Closing the gap between moving and learning
Education Innovation Grantee Spotlight: Jennifer Light is on a mission to help schools integrate physical activity and academic instruction.
By Maria Segala
Through its Grants in Education Innovation, the MIT Jameel World Education Lab aspires to develop the building blocks, ideas, and connections that could power a global transformation in learning. Jameel World Education Lab grants have supported educational innovations across a rich variety of fields including: linguistics, mechanical engineering, literature, architecture, physics, management, political science, and more.
Over the coming months, we will take a closer look at each grantee’s projects. In the spotlight today is Jennifer Light, Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology in the Program on Science, Technology and Society. Light’s project, entitled “An online platform for explaining, promoting, and facilitating embodied education at MIT and beyond” aims to close the gap between the growing body of research on movement and the learning process and the pedagogical strategies that educators use. Light seeks to find ways to help schools integrate physical activity and academic instruction at all levels — for example, teaching elementary school geometry through yoga, middle school physics through martial arts, and high school history through dance.
Below Light discusses her project including what she’s most excited about and takeaways from her work.
What excites you most about your project?
What excites me most about this project is that movement genres from sports to gestures to playground games offer a nearly infinite textbook for teaching subjects across the curriculum, from PreK to college level. But it is remarkable to discover how, with a bit of creative thinking, we could be getting students out of their seats much more frequently — without detracting from academic learning time.
What do you hope is the biggest takeaway from your project?
One of the biggest takeaways from my project is that not every educational innovation has to be expensive. Embodied Education is a comparatively low-cost innovation because it recombines existing institutional resources in novel ways.
What does success look like for your project?
Success will be a website that is valuable to educators in diverse educational settings in the Jameel World Education Lab community and beyond. The site can go live in early summer 2024. In the longer term, I also hope this work helps to build community among advocates for movement and learning to consolidate our impact on the education field.
Read the full interview with Light on the Jameel World Education Lab’s website.
MIT educators and researchers: The Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, is interested in your next educational innovation. We welcome proposals to fund AY2025 projects that could improve learning on our campus and across the world. The Education Innovation application is open through March 13, 2024.
Closing the gap between moving and learning was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.