Embodied Curriculum

Embodied curriculum is the curriculum that takes form and shape in the experiences of people and that ultimately becomes part of their lived experience. It puts emphasis on the body, which is regarded as the locus of perception and understanding of the world and the environment, including the classroom and the subject matter. The evolvement of the term embodied curriculum takes on historical significance as it enables one to grasp the term curriculum from a strict body of knowledge to be learned independently of people's life experiences to a more liberal way of viewing knowledge and reality—that is, as a mutual and continuous construction and reconstruction and negotiation of what reality is and how it is experienced. This ability gives a new grasp of curriculum, one that considers the several factors that affect the way people view the world.

In a traditional sense, embodied curricula take form and shape in official documents and textbooks and in the knowledge to be learned and are made mandatory by departments of education. This shape and form, however, represents a disembodied curriculum, for it is connected to some external-to-the-self source. In contrast, contemporary literature and discourse on curriculum recognizes the importance of feelings, meanings, expressions, imagination, sensory-motor, and spatial experiences in understanding the world and how lived experience plays out in people's lives and how it becomes part of their curriculum. The incorporation of bodily experience in curriculum theory raises issues of objectivity and subjectivity of knowledge and reality and questions pertinent to what is known and what is supposed to be known by individuals. The notion that knowledge and reality are static and outside of the self is replaced by the view that the world is also constructed in the way we experience it and understand it, a mutual exchange between reality and individual perception.

Embodied curriculum is to be traced in the progressive history of integrated and core curriculum argued by John Dewey in 1902 in his effort to eradicate disembodied, externally imposed curriculum. The focus, he argued, should be on the creation of personal and public meaning through the connection of school curriculum with the lived curriculum of children. Constructivist approach, experiential learning, and learning by doing, all represent the embodiment of lived experience in the curriculum. Embodied curriculum is also traced in phenomenology, which is the study of lived experience, a connection nicely exemplified by Max van Manen. Embodied curriculum represents all that which contributes to and comprises a deep understanding of the meaning of everyday experiences. This understanding is further stretched out in the work of William Pinar, who aesthetically imagined currere as a core of curriculum inquiry, a reading and writing of the self in relation with the world.

Later on, in 1980s, scholars connected the notion of embodied curriculum with feminist literature, an extension of the curriculum reconcep-tualization movement. Janet Miller, working with autobiography, explored relationships among gender identity, the self, and others and how these relationships are embodied in the breaking of silence, which is the silence of women's experience. In examining conversations with women, Miller studied the way larger social imbalances of control and power, hierarchy, and imposition are part of these women's lived experiences, and it is manifested in their gender. Also, the work of Madeleine Grumet, informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, autobiography, political, and feminist theory, illustrates that knowing resides in intersub-jectivity. Grumet also exemplified the importance of gaze and touch, which internalize experiences, making them part of one's lived experience.

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