Movement as a pedagogical resource

In the context of higher education, movement could be perceived as a disruption to cognitive learning and thus, being reduced to mere pause gymnastics and a little-bit-of-stretching-in-between-classes act. Or, alternatively, movement may be understood as the foundation of our epistemological construction of the world (Sheets-Johnstone 1999), where thinking in movement stems from the pre-linguistic state of making sense of the world in early infancy. As summarized by Sheets-Johnstone: “Caught up in an adult world, we easily lose sight of our fundamental capacity to think in movement” (1999). When trivializing movement into mere pause gymnastics, we turn a blind eye to movement as the carrier of pre-conceptual meaning.

In this article, I turn to my almost three-decade practice of using dance and movement as a pedagogical resource in teaching foreign languages and communication in tertiary business education (Kiviaho-Kallio 2021; Kiviaho-Kallio & Berazhny 2015). With a background as a qualified dance teacher, I soon discovered the benefits of using dance improvisation for improved self-awareness and interpersonal communication in the business classroom. For a long time, my experiments with arts-based methods remained in the margins. Today, when meeting former students, they often refer to ‘when we danced in your class’ as something that connects us over the decades.

During recent years, embodiment has gained growing attention in the educational discourse, and there are attempts for practical implementations as manifested in the 3AMK Moves project. Yet, in these attempts, we still seem to be far from the epistemological dimension of thinking in movement as a core of learning.

In the following chapters, I will take the reader to China, to Chongqing University of Science and Technology (CQUST), where I have experimented with dance- and movement-based pedagogy since autumn 2023 in the Degree Programme in Aviation Business offered by Haaga-Helia UAS as education export. By the time of writing this article, I have spent altogether nine weeks (218h) in a physical classroom with Chinese university students. My observations for this article are based on those classroom encounters, with particular focus on my last two-week visit to China in March 2026.

The necessity of two aisles in the classroom

For movement pedagogy to be successfully implemented, there needs to be the basic facilities for enabling movement. We will now start our examination by considering the necessity of two aisles in the classroom.

Upon entering the classroom at CQUST Campus in autumn 2023, I was thrilled to discover three sectors of tables with two parallel aisles crossing the large classroom space. In Finland, I was used to narrow classrooms with two sets of tables and one narrow aisle in the middle, cutting the class into two halves. My Chinese host had told me that I would be placed in a smart classroom, referring to the advanced technical equipment. In addition to technology, the classroom turned out to be particularly ‘smart’ in terms of layout.

Why would I spend so much time on the question of one or two aisles? Historically, human communication has developed in the circle around a campfire. Later, in business and politics, we have seen successful round table negotiations taking place. With two aisles in the classroom, the students can form an (oval) circle. There are countless dance- and movement-based exercises that can be performed in a circle, for instance an exercise I have named Living mind map where concepts are first explored through movement before being verbalized and spoken aloud.

Against the above, Chinese classes tend to be big. In my groups, I generally have about 55 students. Yet, the classroom does not feel cramped as it is dimensioned for large student groups. Moreover, outside the classroom there is a landing with ample open space that invites us to explore movement, once the students feel safe in their bodies and as a group. Dance-based pedagogy is ensemble work – trust needs to be built through small and cautious steps, and the teacher needs to attentively listen into the moods of the students.

Poetic Inquiry – phenomenological writing

The examples above call for phenomenological writing to make thinking in movement accessible to the reader. Here I draw from phenomenology of practice (Van Manen 2014), where phenomenological writing is perceived as a reflective process of attempting to recover and express the ways we experience our life as we live it. As expressed by Van Manen, writing is a reflective, sensual and embodied process: ‘To write is to reflect; to write is to research’.

Over the past years, as teacher/researcher, I have found my methodological base in Poetic Inquiry, an arts-based method where data is processed and represented through poetry (Prendergast et al. 2009; Faulkner 2020; Fidyk & St. Georges 2025). Poetic Inquiry allows space for emotions to arise in the text, and there is room for evocative silence between the carefully chosen words. Faulkner (2020) calls Poetic Inquiry an embodied method. As such, Poetic Inquiry may capture a moment in lived experience and convey it to the reader in the form of a pure memory. Currently, in my research, I am using Poetic Inquiry for exploring perspectives on embodiment in education export to China.

Against the above, from my teaching experience at CQUST, I would have numerous examples of dance- and movement-based pedagogy. However, I chose to write about my most recent experiment from March 2026, where I addressed the importance of looking up from mobile phones and computer screens to connect with emotions and with peers.

The exercise is based on a choreography by dance teacher Emma Monto at Helsinki Dance Institute (Helsingin Tanssiopisto), where the dancers explore emotions, gestures and gaze. The first three phrases of the choreography Unohtuneet (the Forgotten) to music by Fabrizio Paterlini are directly translatable to a business classroom as communication exercise. Finally, it should be noted that prior to practicing the choreography at CQUST, I met the group for 38h in the classroom for two intensive weeks.

While writing this, I am acutely aware of my words escaping the intensely embodied experience of thinking in moment. Thus, I now give space for a research poem that materialized after my return to Finland. Notably, the last stanza is a direct quote from student feedback.

The practitioner-of-arts-based-methods manifesto

I have now demonstrated an alternative approach to movement-based pedagogy, that of thinking in movement (Sheets-Johnstone 1999) as a fundamental dimension of lived experience and making sense of the world.

Notably, when teaching at CQUST Campus in China, we always have a Chinese professor present in the classroom. In connection with the Paterlini-inspired dance exercise, we had an interesting discussion with my Chinese colleague who also recognized the problem of excessive use of mobile devices, followed by a loss of introspection and connection with your environment. She was very supportive in encouraging the Chinese students to train their intra- and interpersonal skills through dance.

Finally, based on my long experience as practitioner of arts-based methods, I am ending with a manifesto: Let´s not reduce movement-based pedagogy to a half-hearted pause gymnastic exercise next to your chair in a cramped classroom.

In summary, to introduce thinking in movement, we need to start by addressing the one-aisle problem in the Finnish classrooms. It takes two aisles to form a circle of communication. And to take a Renaissance dance step to the left and the right – as we did many years ago in an accounting class at Haaga-Helia Porvoo Campus. But that’s another story…

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