Taught Bodies

Taught Bodies proves a quick and tantalizing read about the discursive and material body in a variety pedagogical contexts. Consisting of a collection of papers delivered at a 1997 Australian conference, “Pedagogy and the Body, ” Taught Bodies offers an interdisciplinary romp through the school and university classroom, the art gallery, the theatre, popular crime fiction, the cinema, and of course, the boudoir, exposing and exploring the body present and produced in these contexts. With fourteen chapters and an introduction all in slightly over 200 pages, it is a quick and breezy text intended to arouse our interest—draw our gaze—to the often overlooked and taken-for-granted Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 262 fact that the body and pedagogy, “are inextricably entwined, ” as stated in the introduction. On this level it works. After experiencing this text, readers may indeed begin to see bodies in pedagogy everywhere. In my own case, after reading the text I was reminded about the body in teacher education: a space oddly enough not addressed in Taught Bodies but important nonetheless, wherein youthful, more often white and female student bodies train to be teacher bodies, and where, over greater time, graduate students bodies are turned in professorial bodies. Also I was suddenly made more aware of the statue of a male and female adult, naked but with fig leafs prominent, holding books aloft, that stands in the courtyard at the faculty of education where I teach. Among a host of other questions, the statues capture for me now the question of why and when teaching and taught bodies are rendered simultaneously visible and invisible; necessarily seen and not seen in relation to pedagogy, to literacy and to exalted texts, held, in this instance, away from and above the body