top of page
IMG_8023 2.JPG

I have taught movement practice and philosophy across Higher Education and in professional arts environments since 2004, operating fluently between Performing Arts and Environmental Humanities. Our current Higher Education system is undergoing significant and radical structural changes. In this, I believe that the merger of creative arts and sciences is ever more pertinent in finding adaptive methods through progressive and interdisciplinary research tools, in order to effectively work toward genuine transformative change at a meaningful scale. 


My Higher Education teaching follows a sensuous scholarship approach that places the body at the forefront of philosophical inquiry, and that encourages students to explore performative, reflexive and autoethnographic ways to produce knowledge. I was Program Lead for the MA in Movement Mind and Ecology (2021-2024) at Schumacher College, together with Dr Marie Hale and Dr Pavel Cenkl, (former Head of Schumacher College), and I now form part of the Schumacher WILD emergent learning community. Prior to this I was Head of Dance at Liverpool Hope University (2012-2021) and throughout my academic career I have also enjoyed being a part of different doctoral student's journeys and discoveries, as also working as a critical friend and mentor across many HE institutions.

I am part of the Regenerative Learning Network whose work supports futures education consultancy and practice. I believe that transformative education needs to connect classroom and community, increasingly working from a place of compassion and care. Since 2013 I have led on several international teaching programs across China, Japan, the US and Sri Lanka, exploring different educational paradigms and curricular values, working towards a new model of distributed learning and cross cultural engagement.

NYU Shanghai

21 Nov English Poster.png

Braiding Sweetgrass; deepening our ecological understanding of embodied practices of exchange, reciprocity and care

An inaugural lecture for the NYU Shanghai Inclusive Ecology series, run by Assistant Professor of Global Chinese Studies in partnership with the NYUSH Reads program. This lecture for students and staff explores ecological entanglements and interspecies communication embedded in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s seminal work ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’. Reflecting on Indigenous ontologies and multispecies storytelling practices, this talk illustrates how Kimmerer’s inclusive ecology perspectives might inform a new kind of sensuous scholarship, proposing ecosophical and experiential writing approaches that offer an active citational kinship and that uphold a vision of co-creation and coexistence with an animate world.

As part of my NYU teaching residency trip I also directed a day long workshop, “Unearthing: developing social permaculture philosophy and principles through shared movement practice” with the local YUNGU permaculture farm.

Two articles on my additional teaching experiences in China can be found here:

Rachel Sweeney, A Wild Learning Journey in Rural and Urban China 

Doris Zhang, Moving Mossland blogpost (Chinese/ available in English)

Sado Island Centre for Ecological Sustainability, Japan

Surface Tensions:
evolving embodied teaching methods within environmental education

One week research residency through the Sado Island Centre for Ecological Sustainability (Niigata University, Japan). A series of events exploring embodied learning principles and creative pedagogy through nature connections, hosted by Associate Professor Dr Jasmine E. Black, these workshops and seminars were attended by local academics, educators, farmers, land workers and artists and aimed to create a creative platform for exchange and support ongoing ecological enterprise within the island.

A short article I wrote on regenerative education and creative depopulation in Japan can be found here.

Transformative Ed seminar Niigata_edited

University of Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Cross Currents Laboratory

Between 2013-2016 I developped an ongoing UK/Sri Lanka research program together with Professor Saumya Liyanage Director of the Centre of Social Reconciliation at the University of Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Research outputs include a one month CROSS CURRENTS Artist Laboratory  together with the Performance Factory in the UVPA, co-facilitated by myself and Dr Saumya Liyanage, using phenomenology as a lens to critique cross cultural training, and also a co-authored paper, 'Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy' presented at the  International Conference on the Humanities at the University of Kelaniya (2016).

IMG_8029.JPG
IMG_0011 (2).JPG
IMG_0139.JPG
IMG_0103.JPG
IMG-20241117-WA0019.jpg

© 2024 Rachel Sweeney

bottom of page