practicing vulnerability & mimetic learning: embodied learning through the lens of bell hooks
I will examine bell hooks’ exploration of embodied learning as illustrated in her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. I intend to draw connections between her understanding of embodied learning within institutional spaces of formal, adult education as it informs the pedagogical practices within informal, land-based sites and the incidental learning processes therein. Specifically, I will draw out how embodied learning is actualized in the traditional Inuit community of Pangnirtung, Nunavut during a six-week long Arctic field school that I have coordinated for the past three summers. I am especially interested in how embodied, cross-cultural learning is enabled through vulnerability and mimetic or imitative learning.
Expressions of the racialized body within higher education are woven throughout Teaching to Transgress, where hooks expresses an acute awareness of her body at any ivy league graduate school as one of the sole woman of color contrasting the predominantly white, male bodied professors and scholars. Throughout her doctoral degree, hooks made many astute observations, including the parallels of white, male dominance and knowledge production within bourgeois educational structures in the US and the subsequent erasure of the body. She examines how those with power within the institution also had the privilege of erasing their bodies. An exclusive group of intellectuals revered only for their minds’ ability to produce new knowledge, professorial insight was considered entirely separate from the bodies that carried the minds. Subsequently, this new knowledge, which was sanctioned by the gatekeepers of Western thought, cyclically maintained old structures of thought and accordingly, upheld systemic racism, tokenism and essentialism in the academy. Accordingly, knowledge dissemination within the academy was pushed through the ivory tower under the guise of neutral and objective information and professors were “invited to teach information as though it [did] not emerge from bodies” (hooks, 2008, p. 8).
The Pangnirtung Experience
The Pangnirtung bush school serves to elevate local knowledge, honor the skills of Inuit hunters and artisans while laying the groundwork for visiting students to cultivate lasting relationships and experience learning that is critical, cross-cultural and embodied. Implicit in theses pedagogical underpinnings are myriad incidental learning processes and an underlying philosophy of learning that upholds notions of wholeness that re-connect the mind/body split. Over seventeen years, the program has attempted to harmonize its programming to best respond to the rapid social, economic and cultural changes that are happening in the community and Nunavut at large. As the program coordinator, group facilitator and liaison between new students and the community, I am deeply invested in actualizing a prevailing pedagogy that elevates Inuit epistemologies and local knowledge while ensuring that the program never becomes too heavy a burden on Pangnirtung by emphasizing the paramount importance of reciprocity.
Practicing Vulnerability in Pangnirtung
Allowing yourself to be vulnerable as a student on the field school is one way of reconnecting the mind/body split. According to hooks, holistic models of adult education enable not only the students to grow and flourish in ones own self-actualization, but the instructional team as well. However, the conditions for empowerment “cannot happen if [educators] refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks” (p. 21). In my experience, sharing confessional narratives is one approach to expressing vulnerability in a productive way that helps create the conditions for educators to empower the group to take similar risks in their learning and engage with new ideas.
During this summer’s pre-session, I shared a rather embarrassing moment of learning that happened to me in the summer prior on the program. I shared with the group and new instructional team the story of getting caught in high tide while fishing in the Arctic Ocean. Seeking solitude, I set out one afternoon determined to catch my dinner, not telling anyone where I was going. After several hours of being perched on a large boulder in the sands of low tide, I noticed the waves were beginning to lap roughly at the rock below me. In spite of looking behind me periodically to survey the rising tide, I wasn’t able to see beyond the first thirty or so meters behind me, which, from what I could tell, was still free of water and lined with more boulder-like rocks. Deciding it was time to head back, albeit without my dinner, I quickly learned that the remaining thirty or so meters from the boulders to the shoreline was already filled with water and very quickly rising. In a response of sheer fight-or-flight, I waded into the water, and felt as it rose past my boots, up to my knees, stinging my thighs and approaching my waist. I knew this was not the time to panic so I just kept going. As the water level reached my chest, I felt each of my limbs treading water under great duress. A vision of the revered hunter Noah Metuq flashed across my mind, who was very close to the program and died tragically the previous summer in the water. I thought of his body in the water, not unlike mine, and wondering how much deeper I would have to submerge before reaching the shore. And then, I felt sand below my feet, emerging with my rubber boots compounded with water and muck. Three kids came running to the shore, joking, “don’t you not know about the tides?” My fear was quickly overcome with a sense of severe sheepishness. But I knew then that I had learned a pretty profound teaching through my body.
Sharing this story in June with the new set of students proved effective in helping to dismantle some of the power inscribed in my role as coordinator through exposing my own learning, re-learning and coming to know as a visitor in Pangnirtung. To iterate the sentiment of hooks, sharing my story was a means of refusing to reinforce systems of power in groups. As a member of an instructional team for a university program, I sharing some less than savory moments helped to humanize my positionality. More, I would argue that these confessional moments help lay the foundation for what hooks deems “engaged pedagogy”, which demands a commitment to the holistic development of a learner while promoting empowerment and self-actualization through unionizing the body, mind and spirit (p. 15).
Embodiment in Pangnirtung
In her teaching practice, hooks reminds us to remember our corporeal self because “to remember yourself is to see yourself always as a body in a system that has not become accustomed to your presence or to your physicality” (p. 135). Comparatively, embodied learning defies the university’s attempt to erase the body and “silence personal experience as a way of knowing” (Peter, 2013).
Inuit knowledge, not unlike many Indigenous epistemologies, privilege experiential, subjective learning that supports the understanding that “all existence is connected, and that the whole enmeshed the being in inclusiveness”(Kovach, 2009, p. 35).Recently, I drafted a personal protocol that illustrates my understanding of how to respectfully co-exist as a visitor in Pang, where my experiences of embodied learning have inspired many of the guiding principles.
Ways of Being and Doing as Visitor in Pangnirtung
always honor the process over the result; communicate through facial expression; gesticulate wildly and ensure language is performative; listen hard but carefully; be mindful while traversing the land, ask Elders where the best places to leave gifts are; never knock; never wait to be served – you will be waiting for a long time; be patient and learn to wait well; hurry up and wait; tell stories from your own experiences; mimetically adopt physical tasks; assist – and inadvertently get in the way; show, don’t tell; share food; partake in feasts; co-exist intergenerationally; extend your persona; engage in potentially embarrassing activities; recognize embarrassment as a socially useful mechanism in cross-cultural learning; partake in games; learn new physical competencies; re-awaken a sense of what is important; position yourself as a vulnerable learner; bask in the subsequent discomfort; express the ability to laugh at yourself while being able to stand your own ground; resist the urge to fill the space where reflective pauses may triumph; smile widely to indicate your comfort; smile widely to indicate your discomfort; share in laughter that is belly-deep, acknowledge it as a vehicle that carries the ease and contentment of a situation; experience the discomfort of bodies; be here now; experience a productive crisis; throw your own capacities into question; seek to cut the colonial gaze; experience humility on a grand scale; de-naturalize Western culture; show respect, gratitude; resist transposing values from the south onto the north; acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers.
Mimetic Learning as Path to Embodiment
Recently, I’ve begun exploring the idea of mimetic learning as a path towards embodiment in adult learners. While hooks does not speak explicitly of mimetic learning in Teaching to Transgress, her insights around consciousness of one’s body, the discomfort of bodies and fear of exposure are all themes that lend themselves to understanding the mimetic processes that occur in an engaged pedagogy.
In the chapter titled Eros, Eroticism and the Pedagogical Process, hooks explains how a truly engaged teacher and student enter the classroom whole, not as disembodied spirits. In order to achieve this level of wholeness, she feels we must express a commitment to passionate teaching and learning by daring to “give fully of ourselves, going beyond the transmission of information in lectures” (p. 194). For myself, this is a deeply fascinating area and is one that has proven a great challenge for me in teaching and learning environments in both the North and the South. I have always been compelled to temper my expressions of passion and zest for ideas that inspire me when I’m in learning environments in the South. My reluctance is backed by hooks’ understanding that knowledge is often presented as neutral in institutions of higher learning, which compels us to treat individuals and their ideas in a dispassionate way (p. 198).
When I’m in the North, however, I find I am much more comfortable with emoting passion, playfulness and engaging tactile and kinesthetic learning models in part because many Inuit in Pangnirtung have a highly expressive way of communicating, linguistically and beyond. The Pang dialect itself can feel extremely playful in the long-drawn out vowels and singsong articulation. Pangmiut also tend to use more guttural noises to express glee and dissatisfaction with children but also adults. Laughter in discussion, even heavy discussions, often flows from people so easily. I mention this because after being here for one week today, I’ve noticed that I’ve already adopted some of the nuanced play of language and gesture, and it got me thinking about what outsiders to the community may learn from watching and repeating gestures and language, as well as what meanings and relationships are produced from these processes.
It’s clear that imitation is a tool of influence and plays a significant role in intra-community building, but also appears to serve as a tool for mediating membership of outsiders like our visiting students. Moreover, mimetic learning is a deeply embodied process of learning in Pang, which I will illustrate now in more detail.
Mimetic learning in Pang requires that students pay exquisite attention to nuanced details in dialogue, play and labor as they unfold ritually. The implicit pedagogy of being on a hunter’s boat means learning through the body that when a gunshot rings off, your brain alerts your legs to bend quickly into a seated position, as we blast off towards a swiftly sinking seal. Even in moments of apparent lull, the hunters’ eyes sharply scan the water for bobbing seal heads. Latently, my body learned that when the boat motor drops down to a lower gear, I shuffle to accommodate Pitalu Kakee, who moves with deliberate motion to account for the level of gas that remains in the tank of his outboard motor. Each summer, I re-orient my body to the rhythms of Pangnirtung. The speed of which I walk the dusty road from uptown to downtown is radically different from how I shuffle in the streets of Toronto, constantly averting eye contact and remaining expressionless. In Pang, I have to make a concerted effort to walk much slower, and I become much more methodical with my steps as I navigate the rocks and ruts in the terrain. But more, my body slows for a more utilitarian purpose of being able to greet people as I pass them. It takes a few days to rework the length of each step I take when travelling from point A to B. Gradually, my arms and legs find a comfortable synchronicity with one another. When we reproduce these actions enough times, we are inscribing our bodies with a secondary discourse of learning cross-culturally, engaging in a rudimentary layer of deep learning through an embodied interaction.
One of the primary tenants of hook’s engaged pedagogy is her desire to transform consciousness by providing students with “ways of knowing that enable them to know themselves better and live in the world more fully” (p. 194). Throughout my experience in Pangnirtung as a teacher and learner, imitation and mimetic learning among non-Inuit students can be read as an empowering practice that lends itself to a deepened and cross-cultural perspective that has the potential of decolonizing learning.
The greatest sites of learning in my experience have been communication between adults and children, between master and apprentice hunters, within community games that foster collective belonging as mitigated through playful expressions of vulnerability and competition that build kinship ties, and in moments of labor and kinesthetic skill, such as operating a boat or preparing a seal. The potential for decolonizing learning arises when non-Inuit students on the program are subject to another culture’s norms and suddenly, their abilities, linguistic, kinesthetic and beyond are challenged, which requires that one surrender their bodies to scrutiny and become vulnerable to another, less familiar way of doing and being. In these rich moments of learning, the “colonial gaze can be ruptured and turned back onto us” (Peter, 2013). Non-Inuit are now asked to modulate their bodies and language to suit the local norm, which paves the way for productive embarrassment and humanization via self-deprecation, which helps de-naturalize Western epistemologies. Personally, I know that some my strongest relationships in the community are due in part to allowing myself to be vulnerable to local customs of embodiment and performance, including songs, dance, games and language acquisition. Through a mimetic methodology of learning, the conditions for building trust in the community can be established and one’s intentions are more transparent through an expressed willingness to laugh at yourself. Again, this is not unlike hooks’ understanding of embodiment when the educator shares confessional narratives for the purpose of revealing vulnerability and problematizing the power inscribed in their role as educator. These moments can yield inherently uncomfortable bodily experiences, but can also be read as sites of productive crisis, which can, depending on the student’s degree of willingness to be unsettled, pave the way for many powerful learning experiences akin to hooks’ self-actualization theory. According to hooks, teachers and learners that submit their whole selves to the challenge of pedagogical practices intended to enhance and deepen their capacity to live fully are self-actualized (p. 206).
Pedagogically, Inuit communities have been teaching and learning under the guise of embodied, mimetic learning for centuries. Isumaqsayuq is the practice of passing along knowledge through observation and imitation that is embedded in daily life and community activities (Stairs, 1994). A traditional mode of knowledge transmission that is built into Nunavut’s curriculum today, isumaqsayuq is expressed through the learner’s relationship to other persons and to the environment, and is most evident in the incidental, informal and embodied learning of children in Inuit communities like Pangnirtung. Children learn by the process known as of “backward chaining”, wherein the skills are acquired from watching Elders perform these practices, whether it be preparing sealskin or how to tell stories (Stairs, 1994).
How this practice extends to non-Inuit students learning from Inuit outside of four walls is a fascinating process that consistently proves to be a great challenge for many students, myself included. From what students have shared in talking circles, this is in caused by the disrupt in the conditions of learning which are suddenly less protected, and learning begins to occur in less clearly delineated spaces that transcend formal instruction and pervert any fixed understanding of learning outcomes. Furthermore, learning is deeply contextualized and monitored by social reaction. When placed in a traditional Inuit community for the first time, these conditions of learning often wreak havoc on students, challenging their conventions of education and disrupt a sense of balance in their learning. Within a Southern university setting, learning is confined to classrooms and lecture halls, and has a clear starting and ending time. On the field school, learning is more omnipresent and is as likely to occur during a conversation with a local as it is during a workshop with an Elder.
In Teaching to Transgress, hooks alludes to these moments of rich incidental learning that happen when an engaged pedagogue shares in the learning of her students outside of class time. hooks explains how her engaged pedagogy compels her to “sanction involvement with students beyond [the classroom] setting. I journey with students as they progress in their lives beyond our classroom experience” (p. 205). However, hooks notes that engaged pedagogy isn’t the sole responsibility of educators, instead, the learning community must see themselves as mutually responsible in the production of knowledge (p. 205).
Perhaps the greatest benefits for students that arise from a rupture in their learning, in my own understanding, is how knowledge is validated on the basis of life experience, which honors subjectivity and privileges multiple truths. Teaching and learning are emphasized as process-oriented activities, which are realized by students on the program when the ways of teaching and coming to know hold as much importance as the knowledge itself, which is encouraged through an insistence on storytelling and on-action reflection activities.
On the final page of her book in a chapter aptly titled Ecstasy, hooks shares how “students do not always enjoy studying with me. Often they find my courses challenge them in ways that are deeply unsettling” (p. 206). At the beginning of week two into the program this summer, students have been keen to share their insights with similar discomforts related to balancing learning and social responsibilities, building meaningful connections in the community in a short time, and actualizing their commitment to critical and decolonizing practices of reciprocity. I feel responsible for helping students work through their unsettled feelings, and so I ask them to sit with these many-layered challenges instead of writing them off immediately. This is a task that requires guided critical reflection along the way that helps students flesh out their pressing needs by helping them connect their learning in Pang to their studies in the South. The Pangnirtung Field School is a site where we convene to mend the division between body and mind, and “re-awaken a sense of what’s important” (Peter, 2013). My hope is that I can continue to create the conditions for tuning into moments of embodied learning as they unfold on the program and facilitate dialogue and reflection that make it so we can succumb to the vulnerability of learning on Inuit land in a productive way.
