Thinking Bodies, Thinking Minds: Educating with Movement in Art and Design

Leslie Hirst, Associate Professor in Foundation Studies and Pascale Rihouet, Lecturer in History of Art and Visual Culture, received an ACP fellowship and grant to research and lead workshops exploring how movement promotes creative thinking and how it might impact teaching and learning at RISD. In the first half of the Spring, Hirst and Rihouet researched a variety of movement practices and developed their own approach to guiding movement; in the second half, they led five in-class workshops. Their initial findings suggest that conscious movement in art and design education could be a powerful subject for further research and for curricular attention—“not as a Student Affairs offering similar to yoga classes, but as a meaningful component to the way that artists, designers, and scholars must make neuro-muscular-skeletal connections in order to work and think at their highest potential.