Abstract:
Learning in secondary English has traditionally been ‘from the neck up’ with an emphasis placed on thinking and listening, and on reading and writing print-based texts; the same thing might also be said about learning in a tertiary context. However, with an increased focus on multiliteracies, our understanding of what subject area English is in the 21st Century has expanded to include a wider range of meaning-making modes and semiotic systems which we must address when preparing pre-service teachers to work in this area. This paper discusses one teacher educator's practitioner inquiry as she examines how theories of embodiment might be incorporated into pre-service secondary English teacher education. In this study, the educator and a group of pre-service teachers employed drama and movement-based strategies to move workshops from a place where the body is subordinate and where learning resides only in the mind, to a place where the body has a central role in meaning making and learning becomes an embodied experience. With an emphasis on visual research methods to capture bodies in action, the study generated a range of video data; in data processing, screen-shots of videos were taken at regular intervals to create a visual transcript. Working with screen-grabs of videos in this way provided opportunities to ‘disassemble’ the body into parts and examine what the different ‘parts’ reveal about the body in different learning experiences. Drawing on perspectives of multimodal analysis, this paper examines what specific resources, such as gaze, reveal about the role of bodies and the existing repertoires of participants in this secondary English pre-service teacher education context.