No More Brains on Sticks: Summer Pedagogy Reads

The best professors are lifelong learners—including learning how to be (even) better teachers. While it might be hard, or outright impossible, to find time for professional development during a busy academic term, the summer provides an opportunity to slow down, reflect, and refresh our teaching toolkit. One useful approach is to pick up a new pedagogy book every year. To this end, we offer two summer reading recommendations: Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s The Spark of Learning. Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion (2016) and Susan Hrach’s Minding Bodies. How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (2021). Both Cavanagh and Hrach make evidence-based arguments for expanding beyond the traditional “brains-on-sticks” model of education, where students (and professors!) are reduced to their intellectual dimension only. Science has made us increasingly aware of the role our affective and physical selves play in the processes of cognition. Faculty can leverage this knowledge to enhance student learning and wellbeing—and create academic environments more hospitable to human thriving.  

In The Spark of Learning, Cavanagh argues that many of our pedagogical goals can be better achieved if we pay attention to emotion. In the author's words, “if you want to grab the attention of your students, mobilize their efforts, prolong their persistence, permanently change how they see the world, and maximize the chances that they will retain the material you’re teaching them over the long term, then there is no better approach than to target their emotions” (p. xiii). Accordingly, Cavanagh offers advice on how to “consider the emotions of your students when managing how you present yourself to the class, when designing your syllabus and assignments, when considering which activities to include in a given class session and how to frame those activities, and when grading and providing feedback to your students” (p. xiii). Small interventions like using emotional hooks, telling a story to enhance lecture content, making time for goalsetting and reflection, or supplementing traditional discussion with role playing can engage student emotions and boost learning. See here for more insights from Cavanagh’s book. Many professors worry that such an approach might compromise the intellectual integrity of their courses or promote a culture of coddling. But Cavanagh reassures us that the exact opposite is true: “We’re not going to coddle our students, we’re going to energize them to work harder than ever before” (p. 8).  

Hrach’s Minding Bodies considers the neuroscience of emotion alongside the science of embodied cognition: “Scholarship of teaching and learning has effectively applied neuroscience to establish the ways we acquire new knowledge–through retrieval and spaced practice, enhanced by social and emotional connection. The insights of embodied cognition explore the role of physiology in those processes” (p. 15). Hrach’s chapters offer tips on incorporating movement, spatial awareness, and sensory perception into our pedagogical repertoires. Out-of-the-box classroom activities like small-group “standing meetings,” brainstorming strolls, or embodied “surveys” (where students express their position on an issue by physically positioning themselves on a spectrum) can energize bodies and minds and infuse academic learning with fresh energy. As the author passionately asserts, “We are deluding ourselves to imagine that we can compartmentalize students’ emotional and physical well-being during the years-long process to earn an academic degree. Teaching faculty can become much better at acknowledging the relevance of students’ embodied experiences to their intellectual receptivity and at adopting a holistic view of the learning process” (p. 18). 

Summer is a great time to remember that our brains are not disembodied, dispassionate intellectual entities but living organs of the human body. Cavanagh and Hrach’s books can help us consider how to best use this knowledge to enhance our teaching craft.