Ashton Speaker Series, Spring 2018

Thursday, March 1

Waters Room, Zimmerman Library

9:30 - 10:00 AM: refreshments

10:00 - 11:00 AM: lecture

Bodies of knowledge: What studying embodiment can teach us about teaching

Teaching is an embodied practice. We grasp this instinctively. Bodily activities, habits, and sensations are inseparable from the act of teaching, including teaching online. However, post-secondary environments rarely encourage or enable us to think about our work as embodied. In fact, we are often structurally incentivized to proceed as though teaching and learning are disembodied, as though they somehow transcend physicality. By considering embodiment, there is potential for us to reflect in new ways on our own experiences of teaching, and to enrich how we teach. In this talk, we’ll survey multi-disciplinary research on the role of the body in teaching, learning, and knowing. Next, we’ll consider how insights from this research can influence the classroom environments and learning experiences we create.

Speaker Biography:

Sarah Polkinghorne is a librarian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and a doctoral candidate at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral research explores the role of information in people’s everyday food lives, how people come to feel informed about food, and how information and knowledge are embodied. Sarah also has a longstanding interest in librarians’ teaching work, and she has published on this subject in venues such as the Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, the journals In the Library with a Lead Pipe and the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, and the proceedings of the Canadian Association for Information Science. Sarah’s role as a librarian sees her supporting students and faculty members working to find and use information, manage research data, and publish their work. Sarah has been recognized with local, national, and international awards, and she has been delighted to twice serve as a Peer Mentor at the Librarians’ Research Institute, an initiative of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. Sarah can be found at @sarahpolk and at sarahpolkinghorne.ca.