This article identifies and explores three major themes evident in the scholarship seeking to re-examine and re-think historical understandings of the mind/body debate in education. The first concerns the expansiveness and flexibility of beliefs about the relationship between body and mind. Though often rooted in scientific findings or religious dogma, the day-to-day enactment of these beliefs by educators involved continual re-imagining and pragmatic re-configuring to address the challenges of practice. The second involves the application of new methodologies to analyse visual media as well as the creative application of traditional techniques to analyse print media in a way that helps surface the missing voices of students and patients in official institutional records. The third involves the latent issues of privacy, personal disclosure, and measurement. The issue of what should be known by whom and with whom it should be shared, was -- and remains -- an animating concern in efforts to disentangle the relationship between body and mind in education. The examination of these themes is followed by a consideration of their implication for future research in this area. [For part 2, see EJ1216361.]