adolescent girls. Journal of Curriculum Studies. 33 (3): 303-333. Osborn, Susan. 1997. Teaching: What we can learn from the actor. Learn how certain acting techniques and exercises can improve your posture, body language and speaking voice in the studio or classroom. The American Music Teacher. 46 (6): 26. Moore, Beverly. 1998. Situated cognition versus traditional cognitive theories of learning. Education. 119 (1): 161-71. Pinar, William. 2004. Rocket man. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 7-13. Pitri, Eliza. 2004. Situated learning in a classroom community. Art Education. 57 (6): 6-12. Plant, Sadie. 1997. Zeroes + ones: Digital women and the new technoculture. NY: Doubleday. Rosenberg, Sharon. 2004. Que(e)r(y)ing the teacher's body: Femme corporeality, vulnerability, and play. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 87-96. Roth, Wolff-Michael. 2001. Gestures: Their role in teaching and learning. Review of Educational Research 71 (3): 365-92. Seel, Norbert. 2001. Epistemology, situated cognition, and mental models: 'like a bridge over troubled water'. Instructional Science. 29 (4/5): 403-27. Seidel, Jackie. 2004a. For J., How you taught us. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 97-8. Seidel, Jackie. 2004b. Conversation. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 39. Shields, Faith. 2004. Body psalm (for people with rude diseases). Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 29-38. Shiling, Chris, Mellor, Philip. 2007. Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics. The Sociological Review. 55 (3): 531-549. Smith, Eliot, Semin, Gün. 2007. Situated social cognition. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 16 (3): 132-135. Sobchak, Vivian. 1992. The address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sontag, Susan 1966. Against Interpretation. NY: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Soros, Erin. 2004. Are your eyes neon? Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 115-29. Stevenson, John, Yashin-Shaw, Irena , & Howard, Peter. 2007. Reclaiming bodily dispositions through the humanities: Homeless people learning. Journal of Vocational Education and Training. 59 (4): 419-434. Taubman, Peter. 2004. Reasonable bodies. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 15-28. About the Reviewer Peter Appelbaum is Associate Professor of Education, Coordinator of Mathematics Education and Curriculum Studies Programs, Director-at-Large of General Education, and Director of the Strangely Familiar Music Group at Arcadia University, in Philadelphia, USA. While he wrote this review, he was on sabbatical as a Guest Professor at the Friei Univerität, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Children’s Books for Grown-up Teachers: Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory, and Embracing Mathematics: On Becoming a Teacher and Changing with Mathematics.