Performative education inside and outside the ethics of care

Abstract

Inspired by the provocations raised in Cañas’s RISE Manifesto (2015), this essay argues that language learning, language teaching, and performative activities are caring acts. They are qualitative offerings that manifest themselves as embodied, relational, and artful events concerned with fostering fairer and caring societies. I refer to them as qualitative acts of care. The essay also voices concerns regarding the structural constraints faced by language educators and educational practitioner-researchers when they seek to enact language learning, arts practice, or practice-based research as caring and ethical work. Qualitative care is an ever-changing process that is often difficult to capture (both conceptually and experientially) in the flow of practice, which raises epistemological questions about the way qualitative care is measured and deemed to be self-sufficient and self-contained. Paradoxically, measurement and evaluation turn qualitative care into practices that are referred to here as quantitative acts of care. The essay does not provide readers with answers to the problems raised by Cañas (2015). Rather, from the reflexive standpoint of a language teacher and practitioner-researcher, it suggests the need to leverage the qualities of performative learning and teaching by making any work of care a continual endeavour.