ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the nature of embodiment by looking across several moments in eighth-grade classrooms during studies of Anne Frank and the Holocaust. The arts-based techniques share emphasizes the body's role in literacies learning in classrooms. The chapter guides by two assumptions: that engagement is a prerequisite requirement for learning, and that engagement increases when bodies move. Evident across the examples we draw on in the chapter are students moving and freezing movement to learn about Anne Frank and the Holocaust through and in their bodies. In other words, students use their bodies to mediate their learning about Anne Frank's diary and the historical context within which the Holocaust took place. Embodying texts leads to layered understandings of The Diary through multiple and multi-semiotic readings of the text. Students use their bodies to mediate thinking about challenging texts and situate the locus of knowledge in the body rather than solely in the mind or the text.
