Though somatics may still be a field of wildflowers (Eddy 2009), it is also becoming ever-more codified, with more programmes, subfields and specialisms. As an expanding field moving into and across a range of learning environments, this symposium offers an opportunity to reflect on the practices and pedagogies of this terrain. That is, this symposium offers a space to gather and share, not only the content of our work, but also to consider how might we articulate and extend our understanding of the underlying approaches, pedagogies, philosophies, and epistemologies of teaching and learning with and within somatic practices.  While there are differences amongst practices, the deeply nuanced attention to the experiencing bodymind features as a central aspect but is yet to be fully considered pedagogically. Somatic approaches ask us to re-consider what we mean by teaching and learning and who is considered within or excluded from ‘educational’ models. Somatic practices offer opportunities to consider not only ‘achievement’, ‘excellence’, or ‘milestones’ normalized by mainstream education, but encourages us to pay close attention to the virtuosic learning of any body. For example, we can see babies as exemplary learners full of expressive affect, resilience, drive, and curiosity, no matter the external ‘measures’ of perceived ability or range. This symposium offers an opportunity to consider modes and models of learning, and the politics, policies and practices of engaging the other in the dialogic model of any learning environment.



Aims of the symposium:

-To continue to develop research in the area of somatic pedagogies and practices

-To refine the research and articulation of somatic based pedagogies

-To foster an international network of somatic based practitioners/theorist/artists/teachers/learners

-To offer opportunities for local community and international guests to exchange, dialogue and cross-pollinate ideas and practices

-To engage in exchange of reviewing, researching and developing best practices

-To articulate the pedagogies emergent from somatic practices and to look at ways of integrating these modes across curricula.

-To consider how the practices of instruction and absorption in somatic arenas work within, challenge and/or re-model traditional educational settings?



Areas or topics you might address include but are not limited to:

-Articulations of somatic pedagogies

- The challenges and intersections between somatic and ‘traditional’ teaching and learning models

-Integration of somatic pedagogies into traditional teaching and learning subjects or environments

-Reflections on your somatic pedagogies and models of developing best practices

- Frameworks, modes of interaction, ways of holding/hosting/developing learning spaces/environments/relationships which foster curiosity, attention, resilience for teachers and learners

-Applying somatic methods and approaches to learning challenges

-Supporting difficulty, ‘stuckness’, and the ‘bad feelings’ that might still haunt our educational models and legacies

-Integrating creative modes and somatic modes of development

-Exploring Somatic and social imaginaries