Springgay, Stephanie. (2008). Body Knowledge and Curriculum: Pedagogies of Touch in Youth and Visual Culture. Reviewed by Stephanie Baer, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Springgay, Stephanie. (2008). Body Knowledge and Curriculum: Pedagogies of Touch in Youth and Visual Culture. NY: Peter Lang Pp. 144         ISBN 978-1433102813 Reviewed by Stephanie Baer University of Nebraska-Lincoln March 7, 2009 Imagine walking slowly along a beach with a cool, foggy breeze softly blowing against you. You weave in-between rocks, noticing their jagged edges and worn colors as the water softly reaches out to them with the tide. You pull a long red thread from your pocket and drag it along the side of a rock until it catches. You continue to weave in, through, and among the forms and your thread grows longer and more tangled with each step. With every movement, your actions become part of the history of the rock and life of the interwoven thread. Stephanie Springgay’s book, Body Knowledge and Curriculum, gives readers access to such “red threads of entanglement”, weaving in, through, and among ideas, embracing the lived engagement of sense making. The ideas of presence, connection, imagery, and knowledge unfold and their tangled relationship with pedagogy emerges in a welcomed entanglement. Springgay is currently at Pennsylvania State University working in Art Education and Women’s Studies. Her interest in body knowledge and its connections to curriculum has found form in her installations and video-based art alongside her work with a/r/tography. The work of a/r/tography involves the interweaving of the roles of artist, researcher, and teacher, inviting their interplay through lived inquiry. Springgay’s work fleshes out this interplay, delving into the textured layers of inquiry, embodying the lived experience of the artist/researcher/teacher. The book documents a particular project involving a high school art class in an alternative secondary school in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In Springgay’s words, her pedagogical philosophy embraces “the possibilities of thinking through the body and art as interrogation” (p. 16). Such embracing involves Springgay designing and implementing a “body curriculum” featuring three themes for exploration, a) body surfaces; b) body encounters; and, c) body sites. All three themes reverberate throughout the narratives of experience included within the book. Springgay relays her investment in the life of the art classroom, the students, and the teacher during her year there. This book takes instances from that experience and uses them to reveal a bodied curriculum and study its growing importance in the school setting. Springgay narrates her encounters at the school while using pseudonyms and being careful to portray the students and school honestly and attentively. Springgay is also considerate of the reader throughout the book as she describes participants’ experiences within an unfamiliar language. It is easy for researchers to get caught within their own created language as they navigate through their work, forgetting the reader and a wider audience. Springgay explains her use of words and the reasoning she finds as she makes her way to a clearer, yet deeper understanding of embodied curriculum and learning through touch. Often, Springgay uses a “/” to communicate the depth and complexity encountered. She states, “I use the slash to accentuate the activity of movement and the in-between. Un/folding with the slash allows the term to reverberate, to flicker, and to be in a state of constant movement” (p. 6). In her discussion of a/r/tography, she describes the slash as a “place of negotiation…a place to move…a position from which to create a rupture” (p. 37). She goes on to discuss her encouragement of the students to take on this understanding and use it as they negotiate their own movement of thinking. The book is divided into five main sections entitled, 1) Sleeping with Cake and Other Touchable Encounters: Feminist Theories of Touch and Inter-embodiment; 2) The Fantastical Body and the Vulnerability of Comfort: Alternative Models for Understanding “Body Image”; 3) Corporeal Cartographies: Materializing Space as a Textual Narrative Process; 4) Cookies for Peace and a Pedagogy of Corporeal Generosity; and finally, 5) Teaching and Learning through Touch. Each section invites the reader to negotiate how meaning is constructed and how we view our experiences within that meaning-making process. Each chapter makes use of student artwork and/or student encounters in the art classroom. The artworks, along with excerpts of classroom conversations, provide vivid opportunities to explore bodied curricular experiences. In the first section concerning feminist theories of touch, Springgay draws on the work of many scholars to discuss bodied encounters and space. This included the work of artist Diane Borsato who set out to “touch” 1000 people, investigating how it altered her movement through the city. Springgay describes space not as something that is a measure of distance, but rather, “spacing constitutes the very place where things happen between bodies/things. Thus, touching as a way of knowing implies that I can know the other without fixing her or reducing her to an object” (p. 29). Another piece of Borsato’s was her private performance entitled Sleeping with Cake. The physicality of the project involved Borsato filling up her bed with 10 sweet and flavorful cakes, surrounding her as she slept. The concept drawn from this performance involves a closer study of how the experience was about the intimacy and the relationality involved and how her knowing changes in this experience of “being-with.” Later in the chapter, Springgay includes some of her own artwork as well as student artwork to further describe a sense of being-with and of bodied encounters with materials. These artworks are good examples of the first theme introduced to the art class, body surfaces, focusing on the very concept of surfaces. Diving more deeply into the idea of an ethics of embodiment, Springgay draws on the work of Sara Ahmed (2000). According to Ahmed, ethics is “a question of how one encounters others as other (than being) and, in this specific sense, how one can live with what cannot be measured by the regulative force of morality” (2000, p. 138). Springgay draws on a plethora of theorists to flesh out her understanding of the concept of an ethics of embodiment. She points toward agency and transformation but only through accepting that we operate in “tangles of implication” which lead us to varying discourses and which can be met with resistance, contradiction, and a need for change. She correlates this process of living and knowing with learning and teaching. Springgay insists we must see these processes as dynamic and complex in order to respond within our lived experience. Springgay finishes the chapter with a section on a/r/tography, which she defines as “a research methodology of entanglement and becoming” (p. 37). Here she invites the reader to consider understandings and experiences rather than representations of the visual and textual. She identifies six features of a/r/tography to be living inquiry, contiguity, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess. The final feature, excess, is a “calling to the unnamed.” It asks us to think beyond the limitations that we are so encumbered by (and may not realize it) and engage in inquiry, confrontation, complexity, and reinterpretation. Springgay believes it is ultimately this consideration of body in excess “as a/r/tographical research that materializes knowing and being” (p. 48). This first section provides a foundation for thinking about space and bodied encounters as we enter into the next chapter that more closely consider student experiences of body image. In the next section dealing with the “Fantastical Body” and the “vulnerability of comfort,” we begin to hear student testimony addressing the idea of body image. Springgay acknowledges the varied research already done in the area of body image, but finds it important to reconsider within the context of a body in excess as well as the “fantastical body” that, “conceptualizes corporeal difference through processes of creation” (p. 55). Drawing on the work of Susan Bordo (1997), we first encounter an explanation of what many societies consider being the “intelligible” or “ideal” body. …The perfect body has tight, monitored boundaries. The ability to control and modify the corporeal schema to maintain equilibrium is a symbol of emotional, moral, intellectual and physical power. “The ideal here is of a body that is absolutely tight, contained, “bolted down,” firm: in other words, a body that is protected against eruption from within, whose internal processes are under control” (Bordo, 1998, p. 294). The soft, loose, excess flesh threatens the borders of the body, the stability of the individual, and the premise that one is “normal” and in control of their life. The ideal body is excess-free, maintaining the borders between inside and outside. (p. 54) This desire for control is what Springgay begins to investigate with students as she asks questions about their perceptions and what it means to be comfortable. Her idea of a “fantastical body” goes against this control and desires a more dynamic relationship of knowing and living. The students contribute thoughts on what comfort implies and respond to the idea of bodily knowing and comfort with installation artwork. Three students work with these ideas in their creation of Un/attainable Comfort, an installation with fuzzy slippers studded with thumbtacks, a fuzzy blanket that is stitched together so it cannot be unfolded, and an oversized pillow that doesn’t seem to belong with the other items. In discussing the idea of comfort, students share their own experiences and Springgay brings together their thoughts in a further discussion with the reader and critical friends. Ideas of community, space, excess, and movement lead the discussion into pedagogical terms asking us to engage in the en/tanglement of what it means to teach and learn within these ideas. The next section involving corporeal cartographies takes the idea of mapping to a new level. Contemporary mapping is described as a way to un/fold and view maps for “what they can do” in finding the potential of the unnamed. Springgay sees this investigation as an alternative way to imagine space, seeing disruption and difference as a guide to knowing. Student-created videos are referenced in this section to further those understandings. The videos referenced involve walking in boxes, and pushing shopping carts. Seemingly strange activities to video, students investigate what it means to encounter anew and allow an experience to un/fold itself. Springgay compares this chapter’s message to the rest of the book in that it asks us to consider more open spaces in which to understand curriculum and look for opportunities that take us away from our routines and assumptions. She calls for an embracing of the inquiring movement leading to an engagement with these processes within lived experiences as they occur. Corporeal generosity is the topic of the next section and highlights the work of several students. All three projects described are examples of students questioning their surroundings with a desire to intervene and encounter the unknown. The first, an email piece, calls for a reconsideration of lived emotions and their origination. The second art piece, using mail as a medium, ponders the ideas of familiarity, gifts and giving. The intervention-based performance entitled Cookies for Peace involves a couple of students participating in a public peace demonstration by handing out “peace cookies” and questioning their receivers on their ideas of peace. Springgay explores the concepts brought forth by the students’ experiences and begins to tie them once again to what it means to enact these ideas within an embodied curriculum. In the following excerpt, Springgay draws on the work of several scholars to bring together some final thoughts. Embodied experience suggests that we do not have experiences – as in experiences are not separate from our bodies selves – rather we are experiences (see Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Similarly, bodies are not “things” that we “give” meaning to, but that bodies are meaning (Grosz, 1994; Nancy, 2000). Understanding the body as meaning, as opposed to a container in which we store or put meaning, resists an understanding of pedagogy as something that is enacted by bodies onto bodies…neither teachers, students, nor the sites of learning preexist pedagogy – they are invented in the process. Thus, we might shift from trying to “know” and then “teach” [generosity] to engaging with it as an event that has not yet ended and to contemporaneously respond to it” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 19). (pp. 120-121) The final section of the book continues this synthesis of ideas and powerfully brings forth the importance of living inquiry. Through the book, Springgay engages in metaphor, visual and textual understandings of complex concepts and artfully communicates how a bodied curriculum can work. It is within her call for continual reconsideration of self, other, knowledge, and relation that we can encounter lived experiences that fully express who we are (and who we are becoming) as learners and teachers. Returning to the walk on the beach, the path continues to entangle itself among every movement. At times the thread pulls tight, and at other times it hangs down, brushing against your gently swinging legs and arms as they propel your body forward. Every once in a while the wind catches a section of the thread and it loops beautifully overhead, finding a new resting place when it catches. You begin to marvel at the smallest things like how your hand feels against the thread, how the thread seems to dance in tandem with the blowing wind, and how your footprints in the sand create a timeline of your journey. Time has seemed to slow, and you wonder why you hadn’t taken a moment to notice these connections before. Springgay finds that continuing to immerse within embodied experience opens new doors for education and it is our responsibility as educators to help facilitate opportunities for such experiences. She also sees this facilitation, or giving, as a gesture of generosity in which we all become more enfleshed in our learning encounters. I whole heartedly agree. References Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. London, UK: Routledge. Bordo, S. (1998). Bringing body to theory. In D. Welton (Ed.) Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (pp. 84-97). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile Bodies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nancy, J. L. (2000). Of Being Singular Plural. Stanford, CA: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. About the Reviewer Stephanie Baer is a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Teacher Education and the Editorial Assistant for the International Journal of Education and the Arts. She has worked as a classroom teacher in the arts and has taught art methods for pre-service elementary teachers. Her research interests are aesthetics, interdisciplinary education, creativity and motivation, professional development, teacher identity, and of course, the arts in whatever form they may live.