Walter Benjamin (1999) reminds those of us steeped in the literal and modernist institutional discourses of benchmarks and quality of teaching surveys in education that ‘the most ancient’ reading involves looking to ‘entrails, the stars or dances’ (p.722). Through image this paper presents traces of embodied pedagogy from the school and university classroom. These tracings of embodied pedagogy defy baseline certainty and instead assert Benjamin’s (1996) thesis that knowledge can only ‘stand up’ through multiplicity, through all acts of knowing (p.278). As teacher–educators in globalised worlds we have been drawn to re-examining our understandings of learning and teaching. Over the last thirty years we have directed our pedagogical gaze through traditional categories of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. However, we have become aware of its limited focus in discerning current student identities and student learning constructed and represented in the shifting platforms of physical and cyber worlds. Our students live and learn in both worlds. These worlds are distinguishable in many ways but as pedagogues the striking differences are ‘embodiment’ and ‘relationships’. As pedagogues, we question how our twenty first century students learn. Are relationships and embodiment critical and central to learning? As a first step in the large program of research from these questions we have confronted the difficulty of discerning embodied pedagogy. This paper is concerned with the ways of recognizing embodied learning in the physical learning situations of the classroom. Embodied pedagogy includes embodied teaching and embodied learning but is conceptualised through ‘pedagogy as relational’ – between teaching and learning and between teacher and learner. As Aoki (Pinar and Irwin, 2005) and Ellsworth (1997, 2005) urge us to engage beyond commonplace understandings of ‘the relationship between’, we explore a pedagogy that may be ‘cemented deep in the nature of the relationship between’ (van Manen 1991, p.31) self and Other. Ted Aoki speaks of the ‘indwelling midst’ as spaces of ambivalence in pedagogy that are ‘pregnant with possibilities’ (p.426). He understands this ‘no-thing’, not in the sense of lacking, negativity or suspended scepticism, but as one that is ‘pregnant with possibilities’ (p.426) and space. We postulate the form and the function of that location as embodied pedagogy and ask: • What does Aoki’s notion of the ‘indwelling midst’ (Pinar and Irwin, 2005) of embodied teaching and learning look like? van Manen (1991) somewhat paradoxically, states that pedagogy cannot be found ‘in observational categories’ and yet pedagogy is felt by its presence in an encounter. Rather than being drawn into dualistic or Cartesian understandings of being, we find resonance in our joint experience as teachers and teacher educators with the tentative and speculative.

Over one academic year in Australia and located at university and secondary school campuses, 25 pre-service teachers, 25 secondary students and the authors of this paper formed a learning cohort to engage with core professional studies in a pre-service teacher education course. Data from the project included hundreds of digital images. Individually the researchers engaged with all the images and recorded their readings in response to the research question. We drew ambient, reflected and radiant (Rodaway, 1994) lines of flight upon each image tracing the shape or contours of embodied pedagogy. A moderation process then followed. In considering the contoured images we asked: does this analysis allow us to maintain an imaginative state of awareness while at the same time a capacity to question their value and generative capacity (Mitchell, 2005)? The marked images were shared and discussed with groups of teacher educators, education researchers, pre-service teachers and practicing teachers.

Our data analysis makes ‘matter- energy’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.408) visible and troubles the delineations between what can be seen, what is invisible and what is imagined. We experience and draw upon this matter, this embodiment, as teachers but have difficulty in speaking of its presence with our pre-service teachers or to those beyond the classroom. The project makes a contribution to pedagogical knowledge. Through image, we have traced the form of pedagogic moments and offer an ethological reading of them. Our gaze registers the embodied nature of pedagogy and our research provides word and image of that embodiment. The project also makes a contribution to methodological knowledge as the significance of image is emphasised through data collection and data analysis.