Minding the Body: What Student Athletes Know About Learning

by Bonnie S Sunstein

Minding the Body describes how sites of learning within a single institution can require distinct, sometimes conflicting, ways of knowing. Over a two-year period, Julie Cheville observed key episodes in the athletic and academic learning of members of a single intercollegiate basketball team. Their testimony highlights the influential partnership of mind and body. On the court, the student athletes depended upon ritualized bodily activity to enter into relational knowing. Coaches and players perceived the human body as central to understanding. In the classroom, where learning was often characterized by the transmission of information, cognition was detached from concrete activity and interaction. Dispelling the myth that language is the sole determiner of thought, Cheville explores the implications of academic settings that ignore or devalue the conceptual significance of the body. Drawing upon her former experiences as writing instructor, academic tutor, and basketball coach, Cheville notes the effect of fragmented institutional sites. She indicates how an overarching ideological divide between thought (academic) and body (athletic) aggravated the conceptual orientations student athletes maintained. Among a host of recommendations, Cheville suggests the need for writing instruction in classrooms and academic support programs that minds the body by assisting students to draw upon their situated experiences of being and knowing for the purposes of critical inquiry.

176 pages, Paperback

First published July 16, 2001

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look at the academic-athletic divide by looking particularly at the biological nature of the student-athlete. There is a dichotomy of "mind" and "body", in which situational cognition is impacted by the physiological nature of the human body through athetic competition. The book includes specific case studies.

A insightful, different, and extremely useful book about the collegiate student-athlete.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really brilliant analysis of embodied cognition in women athletes. Includes some outstanding stuff about the role of emotion in learning... wow. Can't believe I teach the same students, work with the same people, and am in the same PhD program as this writer!!