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Embodied Knowledges

  • Are you ever uncomfortable or anxious in front of the classroom?
  • Do you sometimes wonder if your students could be more engaged?
  • Do you think about how your students perceive you? Do you wonder what you don’t know about them?
  • Have you considered how your teaching has (or hasn’t) changed over time?

Trusting our experiences in the classroom as learners and teachers helps to make us better practitioners. The bodies and multi-faceted identities that we teach with are key to that experience. Using the framework of queer pedagogy, let’s consider the varied ways our and our students’ bodies exist in the classroom and how we relate to each other in that space. What do we know now that we didn’t before? What have we always known? This workshop is an opportunity to reflect on and share what we have learned through our cumulative hours in the classroom. Join us for a discussion about the embodied experience of being a CUNY student/teacher and how that has developed your thinking about teaching and pedagogy. Then, get ready to swap skills, techniques, and strategies based on your individual experience and knowledge.

This workshop took place via an in-person workshop in Fall 2025. The workshop and materials were developed by Danielle Bennett.

Materials 

All materials on this page and in the linked google folder are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International Public License. 

This folder contains A slide deck that includes workshop instructions and a citation for the reading excerpt used.

Materials Folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vdeIOUUjzdhwcZ1X8tw6lzmBNfGPPtmZ?usp=sharing

Workshop Agenda

  • Introductions
  • Share teaching challenges or interests that brought you to the workshop
  • Movement Warm-up (What does happy/sad/excited/bored look like?)
  • Vibe Shift Movement_1 Act out a disengaged classroom/a disempowered teacher and discuss experience (or talk through images in slides)
  • Writing Activity
    • Excerpt from: “Intersectionality: Embodied Knowledge, Bodies of Knowledge” by Stacey Waite, in Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy, Elizabeth McNeil, James E. Wermers, Joshua O. Lunn, Eds
    • How do we know in our bodies when things are going well?
    • Other prompts in slides
  • Sharing: What do you like about your teaching practice? (Can use Pain Point/Solution framework in slides if useful)
  • Vibe Shift Movement_2 Act out an engaged classroom/an empowered teacher and discuss experience (or talk through images in slides)
  • Closing thoughts