Enhancing Empathy for Justice: A Methodology for Expansive Teacher Professional Development through Creative Body-Based Learning

Abstract

This paper reports from a design-based research project seeking to reduce bullying, and so, contribute to the sustainability goal of improving (understanding of) justice. Goals such as this call for holistic and interdisciplinary ways of thinking that are quite at odds with the linear and reductionist epistemologies available with globally dominant ‘neoliberal’ discourses on education and educational decision making. To achieve goals such as improving justice, sustainable education and educators must explore and champion expansive ways of knowing that acknowledge and celebrate the complexity of everyday learning contexts. Responding to this need, this paper presents a case study of how we, as a group of educational designers and teacher educators, have explored how the arts-based pedagogy known as Creative Body-Based-Learning, when coupled with Engeström’s expansive theory of learning, can provide an alternative structure and methodology for teacher professional knowledge production. The paper will also outline the use of the research methodology of computer-aided phenomenography as a means of evaluating this kind of complex learning where simple testing and self-reporting are typically inadequate.