Dancing the Biomes (DTB) is an indoor/outdoor, year-long, transdisciplinary eco-embodied undergraduate pedagogy that investigates how embodied inquiry can cultivate ethical relationships with the more-than-human world. Integrating movement practice, environmental humanities, environmental ethics, and creative inquiry, DTB invites students to explore how different embodied encounters with place disclose different ways of sensing, perceiving, relating, and knowing.
Developed from Stephanie’s three-and-a-half-year embodied inquiry across the ten major biomes of North America, Dancing the Biomes brings together movement improvisation, somatic inquiry, creative practice, and ecological observation with contemporary perspectives from critical cartography, feminist new materialism, ecological ethics, and environmental humanities. As the curriculum evolved through implementation across multiple universities, engaging more than 100 students across disciplines including environmental studies, psychology, sustainability, outdoor education, and dance, it also became the foundation for Stephanie’s doctoral research.
The central pedagogical principle of Dancing the Biomes is that ethics is embodied. Rather than approaching environmental ethics primarily as a conceptual subject, students investigate ethical relationships with the more-than-human world through movement improvisation, somatic inquiry, sensorial walking, active witnessing, reflective drawing, tactile engagement, and creative practice. In this way, the body becomes not only a site of experience, but a participant in inquiry.
Eco-curriculum
MODULE ONE: Critical Cartography
Students investigate landscape through feminist mapping, deep mapping, and embodied cartography, exploring how mapping practices shape perception, place, and ecological relationship.
Biomes: Deciduous Forest • Lake • Tundra
MODULE TWO: Feminist Post-humanist Perspectives
Students explore landscape through concepts including emplacement, intersubjectivity, intra-action, and diffraction, investigating how more-than-human relationships reshape ways of knowing and being.
Biomes: Swamp • Grasslands • River
MODULE THREE: Ecological Ethics
Students investigate environmental ethics through critical ecofeminism, hydrofeminism, queer ecologies, Rights of Nature, and natureculture, exploring how embodied inquiry cultivates ethical relationships with the living world.
Biomes: Desert • Temperate Rainforest • Boreal Forest • Marine / Reef
Publications
Gottlob, S. (2026). Movement improvisation: A transdisciplinary pedagogical tool for embodying environmental ethics. Journal of Dance Education, 26, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2025.2552464
Gottlob, S. (2024). Dancing the biomes: An ecological dance pedagogy. Animated: Cultural Issues and Practices in Participatory Dance, 52–57. https://www.communitydance.org.uk/DB/animated-editions/summer-2024
Gottlob, S. (2023). Dancing the biomes: Co-creating with nature through movement improvisation. European Journal of Ecopsychology, 8, 40–67. https://ecopsychology-journal.eu/v8/EJE%20v8_Gottlob.pdf
Student Testimonials
Here is what students are saying about their experiences participating in Dancing the Biomes
