Wilhelm Reich talked about the idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves. He was controversial, of course, but his base idea that a lot of the human experience is connected to how people defend themselves in social settings (classrooms, for example) has in my view not been sufficiently studied by top language researchers.
Please correct me if I am wrong on any of this, if any research exists where body posture, distance between teachers and children, have been studied enough to draw some conclusions.
My conclusions, not taken from any research but rather from my own time spent in the classroom, is that language teachers have to actively and consciously develop strategies via community building to help tear down body armor in kids if they are to even have a shot at making their instruction reach the kids.
So I am suggesting to the language researchers that they should not just study about language acquisition, but about defense mechanisms in students.
Back to Reich. If it is true that kids are putting up physical walls in our classrooms, then shouldn’t we address that? When we don’t address that piece in our comprehensible input classrooms, we resemble people talking to brick walls.
This is why we have the Town Meeting.
But where does body awareness in teaching start? With us. We must demo what we want to see when we are teaching, or the kids won’t pick up on it.
