ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how students demonstrated and experienced embodied learning in Smells Like Teen Spirit: Performing Adolescent Identities, a two-course interdisciplinary learning community, which combined adolescent psychology and theater. It also provides an in-depth examination of non-representational theories. The chapter extents to which students engaged in embodied learning, the form it took, and how embodied learning functioned to facilitate integration in learning communities. With an explicit emphasis on community building, interdisciplinary integration, collaborative learning, and integrative assessment, learning communities seem ideally situated to foster embodied learning. Embodied learning was operationally defined as knowledge constructed from the interaction of self with the physical and social environment. The evidence suggests that embodied learning is a credible avenue for knowledge production and integrative learning. As the 'Teen Spirits' demonstrated, the body can be the impetus and the site of learning, creating change, and enacting new cognitive, affective, and behavioral possibilities.
