Body Knowledge and Curriculum

The Author: Stephanie Springgay is Assistant Professor of Art Education and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. in curriculum studies and art education at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research and artistic explorations focus on issues of relationality and an ethics of embodiment. She received the Arts and Learning SIG of the American Educational Research Association’s outstanding dissertation award for her work on youth and the body. In addition, as a multidisciplinary artist working with installation and video-based art, she investigates the relationship between artistic practices and methodologies of educational research through a/r/tography. Other books include Curriculum and the Cultural Body (Peter Lang, 2007), co-edited with Debra Freedman, and Being with A/r/tography (2007), co-edited with Rita Irwin, Carl Leggo, and Peter Gouzouasis.

«Deleuzian philosophy is revolutionary, inviting us to think of our lives in terms of a series of encounters that open us up to difference, to the possibility of becoming a new society, a new people. He was interested in how the arts might play a role in the processes he envisaged. Stephanie Springgay has taken up that challenge in this book, showing us how educational encounters with students in the art classroom open teachers and students to new ways of thinking and being that emerge through the creation of their own art works. As an a/r/tographer, that is, as artist, researcher, and teacher documenting her work with students and their art teacher, Springgay uses the concepts Deleuze invented for this revolutionary work to rethink education practice and philosophy in a way that is at once engaging, entertaining and inspiring.» (Bronwyn Davies, Professor of Education, Narrative, Discourse, and Pedagogy, College Research Group, University of Western Sydney, Bankstown Campus)«‘Body Knowledge and Curriculum’ is just the kind of theory and practice text the fields of art education, arts-based research, and curriculum theory need and deserve. In this work, Stephanie Springgay demonstrates why she is among the preeminent scholars in arts-based research and exemplifies the arts-based methodology – a/r/tography. ‘Body Knowledge and Curriculum’ places at the center of consideration the engaged translations of theory within practice. Springgay weaves them together as mutually informative discourses and makes this difficult task accessible. Based on a six-month study in an alternative secondary school, Springgay renders explicit what can be done when students and educators work from mutual positions of respect and a desire for exploration.» (B. Stephen Carpenter II, Associate Professor, Department of Teaching, Learning & Culture, College of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University)