Rethinking Bodies in the Traditional Classroom

Abstract

This essay is meant to challenge one of the more pervasive critiques of online education: that online education is a pale substitute for the traditional classroom experience because traditional education is embodied and online education issomehow -disembodied.This is an odd critique because it suggests that there are some places or times when people can literally be without their bodies.1 As this is impossible, we can assume the critique is driving at the idea that having bodies together in the traditional classroom space creates a more humanizing learning environment.I want to question this assumption by drawing attention to the ways that students -and even teachers -are actually embodied in rather inhumane ways in the traditional classroom space.Critics of online education tend to derogate the "absence" of bodies in a classroom, while not attending to the ways that bodies are shaped by disciplinary regimes in real time and space in the traditional classroom.To be clear, in this essay I will not suggest that online education is better than the material classroom experience.I am suggesting that we need to take a closer look at the ways bodies are actually used/produced in schooling spaces.

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