Hooping through Interdisciplinary Intertwinings: Curriculum, Kin/aesthetic Ethics, and Energetic Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Learning to become a teacher is inherently stressful. Daunting deadlines of final assignments become the curricular hoops students jump through, conceptualized as gateways to experiencing something meaningful on the ‘other’ side, beyond the circumscribed constraints of a university campus. In an ethic, kinaesthetic, and energetic pedagogical response, teacher candidates were invited to spend time with and physically explore the very object they associate with their exasperations: the hoop. This inquiry thus aimed to explore emergent interdisciplinary understandings between the practice of ‘learning to teach’ and ‘learning to hoop’ on campus and with children in local schools and a First Nations community. Student interviews revealed that the practice of hooping not only released stress, it afforded an opportunity to loosen rigid notions of curriculum and pedagogy, specifically that learning is more than a linear journey of jumping through a prescribed set of hoops and that teaching is more than a process of transmitting information. A bodily pedagogical practice of vulnerability, fluidity and interactivity thus emerged as teacher candidates became receptive to step into and be transformed by the hoop.