from the html version of the file http://www.aahe.org/bulletin/winter2001.pdf:

Minding the Body: What Student Athletes Know About Learning
By Julie Cheville (2001).
Boyton/Cook Publishers,
Portsmouth, New Hampshire;
166 pages; $24.00

[at amazon.com:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0867094990/ ]

Reviewed by Stephen Chambers, director of institutional research and associate professor of history, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; schamber@brain.uccs.edu

Cheville's manuscript is based on the premise that learning is a mind-body partnership that plays a central role in meaning and rationality. In this sense, the body itself is a crucial element in the way we learn; our physical experiences allow us to understand and to thrive in our personal environments. Nevertheless, Cheville points to "an ideological divide between mind and body" extant in learning institutions that in turn leads to denial of "conceptual diversity" within those institutions. This is especially detrimental to student athletes, who perhaps more than others tend to rely upon the mind-body partnership to know and to learn.

Cheville maintains that the standard lecture format class- room alienates many student athletes. By virtue of their personal histories and cultural environments, student athletes develop mental structures for learning that are differ- ent from those of the more traditional student. Educational and economic inequities faced early in life by many of these students offered little opportunity to learn in ways similar to those afforded other college students.

Their mental structures are often influenced by actions proven to be successful in athletic competition. Instructional styles geared toward more reflexive, affective, and image-associated mental structures have proved more effective in relating academic content and generating scholarly work from this group.

The author challenges those who claim that athletics cause a decline in academic standards or that they create intellectual drains at institutions of higher education. Such claims, Cheville concludes, reject "the transactional nature of critical inquiry."

Cheville's book calls for academe to implement a broader definition of intellectual development, one that explains cognitive diversity among all learners. She devotes a considerable amount of the book to providing examples of methods that faculty can use to broaden instruction to reach students who learn differently.