Heavily influenced by feminist philosophers, like Susan Bordo (Bordo 1993), Cressida Heyes seeks to situate the “body” within a cultural and historical context. She wants philosophers to 
explore “real bodies,” not just discourse about and of bodies. Dr. Heyes found almost no examples of professors including the body as a legitimate way of knowing and learning within the classroom. She explains, “I had been working for quite a while in the philosophy of the body and one of the things I got frustrated by is that there are lots of textual arguments which lead to the conclusion: if you want to change your bodily experience, you have to do new things with your body and not just talk about it. I was compelled by these arguments. I thought ‘if that is right, why do we sit around and talk about ideas and read about ideas? This paradox became more and more pressing for me.” She wanted her students “to practice their bodies and philosophy differently,” and to move beyond “thinking” into experiencing the ideas of philosophy.
Dr. Heyes’ began to conceptualize a course in which students were engaged with ideas intellectually, but also emotionally and physically; a course in which the gap between philosophical theory and how students/teachers live their lives was closed. She wanted to be part of a course in which the so-called “Descartes’ Error,” of separating the mind from the body, no longer existed in the way that she taught. If she could develop an academic course that brought together her knowledge of the body, culture and philosophy, she thought that in “some small way I will have done a service.”
The course Dr. Heyes developed to meet this need was called “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” This three credit undergraduate course was cross-listed in the physical education and philosophy departments. The course met twice a week in two, ninety minute sessions. In the first ninety minute session students started with a short meditation and then explored articles like “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Comportment, Motility and Spatiality” (Young, 1980) and a “Body of Knowledge” (Shusterman, 2006). This exploration of discourse about and of the body was supplemented by a second ninety minute session in which students engaged in a yoga practice of postures, breathing practices and meditation techniques based in the teachings of Pattabhi Jois. Together, these two distinct pedagogical approaches were designed to help students explore how the body has its own methods of knowing and that the embodied experience can be further analyzed with critical thinking. Part of what students learn in class is that philosophical ideas can be verified for truth by exploring how they do and do not manifest in the embodied experience, and that embodied experience might itself be a source of knowledge.
Initially, Dr. Heyes worried that students might think of the readings, research papers and philosophical discussions as the “real” class, th
e space in which knowledge was occurring. Dr. Heyes explains, “we are not good at having experiences that are bodily experiences and counting that as a form of knowledge. Second, we do not work with our embodied knowledge politically. We tend to just talk about it. The addition of yoga to the course offers a chance to experience this form of knowledge.” To counter this, students were required to learn and practice a basic series of postures so that the memory of the practice was embedded in their bodies. She evaluated students at the end of the thirteen week semester on their ability to implement the sequence independently and on their ability to modify the sequence according to their own physical ability. Students had the opportunity to see how they perceived from the body, and that these perceptions altered their propositional knowledge.
One of the problems Dr. Heyes experienced in integrating yoga into the higher education setting is that many North American’s view yoga as an “anti-intellectual activity; yoga is essentially viewed and practiced as ‘just physical exercise.’ ” Dr. Heyes finds that yoga is often devalued in North America because, “Anti-intellectual sentiments play really well here.” She explains, “There is a lot of fear and distain for intellectuals. There is a sense that if you can act spontaneously then somehow you are free. There is the idea that ‘what it is to be an intellectual is to be bound by thought.’ If you are bound by thought then you are not free. You are uptight and constricted in some way. It is an inchoate kind of view, but it is popular. It is particularly popular in the yoga world [people who primarily practice modern postural yoga] and I’ve thought, actually it is a disrespectful view of yoga. Yoga has a really rich textual tradition.” One of the things Dr. Heyes hoped to address in her class is that other cultures do have a way in which the body is valued as a medium of knowing, and that this is not antithetical to intellectual thought.One of the reasons Dr. Heyes chose to cross list her class in physical education and philosophy was to bring the two disciplines together. She explains, “This is how yoga is taught in many places in the world. Hatha yoga is considered a way to prepare the mind for thinking and as way to experience different ideas.”
Dr. Heyes chose to teach Western feminist philosophy as opposed to the Eastern texts related to yoga because this is the literature she knows best. She tells the students in her class, “there is a literature here [in yoga] that you should be reading in conjunction with doing this practice, that properly belongs to this practice, but I don’t know that literature as a scholar. I am not well educated enough in this literature to be able to teach it within a scholarly community. I am going to teach you the literature I do understand and we are going to do this [yoga] practice and we’ll see what happens.” She has gotten criticism from other academics that it is “incorrect” for an educator to take ideas from Western epistemology and put them next to a series of yogic practices that actually have a context, history and their own spiritual lineage. However, the juxtaposition of different cultural ideas and practices allows for contemporary issues of the body, that many Euro-Americans experience, to be explored within the course. For example, the literature of yoga, such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Muktibodhananda, 1993) and Gheranda Samhita (Vasu, 1976) do not address women at all, nor do these texts discuss the relatively new cultural phenomena of eating disorders.
Dr. Heyes calls her class a “pedagogical experiment,” an experiment in learning that she engages in with her students. After the course had ended, she met with a small group of her students to talk about the experience of the course, and to learn from her students what worked and what didn’t in the inclusion of yoga. She explains, “I am trying to break down what it is to ‘do philosophy’ and explore the role of the teacher with my students. This is met with a tremendous relief on the part of a lot of students…Higher Education is an opportunity for professors and students to understand that freedom is not a set of prescriptions: do this, this and this and then be free. We need to understand that freedom, as a practice, results in a great deal of uncertainty.”
Dr. Heyes isn’t certain that pedagogical experiments like “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga” have enough support to continue at her university. Despite the fact the course was cross-listed in philosophy and physical education, only one physical education major took the course – meaning that perhaps there is not enough student support to continue the class. Furthermore, Dr. Heyes was required to apply for and receive a grant that would cover the cost of an adjunct to make up for the larger philosophy class she usually teaches. This adds to Dr. Heyes’ work load (in designing a new course, evaluating that course with students and applying for grants), making it unlikely that others in her department will engage in the pedagogical experimentation necessary to explore new ways of knowing.
____________________________________________________________________________
The reader can find more about her work at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~cheyes/research/index.htm.
She has also co-authored the following article on her integration of yoga as pedagogy: Helberg, N., Heyes, C., & Rohel, J. (2009). Thinking through the body: yoga, philosophy, and physical education. Teaching Philosophy, 32(3), 263(218).
explore “real bodies,” not just discourse about and of bodies. Dr. Heyes found almost no examples of professors including the body as a legitimate way of knowing and learning within the classroom. She explains, “I had been working for quite a while in the philosophy of the body and one of the things I got frustrated by is that there are lots of textual arguments which lead to the conclusion: if you want to change your bodily experience, you have to do new things with your body and not just talk about it. I was compelled by these arguments. I thought ‘if that is right, why do we sit around and talk about ideas and read about ideas? This paradox became more and more pressing for me.” She wanted her students “to practice their bodies and philosophy differently,” and to move beyond “thinking” into experiencing the ideas of philosophy.Dr. Heyes’ began to conceptualize a course in which students were engaged with ideas intellectually, but also emotionally and physically; a course in which the gap between philosophical theory and how students/teachers live their lives was closed. She wanted to be part of a course in which the so-called “Descartes’ Error,” of separating the mind from the body, no longer existed in the way that she taught. If she could develop an academic course that brought together her knowledge of the body, culture and philosophy, she thought that in “some small way I will have done a service.”
The course Dr. Heyes developed to meet this need was called “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” This three credit undergraduate course was cross-listed in the physical education and philosophy departments. The course met twice a week in two, ninety minute sessions. In the first ninety minute session students started with a short meditation and then explored articles like “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Comportment, Motility and Spatiality” (Young, 1980) and a “Body of Knowledge” (Shusterman, 2006). This exploration of discourse about and of the body was supplemented by a second ninety minute session in which students engaged in a yoga practice of postures, breathing practices and meditation techniques based in the teachings of Pattabhi Jois. Together, these two distinct pedagogical approaches were designed to help students explore how the body has its own methods of knowing and that the embodied experience can be further analyzed with critical thinking. Part of what students learn in class is that philosophical ideas can be verified for truth by exploring how they do and do not manifest in the embodied experience, and that embodied experience might itself be a source of knowledge.
Initially, Dr. Heyes worried that students might think of the readings, research papers and philosophical discussions as the “real” class, th
e space in which knowledge was occurring. Dr. Heyes explains, “we are not good at having experiences that are bodily experiences and counting that as a form of knowledge. Second, we do not work with our embodied knowledge politically. We tend to just talk about it. The addition of yoga to the course offers a chance to experience this form of knowledge.” To counter this, students were required to learn and practice a basic series of postures so that the memory of the practice was embedded in their bodies. She evaluated students at the end of the thirteen week semester on their ability to implement the sequence independently and on their ability to modify the sequence according to their own physical ability. Students had the opportunity to see how they perceived from the body, and that these perceptions altered their propositional knowledge.One of the problems Dr. Heyes experienced in integrating yoga into the higher education setting is that many North American’s view yoga as an “anti-intellectual activity; yoga is essentially viewed and practiced as ‘just physical exercise.’ ” Dr. Heyes finds that yoga is often devalued in North America because, “Anti-intellectual sentiments play really well here.” She explains, “There is a lot of fear and distain for intellectuals. There is a sense that if you can act spontaneously then somehow you are free. There is the idea that ‘what it is to be an intellectual is to be bound by thought.’ If you are bound by thought then you are not free. You are uptight and constricted in some way. It is an inchoate kind of view, but it is popular. It is particularly popular in the yoga world [people who primarily practice modern postural yoga] and I’ve thought, actually it is a disrespectful view of yoga. Yoga has a really rich textual tradition.” One of the things Dr. Heyes hoped to address in her class is that other cultures do have a way in which the body is valued as a medium of knowing, and that this is not antithetical to intellectual thought.One of the reasons Dr. Heyes chose to cross list her class in physical education and philosophy was to bring the two disciplines together. She explains, “This is how yoga is taught in many places in the world. Hatha yoga is considered a way to prepare the mind for thinking and as way to experience different ideas.”
Dr. Heyes chose to teach Western feminist philosophy as opposed to the Eastern texts related to yoga because this is the literature she knows best. She tells the students in her class, “there is a literature here [in yoga] that you should be reading in conjunction with doing this practice, that properly belongs to this practice, but I don’t know that literature as a scholar. I am not well educated enough in this literature to be able to teach it within a scholarly community. I am going to teach you the literature I do understand and we are going to do this [yoga] practice and we’ll see what happens.” She has gotten criticism from other academics that it is “incorrect” for an educator to take ideas from Western epistemology and put them next to a series of yogic practices that actually have a context, history and their own spiritual lineage. However, the juxtaposition of different cultural ideas and practices allows for contemporary issues of the body, that many Euro-Americans experience, to be explored within the course. For example, the literature of yoga, such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Muktibodhananda, 1993) and Gheranda Samhita (Vasu, 1976) do not address women at all, nor do these texts discuss the relatively new cultural phenomena of eating disorders.
Dr. Heyes calls her class a “pedagogical experiment,” an experiment in learning that she engages in with her students. After the course had ended, she met with a small group of her students to talk about the experience of the course, and to learn from her students what worked and what didn’t in the inclusion of yoga. She explains, “I am trying to break down what it is to ‘do philosophy’ and explore the role of the teacher with my students. This is met with a tremendous relief on the part of a lot of students…Higher Education is an opportunity for professors and students to understand that freedom is not a set of prescriptions: do this, this and this and then be free. We need to understand that freedom, as a practice, results in a great deal of uncertainty.”
Dr. Heyes isn’t certain that pedagogical experiments like “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga” have enough support to continue at her university. Despite the fact the course was cross-listed in philosophy and physical education, only one physical education major took the course – meaning that perhaps there is not enough student support to continue the class. Furthermore, Dr. Heyes was required to apply for and receive a grant that would cover the cost of an adjunct to make up for the larger philosophy class she usually teaches. This adds to Dr. Heyes’ work load (in designing a new course, evaluating that course with students and applying for grants), making it unlikely that others in her department will engage in the pedagogical experimentation necessary to explore new ways of knowing.
____________________________________________________________________________
The reader can find more about her work at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~cheyes/research/index.htm.
She has also co-authored the following article on her integration of yoga as pedagogy: Helberg, N., Heyes, C., & Rohel, J. (2009). Thinking through the body: yoga, philosophy, and physical education. Teaching Philosophy, 32(3), 263(218).
________________________________________________________________
Cressida Heyes received her B.A. in Politics and Philosophy, an M.A. in Political Science in quick succession. Within weeks of receiving her doctorate, Heyes moved to pursue an academic tenure track job at Michigan State University. She now holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta. Dr. Heyes is best known for her highly interdisciplinary work that explores the intersection of philosophy with gender, sexuality, and health. She has written widely on the embodied experience, including texts on cosmetic surgery, transgender studies, weight loss, dieting, identity politics and sexuality. She is a widely sought after public speaker, lecturing on the role of the body in society in Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
0 comments:
Post a Comment