How’s your posture? This seems to be one of those perennial points of contention between parent and child. Parents, it seems, love to pester their children with having correct posture: Sit up. Stand up straight. Don’t scuff your feet. Look me in the eye. Etc…
One’s posture, it is assumed, communicates a great deal about who one is and the attitude towards life that one has. As a teacher who regularly stands in front of a classroom of “postured” students, I’m pretty sure this is true. A student’s posture communicates a lot: Why on earth am I here? Why on earth are you still droning on about this? I really hope that girl sees me right now? Why is she not looking at me? I hope the teacher calls me! I hope the teacher never calls on me in my life! Check out this link from the NY Times on the “Hidden Meaning of Hand-Raising” to prove my point.
But if students’ posture speaks volumes, what about the teacher’s? What does it 
communicate to the students when a teacher lectures with his arms crossed? How about when a teacher sits? What does it communicate when the teacher remains behind a lectern for the duration of the class? What would it communicate if the teacher taught from behind the class?
I’m reflecting upon this because I recently went to hear James K.A. Smith and David Smith talk about their new book, Teaching and Christian Practices. They talked about the need to have an embodied pedagogy. Too often we envision education as simply an information dump: the teacher (the one with knowledge) opens the tabula rasa of the child’s mind and dumps in the data. Instead, they suggest – rightly – that teaching should pay attention to our whole selves – minds as well as bodies. Part of that embodied teaching is the teacher’s physical posture.
Just as the students’ posture communicates a great deal to the teacher, so the teacher’s physical posture communicates a great deal to the student. What is my posture communicating?
