Body Knowledge and Curriculum

Book excerpt: Body Knowledge and Curriculum examines student understandings of body knowledge in the context of creating and interrogating visual art and culture. It illustrates a six-month research study conducted in an alternative secondary school in a large urban city. During the research project, students created a number of visual art works using a diversity of material explorations as a means to think through the body as a process of exchange and as a bodied encounter. The book engages with feminist theories of touch and inter-embodiment, questioning the materiality and lived experiences of the body in knowledge production, in order to provoke different ways of theorizing self/other relations in teaching and learning. This volume is important because it explores the ways in which youth understand the complex, textured, and often contradictory discourses of body knowledge, and seeks to intentionally create alternative pedagogical and curricular practices to ones that subscribe to a healthy body model. Additionally, enacting educational research as living inquiry, this book is an exemplar of the arts-based methodology, a/r/tography. Body Knowledge and Curriculum is a valuable text for courses in curriculum theory, art education, qualitative research methodologies, visual culture and pedagogies, and feminist theory. Appropriate for advanced undergraduate students, pre-service teacher education students, and graduate students, the book provides an interdisciplinary investigation into body research.