Susan Hrach Plenary Session

This plenary session traces the evolution of a SoTL investigation from personal curiosity to theoretical framework to emerging research design. I’ll share how teaching outdoors and “on location” caused me to wonder why and how students became more deeply engaged in our material, leading me to explore worlds far beyond my home discipline, culminating in my book, Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (WVU Press, 2021). The presentation will move beyond the book’s frameworks to examine current efforts to measure and test embodied learning principles across diverse disciplinary contexts. The session concludes with a call to action: inviting cross-disciplinary collaboration to design research studies that can empirically validate the theoretical foundations of embodied learning. Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of how embodied cognition translates to classroom practice and opportunities to contribute to this growing research agenda.