Hocking, Brent. Haskell, Johnna. Linds, Warren. (Ed.) (2001). Unfolding Bodymind: Exploring Possibility Through Education. VT; Foundation for Educational Renewal.
Pp. xxxvii + 333. ISBN: 1-885580-08-8. $23.00

This is a startlingly good book. It makes an original contribution to educational knowledge by providing a new foundation for educational renewal on the ground of a uniquely spiritual orientation to education as well as an ecological worldview.  The editorial introduction on 'Re-imag(e)ining Worlds through Education', captivated my imagination through the idea of 'embodiment' - a key concept in the book. Embodiment means the integration of the physical or biological body and the phenomenal or experiential body. The editors believe that instead of representing knowledge as a commodity or toolbox it is crucial for educators to expose students to authentic forms of learning that reflect the embodied, dynamic, collective and ecological webs of knowledge. 

I have read many texts on education written by those who are writing from the outside of the educational practices of professional educators. These educators in Unfolding Bodymind write 'through' their living practice of their educative relationships. In what they do there is a marvellous range of embodied knowledge previous to all deduction. They acknowledge in full how their views of 'embodiment' have been influenced through their engagements with Merleau-Ponty’s phenemenology (1962) and with the ideas of 'embodied mind' of Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991).

In keeping with the spirit of humanity that pervades this book I want to approach my review through my embodied respect for both the achievements of the authors and my own scholarship of educational enquiry. I am thinking here of an extension, of Boyer’s (1990) scholarships of discovery, integration, application and teaching, into a scholarship of educational enquiry (Adler-Collins, 2000).  My approach to the review was to first read all the contributions. I then focused on the ideas in each chapter that contributed to my own learning as I connected my own experiences to new ways of understanding and articulating through the language of the authors. I then engaged with the text as a whole with some evaluations and conclusions from the scholarships of educational enquiry represented in the living theory section of http://www.actionresearch.net . This review accepts the editors' invitation to ‘write myself into the text’:

"You, the reader, are invited to join us in walking the path of possibility that we are all making through these explorations, Join us in our dialogues between sections; make your own; write yourself into the texts. Let's see what unfolds as we open the door to the rest of our journey into the un/knowing of bodymind…." (p. xxxiv) 

Following the excellent preface by Ron Miller and the editorial introduction the book is organised into four sections each framed by an 'editorial conversation'.

In section one on  Turning Together on Paths of Awareness, Warren Linds explores his question, 'How can I move beyond 'facts' and 'rules of inference' to intuitive action based on common sense, wisdom, and mature judgement? As an artist educator he engages in a facilitated process of dramatic creation that is filled with rapidly evolving uncertainties. I felt that the significance of his contribution on, Wo/andering through a Hall of Mirrors….  A Meander through Drama Facilitation , was in showing how to represent his facilitation as a dialogical and social process. I felt his enquiry could be moved on through the use of self-studies with the aid of video-clips of his educational practices with his students. His work is so important that it would be a pity to constrain his forms of representation within the grip of print (Eisner, 1993; 1997). 
 
Frank Bob Kull's contribution is focused on 'A Scuba Class Holistic Teaching/Learning through Lived Experience…. Or how I dove into the sea and surfaced in academia'. 
I identified with his point that the reliance on universal curricula and methodology violently disregards the actual, unique humans involved in the learning process. He argues powerfully that sitting on the dry land of tradition rather than diving right into the uncertain process of change prevents us from transforming our practice and our lives. (p. 36). Here I recalled Schon’s delightful metaphor of the swampy lowlands and his exhortation to turn to action research in creating a new epistemology for the new scholarship (Schon, 1995). In surfacing in academia and contributing to scholarship it might be important for Bob Kull to explain how his embodied values can be transformed into the educational standards of judgement. I am thinking of the educational standards that he uses to judgement the quality of his educative influence with his students.

John Ippolito writes of Co-emerging in the Second Language Research Process: What it Means to Research What It's Like. He explains what he believes to be of paramount importance. This is, the nature and quality of the relationship between researcher, research participants and research setting within his view of cognition as a process of co-emergence. He also believes that when language is thought about as something for which speaker and hearer are both responsible it becomes an act of co-emergence. It retains its ability to refer to things, as it does in a representational framework, but the vocalizing of a word or sound becomes itself a co-emergent act involving, speaker, listener and setting. (p.59)
I particularly identified with the dialogues between John and the other research participants. The balance between the dialogues and a traditional form of scholarly analysis is tipped heavily towards the traditional scholarship. As John’s enquiry moves on it may be that evidence of more sustained dialogue might help to communicate more fully, what it means to be in research that co-emerges between researcher and research participants. 

Marylin Low and Maria McKay achieved a balance between dialogue and scholarly analysis as they used ideas from a Japanese proverb in their  'When the Wind Blows, the Barrel Maker Gets Busy'. They focused on the interconnectedness of the seemingly random events of unexpected disruptions in conversations. They focus on the conversations enmeshed in their day-to-day living of co-teaching in a second language classroom that disturbed their taken-for-granted stances of the way things are.  

In section two on  Embodying 'Pedagogical Possibilities': Teaching Being, Being Teaching, Heesoon Bai explores the theme of 'Beyond the Educated Mind: Towards a Pedagogy of Mindfulness'. The pedagogical recommendations that results from Bai's analysis  are to help students to become aware of the mind's tendency toward disembodiment and to provide them with opportunities and tools to work at embodiment by recovering percepts and restoring them to the centre stage of consciousness. She refers to this as the 'pedagogy of mindfulness'. I was most moved by her eloquence in describing 'mindful awareness' in cultivating in the young a profound love for the local habitat and community (p.95). 

Genet Simone Kozik-Rosabul asks 'How Do They Learn to Be Whole?, in the context of working on a strategy for helping pre-service teachers develop dispositions. She defines dispositions as the beliefs, attitudes and affective aspects of teaching that provide for authentic learning. She believes that these are usually taken for granted in teacher education. She believes that pre-service teachers are expected to already embody certain dispositions, like curiosity, patience, and respect for others, and asks if they are supposed to magically acquire them somehow before finishing their degree!  She focuses on the profoundly important point that good teaching dispositions must be intentionally identified and developed in order for the other two thirds of teacher preparation - knowledge and skills - to mature. She tentatively offers a 'Personal Process Transformation Exercise' to assist in the development of good teaching dispositions.

Ronald Burr, a professor of philosophy/religion, and Sherry Hartman, a professor of nursing, focus on Bodymind Learning: Interdisciplinary Conversations on Campus.
They show how their use of traditional Asian practices of meditation and tai chi as well as notions of whole person health can result in educational theories and practices that complement and enrich one other in meeting the challenges of education. 

Alison Pryer writes of Breaking Hearts: Towards an Erotics of Pedagogy:

"By uncovering, musing on, and recounting our own experiences of eros - stories of passion and yearning, pain and lose, betrayal and forgiveness, as well as the blank indifference that is the death of love - we may begin to understand the role of eros in teaching and learning. Yet, strangely, in remembering and retelling stories of eros, we simultaneously unravel and recreate its mystery. Eros is an elusive butterfly. We try to grasp it, and it flutters effortlessly through our fingers." (p. 141) 

In section three on Education and Culture: Experiencing Im/possibility a group of contributors take a global view of curriculum and instruction as cultural and human artefacts. Pille Bunnell and Kathleen Forsythe in their 'The Chain of Hearts: Practical Biology for Intelligent Behaviour', explore love as a biological dynamic. They draw on a series of workshops in Chile and Canada to explore their influence on leading teachers to their own understanding of the emotional basis of our humanity in the biology of love. I warmed to their expression of humanity here:

"Living in love constitutes well-being, as one lives in a fluid dynamic congruence with one's circumstances, whatever they are. In the absence of love an organism lives the continuous breakdown of those systematic coherences. In us humans this happens as we live in various other relational  dynamics and the concomitant configurations of bodyhood - namely the emotions of mistrust, expectation, fear, uncertainty, envy, ambition or competition." (p. 157).

Researching such a complex experience and relationship as 'living in love' is going to take much time, sensitivity and disciplined reflection. Bunnell and Forsythe have made a start in their description of a set of workshops in the Chain of Hearts. These consist of twenty units. They present some of the content that is relevant to the topic of intelligence. In their conclusion they acknowledge that the Chain of Hearts is still in the process of development.  Writing myself into their text in a loving spirit, came easily in their story of a novel in which a mentor is assisting a young woman to prepare for college exams and the story tells of a game which ends with the insight:

"People don't make nonsensical statements, unless they are just playing, and then you would know. But when they say something that doesn't seem to make sense to you, the trick is to find the domain, to find the particular way of seeing the world in which what the person says does make sense. That's the only way you can listen to them. Otherwise you are just listening to yourself." P. 165.

It takes such courage to research one's own life in 'living in love', that I shy away from focusing on love in my own research. Yet, the work of Bunnell and Forsythe is bolstering my own courage to account for my own educative relations in terms of 'living in love'. 

James Overbow considers How a Space for 'Embodied Wisdoms' in the Education System Can be Created through Teaching, by concentrating on his embodied wisdom as someone with cerebral palsy. I accept, with regret, his point that more often than not, people of differing races, genders, sexualities, and abilities who are successful within educational institutions, are socialized to incorporate the embodiments, sensibilities, and characteristics of a white masculine prototype. I understand and have personal experience of how this white, masculine prototype has been invoked as the personification of rationality and logic as if it is the only form of rationality and logic:

I often find my embodied wisdom is subsumed under the pedagogical dominance of rationality and logic. Yet in my own life I have found my experience of embodied wisdom enriches my education both as a teacher and pupil. However, I maintain that embodied wisdom should complement logic and  rationality, not subsume them." (p.  171)  

Because he learns and teaches through the experience of his body, in ways that cannot conform to this non-disabled prototype, Overbow explains how he has had to constantly determine to what extent he can validate embodied wisdom without jeopardizing his position within academia (p. 181). In learning from my own experience of validating embodied wisdom within the academia (Whitehead, 1993, 1999), I feel that 'risk' is part of the engagement. If we are going to 'legitimate' in the Academia an embodied epistemology, we are likely to encounter some of the resistances that characterise the 'paradigim' wars (Anderson & Herr, 1999). It is unfortunate that more peaceful ways and languages have not been developed to support radical transformations in the knowledge-base of the Academy.  Maybe we could help to develop such understandings as we influence the Academy in embracing an epistemology of bodymind.
 
Darlene Rigo considers Merleau-Ponty's Work and Moral Education: Beyond Mind/Body, Self/Other, and Human/Animal Dichotomies. She outlines an approach to moral education based on the child's experience of empathic connection to embodied others, and argues most persuasively that if it is to be viable, children's feelings of kinship with animals need to be taken into account and pedagogically fostered. My daughter Rebecca, taught me this when she was 14. She came home outraged after a science lesson that involved cutting up an animal's lung. Along with a few of her friends she had refused on the grounds of her empathic connection with animals. I admired her courage in standing firm and learnt much from her moral outrage. It is because of this experience with Rebecca that I was able to appreciate the significance of Rigo's writings.

Sonia MacPherson writes on Educating Nature: On Being Squeamish in Science.

"As currently practiced, education drives us to abstraction, not just distraction, and is organized to scaffold children's attention progressively away from sensory experiences towards a more disembodied and abstract literate and conceptual world. I in no way intend to vilify abstract thinking, and literacy. Instead, my aim is to encourage more integration between sensory and conceptual knowing, to enhance and enrich rather than suppress our connection to nature (i.e., the body, sensation, identification and connection with animals). As it is, abstract thought and literacy are viewed, re/presented and taught as superior to direct experience, with the possible exception of those experiences that are empirically controlled and measured…. (p. 213)….. If… science education started with the assumption that loving, co-operative relations played a significant role in the unique evolutionary differentiation that gave rise to human beings, this might alter dramatically the way we perceive the world, our species, and our own bodies: as loving, rather than aggressive, violent "places". (p. 214)

I enjoyed the critical clarity of MacPherson's writings as she developed her eco-feminist perspective. I accepted her point about the importance for human evolution of loving, co-operative relations. I was persuaded by her arguments. Yet, because I wasn’t being shown how she was living with this assumption I felt no closer to learning, from her writing, how I might live my own embodied value of loving, co-operative relations more fully in my present practice. I make this point in the spirit of supporting her enquiry into the implications of living in a way that shows loving and co-operative relations in practice.

In section four. Ecological Interplay - Humans/Nature in Freefall Franc Feng focuses on Etude in Green Minor: On Expanding Ethics, Of Being, Wholeness, Sentience and Compassion. Drawing upon his subjective lived experience as postcolonial subject and writing most movingly on the  significance of the death of his father, he theorises towards the possibility of a meta-subjective postcolonial experience for all. Feng argues that holism, and the holistic education it represents, must expand and be inclusive and sensitive to cultural history to connect the oppression of culture and nature. He argues that healing must be theorized alongside related notions of reclaiming recovery, interconnectedness and wholeness. I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion that we must work to contribute to the reversal of anthropocentric greed and arrogance, towards a discourse of love, compassion, humility, and reference for all life. I wondered if his linguistic form of argument, might be hindering a sustained enquiry into his own educative influence in the world as he speaks out against eco-cultural injustice. I understood and appreciated just how much his experience and reflections on his father's life and death had influenced his 'speaking out'. I felt the need to urge Feng to explore further how he was engaging with others in evaluating his own influence and effectiveness in living his ecological values in practice. 

Lyubov Laroche writes on Back to the Future: Holography as a Postmodern Metaphor for Holistic Science Education. From a holographic perspective the hologram does not contain any parts. It is an undivided unity. She believes that when participants enter a holotropic state of consciousness, they have "authentic and convincing experiences of conscious identification" (p. 257) with other people, animals, ocean waves, plants, mountains, atoms, planet Earth, and even the entire Cosmos: 

"It seems there are neither limits nor boundaries as to who or what participants could become. Such experiences strongly suggest that each human might well enfold information about the entire universe." (p. 258). 

"In the holographic universe, the most important mission of science education is to educate a sense of holographic oneness with the rest of the world." (p. 268).

Laroche's contribution pushed to the limits my understanding of education as a value-laden practical activity. The Chapter captivated my imagination through the power of language. I felt my learning grow as I developed my understanding of a holographic perspective. I wondered how to relate and integrate such a unified, holographic perspective in educational enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve my practice?' and 'How can I help  you to improve your learning?'. I looked for help in the Chapter and felt a limit in the metaphor of the title to relate to the value-laden practical activity of education. I wondered if Laroche's enquiries in 'Bath to the Future', might, in the future, show how a holographic perspective could influence the learning of students in their present science education? 

David Jardine, in his Unable to Return to the Gods that Made Them, explores the idea of experience-as-suffering from a perspective in the intersections between hermeneutics, ecology, Buddhism and the lived realities of pedagogy. I do embrace the experience of suffering in my educative relations. Much significant learning seems to involve suffering in the sense of the pain of living contradictions when embodied values are negated in practice. Sometimes the suffering has been caused by external events beyond my own control and my education has involved my responses to such events. What I find so hopeful in this text as a whole is the feeling that the hope in the pleasure of relationship can help to overcome the debilitating influences of suffering in the lived realities of pedagogy. I am thinking of a pedagogy in which individuals are creating themselves through their own learning as they seek to live more fully their ecology of bodymind.  

Joanna Haskell in her, Experiencing Unknown Landscapes: Unfolding a Path of Embodied Respect asks, 'How is it that we have become so separated and disconnected from the beauty of our unfolding world? What opportunities or possibilities might allow us to experience a deep respect not only for each other but the living landscape?  As she explains:

"Embodied respect, the awareness that arises through forming perception while experiencing, guides actions or choices, bringing forth a capacity for embracing interactions of the unknown. If we remain open-minded, that is, open to views, interactions and intuition, then climbing mountains or scripting words emerge through the flow of actions in conversation with the flesh of the world." (p.292)

Until I heard Eliot Eisner's 1993 Presidential Address to AERA (Eisner, 1993) I was not aware of the possibilities of multi-media forms of communication to explain my educative influence with my students. I would urge Haskell to explore the implications of such forms of representation in her enquiry into the beauty of her/our unfolding world.

Brent Hocking in, Touched by Gentle Breezes in Spring: An Ecological View of Renewal in Teaching, reviews the key characteristics of his ecological or ecophilosophical view:

Using points from his definition of his ecological view I ask:

How does your heightened sense of the relationships underlying personal and collective experience show me educational possibilities in the interplay between the knower and known?  Agreeing that notions of renewal raise deeply ecological raise questions about the ethical dimensions of human inquiry and knowledge - how do you participate in the world in a way that shows the integration of your beliefs, principles and the motivations underlying your actions? (p.311)

The Afterword is a Correspondence between David Abram and David Jardine on 'All Knowledge is Carnal Knowledge'.

David Abram…. You know, as a kid I actually loved numbers and their mysteries, but I got befuddled by the way mathematics was taught in high school. I mean, I was unable to just memorize formulas and simply plug 'em into equations wherever needed (though I certainly tried to), because, for some reason I felt I had to work those formulas out afresh every time, feel it out in my body before I could deploy them in any particular instance…. I simply had to experience each formula in my muscles, had to feel how it moved, how it acted, in order for it to make sense to me… It took many years before I was able to regain my appreciation and fascination with that world.

David Jardine: You ask if I've met other kids like that. Can you keep a secret? I'm that other kid. And so are many of the children I see squatted in desks, and many of the teachers, I meet, their eyes bloodshot with trying to keep up the charade  they don't even know they are in." (p.322)

Some evaluations and conclusions.

I want to accept the editors' invitation to 'write myself into the text'. I am unsure how to do this in a way that is experienced as gently enquiring rather than the violent disruption that can be experienced from the traditional forms of 'savage' or scholarly criticism that seem to characterise descriptions of the 'paradigm wars'. My holistic response to 'Unfolding Bodymind' is that the text communicates the embodied contradiction of holding together the love of humanity of the contributors and their experience of its violation, in a range of different contexts. 

Perhaps I could begin my evaluation by explaining why I value the experience of such embodied contradictions in educational theorising. I imagine that most readers carry an image of two aeroplanes, with passengers and crew, being flown intentionally to destruction into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York on the 11th September 2001. The event sandwiched between my 34th Wedding Anniversary on the 9th September and my Mothers 87th Birthday on the 13th September carries the power of the embodied contradiction of my love of humanity and of its negation. In my experience, existing as such a living contradiction stimulates the imagination to ask, 'What am I going to do about this?'. My imagination, pushed into action by my values, asks 'How am I going to improve my practice?'. In my use of 'I', I do not want to be misunderstood. I want to avoid the critique made by Shroyer (1973, p. xvii) of Heidegger's 'I' that it remained formal while pretending that it contained content in itself. I also want to take heed of Kierkegaard's warning  of the danger of the imagination in creating a unity that became separated from practical living. As Mary Catherine Bateson says:

Perhaps the issue is not a fixed knowledge of the good, the single focus that millennia of monotheism have made us idealize, but rather a kind of attention that is open, not focused on a single point. Instead of concentration on a transcendent ideal, sustained attention to diversity and interdependence may offer a different clarity of vision, one that is sensitive to ecological complexity, to the multiple rather than the singular.  (p.331)  

In evaluating this text I have been moved by the ideas to engage with a largely unfamiliar and uncertain way of thinking and relating in terms of an ecology of bodymind. In relation to my own judgements I feel confident when I draw on my understandings from the traditions of linguistic, phenomenological and dialectical philosophies. I have a history of engagement with ideas from these traditions that inform my evaluations. However, Unfolding Bodymind invites me to move into a new possibility by engaging my past learning with a creative response to, and within, an ecology of bodymind. In accepting this invitation I have tried to show, through my aesthetically engaged and appreciative responses (D'Arcy, 1999) to the ideas from the different contributors, that I am walking with them in their educational conversation. In accompanying them I want to share some of my learning from my own educational research to see if it resonates with their concerns in a way that captivates their imagination and helps in some way to move their own enquiries forward. I need to make a distinction here between the evaluative judgements I make when I apply stable standards of judgement to a piece of work and the evaluations I am making here. My evaluations here are being made as part of my educational enquiry as I seek to join an educational conversation that is grounded in an ecology of bodymind. 

From my viewpoint within such an ecology, I feel connected in a network of relationships. I think you will see such a network of relationships in the learning resources at http://www.actionresearch.net .  One of the ways I use the new technologies is to turn a digital video tape on my relationships in order to understand better the nature of my educative influence so that I can work with this better understanding to improve my practice of educative relations. In the living theory and values sections of actionresearch.net you will see a number of doctoral, educational enquiries that celebrate similar values and ways of working to the contributors to Unfolding Bodymind. In the multi-media section you will see analyses of my own educative influence with the learning of others. In particular you will see my attempts to transform my embodied values into educational standards of judgement in the practice of my educative relations and contributions to educational theory and knowledge. 

My purpose in setting side by side Unfolding Bodymind with ActionResearch.net, as part of my evaluation, is to suggest that together they dramatically extend the growth of educational knowledge. I am thinking of this extension in relation to the Themes of AERA 2000 and 2001:  'What we know and how we know it’, and 'Validity and Value in Education Research'. The dramatic increase in use of the internet is stimulating research into e-learning. In reviewing Unfolding Bodymind I have been drawn to focus on the potential of e-learning in accepting the invitation to respond, made by the editors in the text of Unfolding Bodymind. I suspect that the networks of relationships that help to constitute an ecology of bodymind will be increasingly influenced by information and communications technology. To support this move I have created a Forum in the Conferencing space of ActionResearch.net and respond to the contributors of Unfolding Bodymind and their readers, with the reciprocal invitation to continue to share and develop our ideas and practices, together. I trust that this review is experienced from within an embodied educational spirit in dialogue. In saying this I feel the urge to repeat something said by Kilpatrick (1951) that educational theory was a form of dialogue that has profound implications for the future of humanity. Unfolding Bodymind makes an important contribution to this dialogue.

Note - with thanks to my colleague Sarah Fletcher who urged me to go the extra mile in walking and writing my way into the text.

Anderson, G.L.  & Herr, K.  (1999) The New Paradigm Wars: Is There Room for Rigorous Practitioner Knowledge in Schools and Universities? Educational Researcher, Vol. 28, No.5, pp. 12-21, 40.
Eisner, E.  (1993) Forms of Understanding and the Future of Educational Research. Educational Researcher, Vol. 22, No.7, pp. 5-11.
Eisner, E. (1997), The Promise and Perils of Alternative Forms of Data Representation, Educational Researcher, Vol. 26, No.6, pp. 4-10.
Husserl, E. (1931)  Ideas, p. 12. Translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
Kilpatrick, W. H. (1951) Educational Theory, Vol.1, No.1.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Original Work published 1945)
Schon, D. (1995) Knowing-In-Action: The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Vol.  27 (6) (27-34).
Shroyer, T. (1973)  Foreword p. xvii  in Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. London; Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991) The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Whitehead, J. (1993) The Growth of Educational Knowledge: Creating your own living educational theories. Bournemouth; Hyde. 
Whitehead, J. (1999) How do I improve my practice? Creating a discipline of education through educational enquiry. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Bath, in the Living Theory section of http://www.actionresearch.net