Within MIT’s Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, atop the resilient blue mat of the gymnastics area, an unconventional anatomy session took place during an October gathering of class STS.024/CMS.524 (Thinking on Your Feet: Dance as a Learning Science).
Facilitated by a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), Thinking on Your Feet was designed and launched for the inaugural time in Fall 2024 by Jennifer S. Light, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology and a professor of Urban Studies and Planning. Light envisioned a diverse roster of guest educators for the course. In the final week of October, she passed the baton to Middlebury College Professor Emerita Andrea Olsen, whose knowledge intertwines dance and science.
Olsen divided the class into smaller teams. Participants placed their hands on each other’s shoulders in a conga-line formation and moved across the mat embodying the layers of the nervous system as Olsen had just clarified: the supportive spinal cord and authoritative brain of the central nervous system; the sympathetic nervous system, which governs fight-or-flight responses, alongside its calm, parasympathetic counterpart; and the genuine “gut reactions” linked to the enteric nervous system. The groups laughed and faltered as they strove to maintain their roles and synchronize their actions.
As peculiar as this activity was, it suited a class focused on movement as an educational instrument. One of the introductory texts for the course, an excerpt from Annie Murphy Paul’s book “The Extended Mind,” explains why this approach was a more impactful precursor to understanding the nervous system compared to a conventional lecture: “Our memory for what we have heard is remarkably weak. Our memory for what we have done, however — for physical actions we have undertaken — is much more robust.”
Comprehensive learning
Thinking on Your Feet serves as the third course derived from Light’s Project on Embodied Education (the previous two, created in partnership with MIT Director of Physical Education and Wellness Carrie Sampson Moore, explore the historical intersection of exercise, schools, and medicine). Having spent much of her career as a historian of science and education, Light redirected her academic focus to movement and learning after she began training at Somerville’s Esh Circus Arts to alleviate the stress of leading her department. During her sabbatical a few years later, as a participant in Esh’s pre-professional program for aspiring acrobats, she took various dance classes covering genres from ballet to hip-hop and Afro-modern styles.
“I began experimenting with the notion that this is experiential learning — could I introduce something like this to MIT?” she reflects. “There’s a wealth of intriguing contemporary scientific research indicating that cognition and learning are not solely cerebral processes but engage the whole body.”
Thinking on Your Feet covers an overview of recent research findings demonstrating the astonishing degree to which physical exercise boosts attention, memory, executive function, and other measures of mental sharpness. Additional readings explore dance’s significance in the sharing of knowledge throughout human history — from the Native Hawaiian hula tradition to the early ballet forms in European courts — and discuss how movement-centric education can involve underserved demographics and neurodiverse students.
“Embodied learning can be advocated from numerous perspectives,” states Light. “I want my students to realize that what they have been informed about learning is merely part of the narrative, and that contemporary research, ancient wisdom, and non-Western customs have much to contribute regarding how we might reconsider education to optimize the advantages for all varied types of learners.”
Acquiring the art of dance
If you glance at the new class’s syllabus, the term “fun” is hard to overlook. It appears twice — bold, in capital letters, and adorned with an exclamation mark.
“I aim to cultivate a playful, experimental, ‘there’s no need for perfection, just embrace creativity’ atmosphere,” explains Light. No prior dance experience is necessary. The 18 students who enrolled this fall varied from proficient dancers to complete beginners.
“I mainly enrolled in this class to meet my arts requirement,” concedes junior physics student Matson Garza, one of the newcomers. He was taken aback by how much he enjoyed the course. “I am intrigued by physics education, and I’ve discovered that beyond entry-level classes, it frequently lacks intuition. Merging movement might be one strategy to address this issue.”
In a similar vein, second-year biological engineering major Annabel Tiong found her pathway through her interest in hands-on education, which was deepened through her volunteering with a program designed to ignite curiosity about healthcare careers by involving children in medical simulations. “Although I don’t have a substantial dance background,” she shares, “I was intrigued by how dance, with its loose and creative essence, could be employed to convey STEM subjects that seem quite tangible and technical.”
To supplement the Tuesday lectures and discussions, Thursday “lab” sessions concentrated on overcoming reservations, instructing various movement styles, and aligning dance with academic subjects. McKersin of Lakaï Arts, an instructor in dance for the MIT Music and Theater Arts section, led a lab focused on Haitian harvest dances; Guy Steele PhD ’80 and Clark Baker SM ’80 of the MIT Tech Squares club introduced square dancing and its connections to mathematics and programming. Light invited some of her dance instructors from the circus community, including Johnny Blazes, who specializes (according to their website) in working with “individuals who have been implicitly and explicitly told they don’t belong in movement and fitness environments.” Another guest, Reba Rosenberg, guided the students through fundamental partner acrobatics that Light reports greatly enhanced the class’s sense of confidence and community.
“Afterwards, several students inquired, ‘Could we try this again?’” recalls Light. “None of them believed they could accomplish the feats that by the conclusion of class they managed: balancing on each other, standing on each other. One can imagine how the necessity of physically trusting someone with your safety yields extraordinary benefits when we return to the classroom.”
Learning through dance
The pinnacle of Thinking on Your Feet — a concluding project accounting for 40 percent of students’ grades — demanded each student to develop a dance-oriented lesson plan on a STEM topic of their selection. Throughout the semester, students were exposed to various instances of such educational approaches. Olsen’s nervous system parade was one example. Others came from Lewis Hou of Science Ceilidh, an organization that employs Scottish highland dance to depict concepts across the natural and physical sciences, and MIT alumna Yamilée Toussaint ’08, whose nonprofit STEM from Dance fosters young women of color in creating performances with technical elements.
As an initial assignment, Light had anticipated asking students to adapt pre-existing choreography. Yet, her students surprised her by expressing the desire to leap straight into crafting their own dances from scratch. Their initial attempts weren’t intricate, but Light was sufficiently impressed by their results that she plans to revise the syllabus accordingly.
“One group was exploring differential calculus while envisioning the floor as a graph,” she recalls, “having dancers contemplate their positions in relation to one another.” Another group, comprising
Members of the MIT Ballroom Dance group creatively interpreted the computer science principle of pipelined processors. “They were communicating with one another using terms like ‘load,’ ‘execute,’ and ‘write back,’” Light mentions. “What’s remarkable is that the students could provide each other with constructive criticism on the technical aspects. For instance, ‘Alright, I notice you’re attempting to clarify a clock cycle. Perhaps you could try presenting it this way.’”
Among the pipelined processing participants was senior Kateryna Morhun, a competitive ballroom dancer since the age of 4, currently pursuing a degree in artificial intelligence and decision-making. “We aimed to push our boundaries by teaching a specialized, more intricate subject that typically isn’t the focus of embodied learning projects,” Morhun explains.
How valuable can dance be in conveying complex academic material? This sparked a lively discussion within the Thinking on Your Feet group. It’s a question Light plans to explore further with mechanical engineering instructor Benita Comeau, who audited the course and proposed a lab investigating the links between dance, physics, and martial arts.
“This course inspired numerous ideas for me, spanning various subjects and movement styles,” Comeau states. “For instance, the square dance session reminded me of the symmetry groups used to define molecular symmetry in chemistry, and I realized that students could engage with symmetry groups while learning about chirality” — a geometrical characteristic pertinent to many scientific fields.
For their concluding presentation, Garza and Tiong’s team addressed substitution mechanisms, a subject within organic chemistry (“often regarded as a very challenging and dreaded class,” based on their report). Their instructional plan indicated that students would first need to grasp essential concepts through traditional readings and discussions. However, to animate that content, groups of participants representing atoms would take center stage. One, representing a central carbon atom, would extend an arm to indicate readiness to accept an electron. Another would stand nearby with two balls symbolizing electrons, linked by a ribbon. Others would rotate in a designated sequence around the central carbon to illustrate a model’s initial stereochemistry. Thus, a dance would commence: a three-dimensional, human-scale representation of a complicated chemical process.
The group was prompted to summarize what they wished for learners to uncover through their performance. “Chemistry is highly dynamic!” they articulated. “It’s not merely combining chemicals to magically create new substances — it’s an evolving process of collisions, bonding, and molecule-breaking that leads some structures to disappear while others emerge.”
In addition to assessing the effects of movement in her courses in partnership with Raechel Soicher from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab, Light is authoring a book about how contemporary science has rediscovered the ancient principles of embodied learning. She envisions her class initiating a dialogue at MIT about integrating such movement-based insights into future educational methodologies. In fact, she believes MIT’s legacy of innovative teaching methods makes it an ideal environment for these inquiries.
As her syllabus articulates: “For all of us, as members of the MIT community, this course encourages us to rethink how our ‘mind and hand’ approach to experiential learning — a product of the 19th century — could evolve into a ‘mind and body’ paradigm for the 21st century.”