Minding the Body

Minding the Body describes how sites of learning within a single institution can require distinct, sometimes conflicting, ways of knowing. Over a two-year period, Julie Cheville observed key episodes in the athletic and academic learning of members of a single intercollegiate basketball team. Their testimony highlights the influential partnership of mind and body.On the court, the student athletes depended upon ritualized bodily activity to enter into relational knowing. Coaches and players perceived the human body as central to understanding. In the classroom, where learning was often characterized by the transmission of information, cognition was detached from concrete activity and interaction. Dispelling the myth that language is the sole determiner of thought, Cheville explores the implications of academic settings that ignore or devalue the conceptual significance of the body.
Drawing upon her former experiences as writing instructor, academic tutor, and basketball coach, Cheville notes the effect of fragmented institutional sites. She indicates how an overarching ideological divide between thought (academic) and body (athletic) aggravated the conceptual orientations student athletes maintained. Among a host of recommendations, Cheville suggests the need for writing instruction in classrooms and academic support programs that minds the body by assisting students to draw upon their situated experiences of being and knowing for the purposes of critical inquiry.

The Transformation of Space into Place
The Pursuit of Systemic Balance
The Efficacy of Emotion
Academic Integrity: The Need for "Live Encounters"
Minding the Body Afterword: Reflexive Ethnography and the Undoing of a Scholarly Warrior

Bonnie Sunstein is professor of English and education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Writing in English and Program Chair in English Education. She teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She has over thirty years of teaching secondary and college English in New England, where she continues to teach in the summers, at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Institute on Writing and Teaching.

A practical and engaging consultant, keynote speaker, and workshop leader, Bonnie works frequently with departments of education, universities, local school systems, and conferences of teachers. Her workshops on writing, literacy, portfolios, teacher-research, and cultural studies offer hands-on experience.

Bonnie's books for Heinemann include What Works, Composing a Culture, Portfolio Portraits, The Portfolio Standard, and she has contributed many chapters in other collections about writing and research. Her articles, poems, and chapters appear regularly in professional journals and collections. She is co-author of three editions of FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford St.Martins). Bonnie has received Iowa's Collegiate Teaching Award and the English Department's John Gerber Award for excellence in teaching, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Foundation "Imagining America" grant for her FieldWorking Online project. She has led two national portfolio projects, served on NCTE's CEE executive committee, Standing Committee on Research, and was a Trustee of the Research Foundation.