Exit Slip: Embodied Learning

 During the rope making, braiding, and poem-writing, I feel like it finally clicked for me what embodied learning actually means. Before, I was like "yeah cool, you use your body to learn." However, it actually took the contrast of what disembodied learning is for it to really hit home what we're trying to do here. Indeed, embodied learning is using your body to learn. But when you use your body to learn, you are also building these neurological pathways (presumably those that have to do with motor function) and associate it with the concepts or ideas.

This whole idea made me think of my own experience with playing music. I starting learning to play the piano when I was about 4 years old and guitar since I was about 7. I've taken periods away from practicing both of them, and sometimes have multi-year gaps between practice sessions. Interestingly, though, the "muscle memory" still remains and while my playing is not as polished as it once was, I can usually still remember how to play certain pieces with remarkable fluency. It's as though my fingers remember, but my brain doesn't! Now, I'm sure there's a psychological explanation to why my fingers appear to move on their own, but what's more interesting is how I can actually recall elements of music theory that I've long forgotten, simply by moving through the scales or chords with my hands. I can just let my hands play, then figure out what they did and work backwards from there. 

During class, Susan has elluded to embodying the shapes of graphs/functions by moving our hands through space in their shape. I'm really digging this idea: the students may forget what a cubic function looks like if they just draw it or view it, but what if they actually move their bodies? What if, later in life, they think "cubic" and then their body automatically traces the shape? Then suddenly everything is flooding back to them. 

I'm sure that triggering memories is just one tiny aspect of embodied learning. I'm beginning to see a lot of other benefits and am starting to make similar connections (though they aren't quite clear enough to express here yet).