ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the many ways in which schools try to eliminate bodies, the bodies of children and the bodies of teachers. I am speaking here not of homicide, but rather of the failure to recognize the bodies of the students we teach and those of us who teach them. It is about how schools make bodies unwelcome, unable to see them as potential sources of information or education, much less the sites of pleasure and connection. It is about what happens when we separate “minds” and “bodies” so completely that we virtually ask both students and teachers to “leave their bodies at the schoolhouse door and pick them up again at 3:30.” It is about the dehumanization of schools by the enforcement of curriculum, pedagogy, management and policies that see only brains and treat bodies as irrelevant or dangerous. But this is also a chapter about hope-about what schools can (and sometimes do) look like when students and teachers teach, learn and interact from an embodied place.
