Jen Light’s teaching and research aim to close the gap between the growing body of research on movement and the learning process and the pedagogical strategies that educators use, finding ways to integrate physical activity and academic instruction at all levels. She offers three courses in collaboration with MIT and Boston-area coaches, physical education and wellness instructors, and movement artists: Embodied Education: Past, Present, Future; Exercise is Medicine: From Ancient Civilizations to Modern Healthcare Systems; and Thinking on Your Feet: Dance as a Learning Science. She is concurrently writing a book about the ancient wisdom and modern science of embodied education. Find out more about the MIT Project on Embodied Education here.
Light holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of the Professional Preparatory Program at Esh Circus Arts and an American Council on Exercise certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor. Professor Light has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and the Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and awarded the Outstanding Scholarly Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association (Sociology of Children and Youth), the Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and an honorary doctorate from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Light currently serves on the board of the Boston Circus Guild and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute. She has participated on the editorial boards of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing; Information and Culture; Journal of Communication, and Journal of Urban History. Previously, she was head of the MIT Program on Science, Technology and Society and on the faculty of the School of Communication and the Departments of History and Sociology at Northwestern University.
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