Running With and Like my Dog: An Animate Curriculum for Living Life Beyond the Track

Authors

  • Rebecca J. Lloyd

Abstract

More than a playful inquiry, questioning what is it like to run 'with' and 'like' a dog provides a philosophical and tangible point of entry for re-exploring notions of a 'lived', or rather, a 'living' curriculum. Dogs have extreme perception, yet due to traditional hierarchical distinctions, human-animal intertwinings of consciousness are rarely explored laterally or with reversibility. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's common element of 'flesh' and Deleuze's notion of molecular becomings, this inquiry delves into life beyond the rigidity of our culturally constructed, forward-facing comportment. So often we humans run through life with self-imposed blinders. We run with a view fixed on the horizon, a gaze that is not open to the possibilities of the path we have the potential to not only follow, but to create. Dogs, by contrast, experience the world phenomenologically as they perceive it for what it really is: a slew of sentient wonder. As we approach what it might be like to be more like our dogs in the way we run through and shape our course in life, an animate curriculum for running off and beyond the linearity of a self-imposed track, tenure, athletic or otherwise, awaits.

Author Biography

Rebecca J. Lloyd

Rebecca Lloyd is an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa. Lloyd’s interdisciplinary research intertwines curriculum understanding, physical education pedagogy, sport psychology and exercise physiology as she philosophically, theoretically and practically researches ‘movement consciousness’ in health-related fitness and physical activity. She also explores ‘movement consciousness’ and embodiment theories that pertain to teacher education, particularly the postures, positions and gestures of teaching that put teachers metaphorically and palpably in touch with the process of learning.

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Published

2011-11-28

Issue

Vol. 27 No. 3 (2011): Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

Section

General Themes

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