What I enjoyed most about the microteaching session was learning from colleagues who used teaching approaches involving the body. I have been reflecting on how the different areas of my work can connect through the lens of the body, understood as the first site of the lived experience and the threshold through which we perceive space. I previously attempted to foreground ‘the body’ in my teaching, but felt I lacked the theoretical framework to do so.
The other microteaching sessions allowed me to explore connections between body, space, and architecture in teaching. Carlotta invited us to move through the room, observe the city and recreate our view through a collaborative drawing. Milly asked us to stand and translate a still image into movement, which we developed in partnership. In both instances, standing and moving shifted our energy, relieved the stiffness of sitting, refreshed our focus, and changed our relationship to the space. I also noticed how the tasks detached us from reliance on laptops and phones.
These exercises reminded me how movement shapes engagement in the classroom and how physical space influences belonging and connection (H Wookey, 2023), with the body itself becoming a medium for collaboration. My questioning of how traditional classroom layouts privilege frontal settings and produce disembodied knowledge resonates with Choreographing the City (Theatrum Mundi, n.d.) and with Bingham‑Hall and Cosgrave’s (2019) argument that spatial arrangements choreograph behaviour, attention, and embodied experience. Together, these reflections highlight movement as essential for reconnecting learning to the body, space and to lived spatial experience.
Aglaia then asked us to draw a precedent based on one person’s verbal description, almost as if we were inside the space they described, turning language into an image. To me, this was embodied knowledge (Ingold, 2023). As we drew, guided by our colleague’s words, we were thinking through the hand, creating new knowledge intuitively, letting the hand guide the mind while giving form to what was being described.
I would like to embed this as a ritual to begin or end my teaching days. Each week, on rotation, one student would describe a space chosen from a precedent image, while the rest of the class would try to draw it. As the term progresses, this could become an exercise where students describe a key space from their own projects, while their peers attempt to visualise it. In return, the student describing their project would receive multiple interpretations that would help them revisit and rethink their design. This exercise, over time, could adopt different media for translation.
Building on what I experienced, I would also like to test an exercise where students, upon entering the classroom, collaboratively reconfigure the setting of the teaching space, moving furniture to create a new focussed space for that day. Coordinating through doing and thinking through the body, without premeditation, could give the room a new identity each morning and set the tone for the learning that follows.
I believe these methods would encourage critical engagement with the learning space, bring some joy back into the classroom, and nurturing collaboration, helping students approach learning with more presence and awareness.
References
Bingham-Hall, J. and Cosgrave, E. (2019). Choreographing the city: Can dance practice inform the engineering of sustainable urban environments? Mobilities, 14(2), pp.188–203. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2019.1567981.
H Wookey, S. (2023). Movement & City – Wookey Works. [online] Wookey Works -. Available at: https://sarawookey.com/public-engagement-in-the-city/ [Accessed 21 Feb 2026].
Ingold, T. (2023). Training the Senses: The Knowing Body. Marres. Available at: https://marres.org/en/program/training-the-senses-the-knowing-body/ [Accessed 21 Feb. 2026].
Theatrum Mundi. (n.d.). Choreographing the City. Available at: https://theatrum-mundi.org/project/choreographing-the-city/ [Accessed 21 Feb 2026]
Carlotta’s microteaching – collective drawing
Carlotta’s microteaching – city observation
Note on the use of Copilot: Microsoft Copilot has been used to help condense the text without generating any of its own inputs, in order to adhere to the word limit. This was then edited manually to create the final blog.