The sensorium and fleshy schools

Abstract

As places of learning, schools inevitably foreground cognition. Neglected in schools and in the literature is the body, often an inconvenience or barrier to learning rather than a site of perception and understanding. Where the body is considered, it is primarily concerned with pedagogy and children rather than analysing the broad range of embodied experience: teachers’ sensuous experience is side-lined; classrooms are central with toilets and staffrooms and corridors usually ignored; policy and architecture largely unconsidered. Furthermore, ironically, the focus in the literature also foregrounds the body within its contribution to cognition rather than centering the fleshy experience of sensing. This article therefore addresses these omissions and focuses on the sensorium – movement, the haptic, hearing, smell-taste and visual – providing a framework to analyse the truly embodied experience of the school environment. It argues that as well as being culturally bound, the sensorium is delineated and encoded within the educational ideology and architecture of schools, prescribed by senior leaders to manage and police the flesh within their school walls.