A Mind Body Virtual Book Club

This week we launched the first session of our Fall book club. For the next 5 weeks, we will immerse ourselves in the goodness of Susan Hrach's book Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation and Movement Affect Learning. Our book club embraces Dr. Hrach's call for the end of mind-body dualism and is designed to allow participants to experience in each session what it feels like to apply one of the 6 principles discussed by Susan.

Our Book Club Schema

We designed our book club to model what we ask our educators to do in course design: decide on a structure or schema that best fits their content area. The schema for our book club is Enter, Engage, and Exit as explained in the image below.

A Delightful First Session

Our faculty and staff at the Medical University of South Carolina are amazing and were very open and receptive to this new experience of a book club.

• Enter: Our experiential guest facilitator for our first session was Coach Ayana O, a business coach and mindfulness teacher. Coach Ayana led us in a highly appreciated guided meditation for clarity with a focus on present awareness, a better way to stay in control.

Engage: We engaged in discussion starting off with everyone sharing their aha moment in the chat it was amazing the diverse responses from reflections as a parent to traditional classroom instruction to rounding with residents.

Exit: Our Director of Instructional Design and Technology Mary McGraw Smith led us out with reflective experiences of how impactful movement was for her students in K-12 and how excited she is to be part of the efforts to achieve similar positive outcomes in Higher Ed where we sometimes treat students like Susan describes in the book, "Brains on sticks."

How Did Everyone Leave?

I have adopted one of the practices from Liberating Structures where after each meeting I ask each member of my team "How are you leaving?" I didn't realize how impactful this was until one day I forgot to ask at the end of a meeting and one of my team members said, "Julaine how are you leaving?" and she shared that she was looking forward to sharing how she was leaving. She found our collaborative brainstorming energizing and wanted to share. This gave me great joy and since then I have endeavored to ask in almost all my meetings with my team and others, "How are you leaving?" As you can imagine I had to ask the book club participants "How are you leaving?" and my heart was so filled with joy I had to do a word cloud.

How are you leaving?

How are you leaving after reading this article? I hope you are leaving feeling:

• joyful and energized by the positive responses to our book club with a difference.
• inspired to try something similar at your institution.
• connected to the movement to transform our higher education classrooms into spaces that embrace mind-body wholeness and value the impact of embodied teaching practices.