Embodied Learning with Susan Hrach

On today’s episode of Intentional Teaching, I bring you a fantastic interview with educator and author Susan Hrach. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Columbus State University and the author of the 2021 book Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. I knew of Susan’s work in embodied learning, and I discovered recently that we share an interest in active learning spaces and how they can be used to support and enhance teaching and learning. I reached out to Susan to see if she could help me better understand the connections between our bodies and our learning spaces, and she gladly agreed. 

In the interview, Susan describes some of the ways we use our bodies for learning, and she shares practical advice for faculty teaching on-site or online for recognizing and fostering embodied learning.

Episode Resources:

Susan Hrach’s website: https://susanhrach.com/

Susan Hrach on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SusanHrach

Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning: https://amzn.to/3TEsMFL

“What it’s like to teach in an active learning classroom,” by Robert Talbert: https://rtalbert.org/teaching-in-alc/ 

“More than mere handwaving: Gesture and embodiment in expert mathematical proof,” by Tyler Marghetis, Laurie D. Edwards, and Rafael Núñez, https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AAUoDwAAQBAJ

"The push for more active learning spaces on campus," Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/16/push-more-active-learning-spaces-campus

Music:

"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching

Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Transcript

 [00:00:00] Derek Bruff: Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Breath. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

I was recently reminded by Karen Costa that all learning is in person learning. That is whether teacher and students are gathered together in one time in place, or whether they're meeting up in a Zoom classroom or they're interacting a synchronously through a learning management system. We are always in person wherever we are.

We are embodied creatures, not just brains on sticks. Our bodies and how they interact with our physical environments matter to the act of learning. On today's episode of Intentional Teaching, I bring you a fantastic interview with educator and author Susan Hrach. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Columbus State University and the author of the 2021 Book, Minding Bodies, How Physical Space, Sensation and Movement Affect Learning.

I knew of Susan's work in embodied learning and I discovered recently that we share an interest in active learning. And how they can be used to support and enhance teaching and learning. I reached out to Susan to see if she could help me better understand the connections between our bodies and our learning spaces, and she gladly.

In the interview, Susan describes some of the ways we use our bodies for learning, and she shares practical advice for faculty teaching on site or online for recognizing and fostering embodied learning.

Thank you, Susan, for being on the Intentional Teaching podcast. I'm very excited to talk with you today. 

[00:01:52] Susan Hrach: Ooh, thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be here 

[00:01:56] Derek Bruff: So you are the director of the Faculty Center for Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Columbus State University. Is that. That's correct. And that is in Columbus, Georgia, but you are not in Georgia this year.

[00:02:07] Susan Hrach: That's right. I have the fabulous Brian Banks serving as interim for me this year while I am on a Fulbright. And so I am at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario with Fulbright, Canada and. I'm so lucky that our, our host institution and David Hornsby, who's the associate provost for teaching and learning here, sponsored a scholarship of teaching and learning Fulbright research chair award.

So I'm so thrilled to be here alongside Peter Felten. The two of us are doing 

[00:02:45] Derek Bruff: Oh, you're there. I knew Peter was doing something similar. I didn't realize you were there with Peter. 

[00:02:49] Susan Hrach: Yep. So here we are in Ottawa thinking a lot about just teaching and learning, learning from their faculty here, and enjoying the gorgeous outdoors environment.

[00:03:06] Derek Bruff: I bet it's really nice there. You are the author of a book called Minding Bodies that is about the role that our bodies play in learning. And one of the arguments you make in that book is that we aren't just brains on sticks. That our bodies and our environment matter. They affect how we learn, how we think.

To try to give our listeners a little sense of that. Can you, can you maybe give an example of a body learning connection that a lot of people might be able to relate to? 

[00:03:38] Susan Hrach: Well, I, I mean, I think one that is fairly well known that everybody has experienced from time to time is just how much your sleep matters and your energy level.

Even just when you're trying to answer email, say at the end of your day rather than first thing in the morning or, or do anything that requires pretty serious like cognitive effort. It's just, it's still amazes me how much longer and harder it is to do when my body just doesn't have as much energy. And it's a purely cognitive task, but you know, it's absolutely faster, easier goes, you know, so it's so much simpler, even in my head when I'm approaching it with a, you know, fresh night's, good night's sleep.

[00:04:32] Derek Bruff: I'm the kind of guy who likes to get stuff done, and so sometimes I have to talk myself into going to bed because I could finish the project tonight. But I'll realize I could actually finish it faster and better if I get seven hours of sleep and then tackle 

[00:04:46] Susan Hrach: Yeah, that's right. And I, and I think there's been several very persuasive studies recently that people are, you know, sharing with students about the trade off of staying up for an all nighter to study versus just going to bed and getting a really good night's sleep.

And I, I mean, I think it's stunning, right? The students would never believe that they would do better on the test if they skip staying up all night study. But they do. 

[00:05:15] Derek Bruff: I believe it. I believe it. . . . Well, and I have a, I have one story about this. I was teaching a first year writing seminar in the math department.

This was many years ago now. . and I had a student who came to our 9:00 AM class every day, and I really thought she hated the class. . , her entire affect was, I don't wanna be here. . , this is dumb. I, she didn't wanna participate in class. And then a couple weeks into the semester, she came to my office hour at three in the afternoon.

and she was cheerful and bubbly and had all these great questions about course material, and I realized it was sleep, right? It was, it was 9:00 AM was really rough for her given whatever her life was like. . . And it completely affected her participation in the course. And so it was, I was glad to know that she actually really liked the class and she was enjoying it.

Yeah. But I wouldn't have seen that if I hadn't seen her in the a. 

[00:06:04] Susan Hrach: Isn't it great that you could notice the difference right away when she came in? Like she just seemed like a different person, right? 

[00:06:10] Derek Bruff: Yeah. . Yeah. I wanna talk for a minute about pandemic teaching and something that I've been saying a lot and I, I don't think I'm making this up, is that a lot of faculty and other instructors became much more aware of our student's.

physical learning environments during the pandemic. So instead of just having them come into the classroom, we're all used to seeing, we were on Zoom and students were having to participate in class from lots of different places. And we as instructors had a, sometimes a little more insight into where they were coming from.

Is that their, you know, their childhood bedroom and their parents' house? Are they in their car at a McDonald's parking lot? Cause that's where the free wifi is. I think a lot of faculty became more aware of, at least the role that our environments play. And I think to some degree, well, I think about things like lighting right.

And comfortable chairs. Sure. Right. These things that we could see students making strategic choices around. , hopefully designing a, an environment they were in. What what did you see as some of the things that either you or faculty you've worked with have taken away? The the pandemic teaching .

That I think that, that you would want them to like, continue to think about and continue to, to to incorporate into their work. 

[00:07:26] Susan Hrach: Well, it's funny that you would say, you know, that you hoped students were making intentional choices about their environments because I'm not sure that we, any of us really did, at least at first.

And it's one of those issues that I don't think we talk explicitly about enough. So it may have seemed incidental, like, oh, you've, you know, look at you, you're sitting outside on your back porch. But what we need needed to, you know, I think have the time to absorb is that We need to talk early and often about where you are and what options you have and what difference it makes.

Because sometimes I think we. , Well, there's constraints, right? There's where's, where does the wifi reach to? And where is the quietest place and where am I gonna be out of the way of other people in this environment, you know, being distracting. So there's real constraints. And for, for a lot of our students, you know, they didn't have tons of options, but I think it would've probably been really.

And some people I'm sure did address this, very helpful to spend carve time out to spend talking about where are the third places, you know, in, in your town or in the environment where you know your students live that they might be able to go to find quiet. I found through a completely different assignment that I had, that a number of my students had never visited their local public library,

And so, you know, these are opportunities to say space matters and for you to be super conscious of choosing. Space where you're gonna do your work online, or you're gonna have your meeting that's a synchronous meeting is going to shape the success of that moment. And so whatever you need to do with the space that you choose, and that might be Lighting a candle, opening the window you know, doing something that would make it more pleasant.

Or it might be just thinking carefully about your posture. You know what, I, I know I had to buy a new chair during the pandemic. I mean, I think a lot of us suddenly had some back issues that we didn't know about. But that connects to the second part of your question, which is how can we do online and get away from our screens more often?

Because the amount of screen time is just really not doing us a lot of favors. And so I've really started thinking a lot about ways to design assignments that do not chain my students to the computer. How can I have them go somewhere else and think about something and then use their devices to, you know, record a short audio or take some pictures or, or journal and then take a picture of their handwriting and upload it to the LMS, you know, discussion board or something so that it becomes a livelier space and we.

Have the freedom to, you know, break away from our screens. I think that's, that's a huge challenge. 

[00:11:20] Derek Bruff: Yeah. And what I'm hearing from you, and let me make sure I'm following, is . So this idea of moving away from our screens . There's that line sitting as the new smoking, right? there's, there's a lot.

Negative health effects sitting too long and having too much screen time. But you're saying it's not just an effect on your body, it's also an effect on your ability to learn, your ability to remember your ability to engage with the material is affected by these movements and these shifts of 

environment.

[00:11:47] Susan Hrach: It is. And so here's where things get really interesting, and I hope you'll bear with me if I. I'm struggling to explain this cuz I'm doing a lot of reading about it myself right now, which is physical spatial navigation. And so I'm, I'm reading about the way that your hippocampus is the center of kind of your spatial orientation and also memory, right?

And so there's a lot of interaction between our being able to physically navigate. Through our environment and then our sort of ability to recall where, where we were when we were thinking about something or where, you know, the journey that it took to while we were thinking about X. And so, you know, I've had students tell me things like yeah, I, I had this.

Fantastic experience of listening to it was a, I don't know, it was a recording of something that she was needing to It was content, right? That she was observing and she said because I did it while I was rollerblading. And it was, it was just had a totally different effect on me. And I was like, Exactly.

Yes, exactly. It would because you're, you're literally able to kind of be watching the the passing landscape as you're thinking about this thing. And I've had an experience of trying to memorize a, a passage of literature, in fact, a. Shakespeare speech while I was on my bicycle. Hmm. And I mean, you should try it.

It is pretty amazing what a difference it makes to be kind of engaging with content that you wanna remember and think deeply about while you're moving through a landscape. And even inside the classroom, I think if we use all four walls and here I'm getting to, I think something you are really interested in these, you know, active learning spaces.

If we really make the most of, of the full classroom environment and have students navigating that space as they are wrestling with the content. It's gonna help. It just, it's it, I mean, I have anecdotal evidence from my own students, but I've just seen it work differently. And so I think, you know, we just we knew that, that it was more engaging to have them, you know, using all of the different walls of the classroom.

and, you know, making, making use of the space in a way that it didn't have a front of the room. But I think what we're still needing to just be very interested in, in understanding is how that actually is using your brain in a more natural way that, you know, humans evolved to learn things.

 is by, you know, having to be physically kind of moving as we were learning things. 

[00:15:23] Derek Bruff: Well, and you're reminding me, I read a post recently, I think he wrote it back in January or February. Robert Talbert who is a math faculty member at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and. He, he he had a sabbatical year where he studied active learning classrooms and the, and the literature on them.

And then this past spring, he had the chance to actually teach in an active learning classroom for the first time. And he, he writes about the experience and how different it is from reading about those classrooms to actually teach in one of those classrooms. But one of the things that he put in his blog post that I hadn't thought about was he described the ways that mathematicians do their work.

And you know, I was trained as a mathematician. I had seen this right. We, when my advisor and I would sit down to solve a problem, we only sat down for a little while, right? we would be in his office, there was a chalkboard. He and I would usually take turns going to the chalkboard at working through some things, right?

We were never. Seated looking down at our papers the whole time, we were doing lots of different movements with our bodies and we were using things like a, a whiteboard or, or a chalkboard. Right. A collaborative space of some sort to do that. And that's what Robert liked about the active learning classroom, is that it's a space that actually allows the students to physically do the things that mathematicians are doing when they're doing math.

[00:16:40] Susan Hrach: Yeah. 

Yeah. Oh gosh. I read such an interesting study about math in particular, in which somebody did a they were like, Creating an inventory of mathematicians, gestures and also, you know, the ways that they were solving equations at the board. And it was called something like math is manual labor. 

Because it was so physical and involved a lot of gesturing and you know, having to ex explore the ideas while you were standing and. Moving around and talking. And so, yeah, I think that's, that's super interesting. And, and I would say even coming from my own field in, in the humanities and literature it doesn't have to mean that you're just sitting and looking at a text.

I and it takes a little bit of prep. I usually identify some key passages that I want everybody to. You know think carefully about, and I just, you know, enlarge them on a blank doc and print it. And sometimes I use scissors. This is all very, you know, low tech and a piece of scotch tape and I you know, tape them to the walls.

Or to those giant sticky notes. I love those giant sticky notes. And then I ask the students to walk around at, as they are, like reading and thinking through those key passages. So we could do that sitting down and you know, in the more traditional environment, we'd say, All right, everyone. And then let's look at what happens on page 97 here.

But the feedback that I got from the students was that they literally remembered those key moments from the texts they were reading better, differently, deeper, because they were having to navigate the passages, you know, in the space of the room. So I think it can be done. It's, you know it's just a an exercise in, in being creative.

[00:19:01] Derek Bruff: Let me shift gears just a little bit. Let's talk about a traditional college classroom for a minute. . . And you can, you and I can probably imagine the same thing, right? There's rows of chairs, maybe even bolted to the ground. . There's, there's a lectern or a podium or whatever you call it at the front.

Either a chalkboard or a whiteboard, maybe a screen that comes down. Right. There's definitely a front of the room. Maybe there's an aisle down the middle of the chairs. Maybe there's not. If you were to do kind of a embodied cognition assessment of a space like that, what, what would you observe?

What would you note about pros or cons of how this kind of space might support good learning? 

[00:19:43] Susan Hrach: Oh my gosh, Derek, it's almost like you were at my last meeting with the Carleton Community of Practice. This is exactly what we did. We we're meeting in different classroom spaces every time so that we can be super intentional about scanning the environment.

So we're looking for both affordances of the space and then constraints. So the things that I have them examine are affordances for, first of all, offloading cognition. So that would be like whiteboards, chalkboards anything that is available to the students to jot down ideas, take notes, generate, you know, thoughts, collect information.

Or do they have to bring in all of that themselves? Right. Or, you know, how much is the room supportive of their need to to, to put their ideas on some other holding space so that they can go ahead and think about other things, offload their cognition, right? Then we look at affordances for. Communication.

So, you know, there's tech that could be involved here. If it's a big space and you need microphones and I'm currently kind of obsessed with wanting to see these catch box microphones. Have you seen this? 

[00:21:16] Derek Bruff: I've I think I have seen one in person. I've definitely heard of them. 

[00:21:20] Susan Hrach: I wanna see one in person 

[00:21:22] Derek Bruff: that's a microphone in a box that you could throw across the room.

Yes. And have someone else catch it and then project their voice to the whole room. 

[00:21:29] Susan Hrach: Yes, and I love the concept. Mostly because it requires a coordinated effort between the tosser and the catcher. And according to embodied cognition research that would enhance their sense of personal connection. 

That the room would feel like they were sort of more all in this together if they had to perform this coordinated movement of tossing and catching this microphone. . So really what I'd like to see is in action, some people using the catch box, but at any rate so affordances for communication, affordances for interactions.

So here's where we get to the classroom furniture in its layout. How easy is it for everyone to talk with different members of the class? To move into different groupings? There might be really nifty chairs that, that are affording you some opportunity to kind of roll around or, or tilt back or fidget or, you know, but if the tables are all locked down in ways that you, there's nowhere really to roll with your chair, then it's of really limited value.

And so, I mean, I know that most classroom. Are built with this idea that they have to accommodate a certain capacity, but I think in most cases the best thing that we could do is take things out of the room so that it's a little freer to be able to move around. And I don't know, you know, if that's always possible with the capacity, but but that, that's a, an affordance for interaction cuz if you're pinned into your desk or into the place in the auditorium where you sit or behind this table that can't move.

Then you're not going to be able to talk to everyone in that class or move around very easily. So then a little bit more off the beaten path. I mean, we, we also looked for affordances for restoration. Okay? So this is where your brain needs to be able to look out a window or, and look at different distances.

It's good for your eyes to be able to look far away to sort of uses different muscles and sort of gives your close vision a chance to, to rest. And also it's, it's a, it's restorative for just your, your sense of wellbeing to be able to see some green spaces. So does the classroom have that sort of affordance?

And is there, can you open the windows? What is the lighting like? You mentioned lighting earlier. Lighting is huge. So there have been some great articles I've seen recently in, in the Journal of Environmental Psychology that are about dim light and bright light. and so I think probably very few classrooms are on dimmer switches, but apparently according to the, to the experimental research, and this makes good, I mean I think we can all connect to this.

If you wanna do a little bit more creative thinking, get people to sort of lower their inhibitions. To generate more unusual ideas, then you should turn down the lights a little bit. I mean that's why, that's why dance clubs are dark, right? Cause we need to feel a little bit safer to To be more creative and, and then apparently you know, the bright, brighter a light is the more conscious we are of our kind of executive functioning and our need to sort of be we feel that other people.

You know, be surveilling us more easily. And so it's sort of a might be more conducive to certain kinds of thinking but, or, or certain kinds of self-regulation, I think is what the article suggested. But then I also talked to somebody who pointed out that she's not sure that that's true of all types of neurological.

Identities that we, you know, some, for some people, bright light may not help their self regulation at all. It's too bright and it's, you know, upsetting. So there's affordances for restoration is an important thing, and then I'm sure I'm leaving something out, but, but you can spend a long time really looking carefully at a space and thinking about all the ways that it's either conducive or has obstables.

To doing the sorts of things that would, would be, you know, better for students learning. 

[00:26:42] Derek Bruff: Yeah. Well, what advice would you give for an instructor? Because we can't always redesign the space, although now I'm imagining, you know, if I were trapped in a classroom with no windows, , could I hang a mobile of some sort in a corner?

To give students something colorful to move their eyes to, that's further away, right? That sounds like that could be helpful actually to give them a, a, a place to, to, to move their eyes for a little bit. But what, what other advice would you give for faculty who are trying to be intentional about 

their students embodied learning. 

[00:27:13] Susan Hrach: Well, I mean, I guess I would say first of all notice the way that your classroom probably is encouraging you to just stand in one place and talk. Uninterrupted exposition is what most classrooms are built for, right? And so, you know, at, at some point I think you, you can walk into any classroom and, and when you're aware of these things, you think, Oh my gosh, it's really.

It's amazing how just fundamentally, you know, all education spaces are built around this, this it's like a physical manifestation of the filling of the vessel, of the, like, there's gonna be this unidirectional content that flows from one source and, and is just going to be absorbed by everyone else in the room.

And so whatever the technology set up is, if you're. Frequently, a screen is coming down on top of a chalk board or whiteboard, right? So does that really need to happen? Do we really need, you know, see if there's opportunities for you to just be low tech from time to time and. You know, challenge yourself to think of, you know, how, how, how could we get through this class maybe without looking at a screen or just looking at it for a short time and then raising it and doing other things.

Variety is a huge help to attention and alertness. So I guess, you know, the other thing faculty should feel empowered to do is just mix it up. I mean, you don't have to do everything completely differently all the time. Just do some different things sometimes. And you know, the easiest thing to do is to give students a chance to leave the classroom sometimes.

 Send them out in pairs or groups of three to have a like, quick 10 minute discussion about something and come back. I mean, that's seems so. Simple. And yet it's kind of radical like, what? We're gonna let them leave! 

[00:29:39] Derek Bruff: What if they don't come back?! 

[00:29:40] Susan Hrach: And if they don't come back, I would say like, Well, hmm, I think we have some questions to ask ourselves.

You know what? Wow. It was like we were holding them prisoner, you know? So, you know, let them leave the space from time to time. And think of other places on campus where you might occasionally hold class just for variety. You know, is there, can we meet in the library today? Is there something productive we could do there?

Can we, you know spend 15 minutes outside today. So those are tiny things. And then, you know, really, I, I think we need to be braver about moving furniture. I mean even when it's got wheels on it and it's meant to be flexible. They're so often just in rows facing the front, which is such a waste, you know?

I mean, that's not, that was not what the, the. Facilities people probably had in mind. , right? Yes, it takes a few minutes to rearrange and it takes a few minutes to set back. And, you know, one of the other sort of radical ideas that I've been encouraging people to think about recently is getting a list together of all of the other faculty who have happened to use the room where you're in.

 And having, I mean, this is it, it can get a little dicey. See if you can have a conversation about what default setting for the room might be acceptable to everybody, given that it doesn't have to be in rows all facing the front, right? Yeah. And I mean these are, these are delicate conversations and you know, I've had, I've been in some that were, you know, bordered on some hostility.

 Cause this is tough, right? These are, this is real, this is where it gets real. 

[00:31:42] Derek Bruff: I taught, I taught in a math department where, Some of the classrooms had a sign at the front that said, at the end of class, please return their furniture to its proper configuration. And that drove me up a wall.

 Because what is proper, Right. Proper is what it needed to be for my class today. Not some, you know, default that we haven't had a discussion about. 

[00:32:03] Susan Hrach: Exactly. And you know, I mean, I think we have to be very. First of all, aware of the fact that some of the people in the classrooms may not have much institutional status or power.

And if they're, you know, adjunct faculty who are, who are racing from place to place and they. You know, I, I just wanna, you know, I wanna be considerate of the fact that there may be some people who would, who would really like to do more creative, clever, active learning, and they just don't have a moment in their day to really be able to, to do that.

But the other thing I think I, we should just be sensitive to is, Active learning might take, might take a whole generation to really, to really have inhabit, you know, to, for people to inhabit these spaces in different ways. You know, some of the comp design and architecture firms that do active learning spaces done some really interesting work about how long it takes human beings to first of all, kind of grieve over the environment that's, Changed.

Yeah. Cause humans get really, we get very like get very attached, attached to our environments. 

[00:33:36] Derek Bruff: Right. You should ask a 

mathematician about their chalkboard, , 

[00:33:40] Susan Hrach: Right. So, you know, be prepared for people to need years to kind of let go and then, Other more years on top of that to, to, I like this word, to inhabit a space.

Not just to use it, but to be like, Okay, I, I, I know how to operate in this new space. And so, you know, I'm trying to. To, to just give myself a much longer term, more patient view of the work that we, that we have ahead. I mean, I still think it's, we gotta keep talking about it and keep modeling it and keep practicing with it and learning about, you know, what works and what doesn't work.

But it's not a, it's not gonna be fast. . 

[00:34:34] Derek Bruff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you Susan. This has been a great conversation and I'm excited to hear more from you over the coming year as you continue to explore these topics abroad. 

[00:34:45] Susan Hrach: I appreciate your good questions. I mean, as you can tell, I just am so.

Completely obsessed with, you know, the interesting things about the physical world that you know, those of us who are, tend to be so abstract and in our heads all the time, you know, it's like a really fun new way to, to, to look at at the work that we do. 

[00:35:15] Derek Bruff: Sure. And to understand ourselves better and our students better, and be more intentional about how we cultivate the kind of experiences we want.

[00:35:24] Susan Hrach: Exactly.

[00:35:29] Derek Bruff: That was Susan Hrach, faculty developer at Columbus State University, author of the book Minding Bodies, and currently a distinguished research chair in the scholarship of teaching and learning at Carlton University in Canada. I really appreciated all the insight and practical advice she shared about embodied learning.

I can relate to that student who mentioned learning while rollerblading. Not that I roller blade, but I remember hearing Karen Costa, whom I quoted at the start of the episode talking about trauma informed pedagogy on a Tea for Teaching podcast during 2020. And I remember right where I was when I listened to that episode, standing in our laundry room, folding clothes.

As for Susan's advice for teaching, I think I'll be quoting her a lot with that line. "We need to be braver about moving furniture." See the show notes for links to more information about Susan and her work, and please let me know if you try out any of the strategies Susan suggested in this episode. I would love to hear your thoughts on embodied learning in onsite and online classrooms.

This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Buff. See the show notes for links to my website. The signup form for the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, which goes out most Thursdays, and my Patreon, which helps support the show for just a few bucks a month. You get access to the occasional bonus episode, Patreon only teaching resources, the archive of past newsletters, and a community of intentional educators to chat with.

As always, thanks for listening.