Teaching physiotherapy students to “be content with a body that refuses to hold still”

In recent decades, physiotherapists have become concerned with cultural, economic, philosophical, political, and social questions and have been exploring more flexible ways of speaking about and practicing physiotherapy. While recognizing the need to embrace a broader range of perspectives, physiotherapy educators and other medical educators have been at a loss as to how to best achieve this. Drawing on two examples from South Africa and New Zealand, we seek to illustrate possibilities and barriers to teaching social sciences to physiotherapy students, specifically theories of embodiment as an alternative to the biopsychosocial model. We review each educator's choice of embodiment theory in curriculum design and the role of the educator's disciplinary background on teaching, learning, and assessing that learning. Against this background, we explore physiotherapy students' experiences with theories of embodiment and possible transformative implications for their self-worth and/or professional practices. We suggest that students were able to explore physiotherapy's relation to the body and the profession's historical inattention toward the body as a philosophical/theoretical construct. From the lessons learned, some can perhaps be usefully passed onto others thinking of introducing a more diverse and inclusive approach of the body; one that we argue will be needed in the future.