Engaged Pedagogy and Performative Teaching: Examples from Teaching Practice

Abstract

Effective and engaged teaching practices are those that recognise the importance of making real world connections between the subject material taught, and the students' experiences, through 'engaged' teaching and working to encourage the student to become reflexive and critical thinking societal participants. It is argued that meaningful teaching praxis or engaged pedagogy emanates from a teaching philosophy that is driven by the belief that both teaching and learning are collaborative processes between the teacher and the student group. By drawing on experiences of teaching a large first year university Anthropology class (>550) and a smaller third year Anthropology class (<90), the paper argues that one can use 'performative teaching' and 'performance' teaching as a praxis of 'engaged pedagogy'. It is argued that such an approach assists in creating a classroom culture that is sufficiently structured in that it allows one to guide learning of the curricular material, while still being flexible enough to allow the class to follow the contours of a discussion that is organically prompted within the class. Such an engaged pedagogy, the paper attempts to show, can articulate through replicable performative teaching practices 1 .