The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning

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By SUZANNE M. KELLY

Not long ago, a soon-to-be-minted Ph.D. sat in on one of my women's-studies classes, placing herself in the midst of the undergraduates. Afterward the two of us stayed behind to discuss her impressions of the class. "I'd forgotten what it's like to sit with them," she said.

I nodded in agreement, and she smiled slightly. I could see she wanted to say something else, so I probed. "What else did you think?"

"Well," she said, "I'd also forgotten how they smell!"

I'm still not entirely sure what she meant, but her delivery was so earnest — and so free from judgment — that I couldn't write her comment off. In fact, it tapped into some very deep part of me that understands the potency of sensual bodies, both the students' and the professor's, in the classroom.

Even in my undergraduate days, I had a sense that my education was never independent of the bodies seated beside me. I was the kind of student who sometimes felt pressed to stand on top of my desk to confront my philosophical enemies. I can still see the contours of one foe's head and hear his slow, monotonous speech, even though it's been nearly 20 years since we met. Memories of my body in that room still fill me with the old readiness to pounce. How I must have appeared to people then — in my long hippie skirt and combat boots, hair wild as the night, a foot shorter than my foe. Climbing up on my desk was obviously about making myself appear larger, but it was also about literally getting above the impeding banter so I could be heard.

I suspect that some of our peers didn't care for our contentious displays, and I can appreciate that now. But I believe that without that classroom, without being framed by the presence of one another, we could not have come to know all that we did. Words and ideas were the intangible, abstract stuff of our learning. But they were always moving through the matter of our bodies in time and space, looping, feeding in and around our fleshly selves.

Of course, none of what I've described could have been experienced online. I have colleagues who are passionate about the virtues of online courses. They tell me students "speak" more online, that conversations are more open, fruitful, and inclusive.

But in women's studies, my field, many courses grapple with the body as they cover eating disorders, ideas about beauty, violence against women, and other issues. In one of my courses, for instance, we talk about modernity's policing of the body and what that has meant for women in body practices like dieting, ornamentation, and hair removal. In a physical classroom, we are witnesses to at least some of each other's practices: me to my students' makeup and dyed hair; them to my shaved legs and high wedge sandals. What does it do to our discussions when bodies are hidden behind computers and software — when the sensuous classroom is lost?

Every spring, when the weather begins to warm up, the outdoors calls students and professors alike to move class outside. That always sounds like a good idea until we are actually out there, and we can't hear ourselves talk over the combined sounds of cars, leaf blowers, and other conversations.

I like being outside anyway. As we step beyond the walls of the building, a new classroom is formed by the circle of our bodies on the grass. A leaf falls on my papers; a spider crawls on my bag. A student plucks a dandelion and puts it behind her ear. The wind brushes the hairs on my arm, and I smell the fresh-cut hay from the field beyond the quad. Memories and emotions from my outdoor past are fused with the ideas of the day's class.

Despite not being able to hear one another as well as inside the building, we manage to communicate without the walls of the traditional classroom. It seems ironic that online learning is often referred to as "a classroom without walls," given that the phrase once referred to a kind of experiential learning, one rooted in taking students out into the world, not cordoning them away into the far corner of their home offices. Either way, education isn't simply a question of walls or no walls. It's the bodies that matter.

It should come as no surprise that educators consider the body expendable, given the long Western tradition of playing down the body's knowledge in favor of the mind's. Some weeks before we had an outdoor class last semester, my students and I had been discussing Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," on the potential of the cyborg. With cellphones and computers, pacemakers and hearing aids, we are already, Haraway tells us, part human and part machine.

My students often initially find Haraway's arguments compelling, seeing the good in what we now are, and the potential to apply it in positive ways. "There's no turning back," they argue. What lies ahead is the promise of the cyborg, the benefits of which would include breaking down oppressive gender roles through the anonymity made possible online.

But eventually the old notions of nature and origin come rushing back, and my students begin to mourn the possibility of losing their sensuous selves even in relationship to their peers. Timid or brave, most students delight in having an attentive audience. Body language matters — a glance, a smile, a nod, and even the way a student holds a thought for a bit, visibly considers it, and then speaks it out loud.

Obviously distance learning has merits. People who might not other-wise have access to education can take online courses. That is particularly true for women, who must often balance mothering with paid work and find it impossible to be a student in the parameters of traditional education. But online courses are just a substitute for traditional education because a classroom full of bodies is quite literally full of real, living matter. In other words, it's the real thing.

At the most basic level, to be a student has always meant actually dragging one's exhausted body into class with readings in hand, being (more or less) awake, alert, listening, and ready to open one's mouth. And to be a teacher, for me, means seeing the faces of the students and how their bodies reflect their thoughts and emotions, hearing the timbre of their voices or the lilts in their dialects, experiencing them before me in the rich mix of ideas.

After one class not long ago, a student caught me to discuss some ideas for her final paper. It wasn't until we had been talking for half an hour that I happened to look down and notice that I had buttoned up my coat wrong. The left side was hanging way below the right.

"Look at me," I said, laughing, humiliated. "I'm turning into one of those oblivious professors!" I had stood there going on about this theorist and that idea, all the while looking as if my not-yet-2-year-old nephew had helped me dress. The student was kind enough to laugh with me and to try to cheer me up by telling me about a friend of hers who was bored by the constraining lectures of law school.

"Sounds awful," I said.

"Yes. I told my friend how different it was for me at college," she said. "How one of my professors sits on top of her desk, flailing her hands here and there, sometimes even eating oranges!"

My heart sank as I quickly realized that she was talking about me. I do sometimes eat oranges in class. I do occasionally wave my hands around. And I do sometimes sit on my desk — in that way, I guess not much has changed since my college days. The student's description was a useful reminder, helping me to better see myself as a professor with a body, and to think about the meanings — both known and not yet understood — that are embedded in our physical proximity to one another.

Suzanne M. Kelly will be a lecturer in women's studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz, starting in the fall.