Instructional Performance Research Articles

Experiential Learning in the Large Classroom Using Performative Pedagogy

Experiential learning (EL) is widely believed to lead to enhanced student engagement. This form of learning, however, may be difficult to implement in the large class sizes so common today. This case study describes an initiative involving performative pedagogy using interdisciplinary teaching and learning in an undergraduate class of 150 students from a change management module in the School of Business and an ensemble performance module in the Music Department in an Irish University. The students utilized acting, music, dance, and role-play in a large enrolment setting. Postprogram surveys and focus group interviews of students found that students responded positively to the initiative. Students also rated the class as more engaging than other subjects in which they were registered. Reflective essays written by students showed evidence of deep reflection and learning and these formed the basis for our discussion of the implications of this approach for management education. Future research should examine the effects of performative learning on student performance in terminal examinations.

Exercising Freedom

Göze Saner’s ‘Exercising Freedom: An Arendtian clown training utopia’ proposes a performance pedagogy that consists in exercises of/for freedom. Steering clear of approaches to training that claim to free a performer’s body or voice, Saner instead offers a close reading of political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s theatrical understanding of freedom and political action (particularly ‘Action’ in The Human Condition and “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future) to extract the skills and qualities required of an actor to publicly perform an action that is ‘wholly unexpected and unforeseen’ (Arendt 1960: 43), make a new beginning, reveal who they are as well as the cracks in systems that appear unchangeable and bring about the experience of freedom, not only for themselves, but also, and more importantly, for the witnesses. How does one train to perform the event of freedom in the Arendtian sense? Following the image of Greta Thunberg on her first school strike, the article investigates how a personal action can resonate historically and incite collective activism. Given the unique relationship between a single performer and multiple spectators, the solo genre resonates with Arendt’s description of freedom; however, it also raises specific challenges—particularly with respect to the neoliberalist celebration of a different kind of individual freedom and its influence on solo performance as a paradigm. Touching briefly upon solo documentary performance and solo autobiographical performance, the article arrives at clowning, as a solo form of training, acting and relating. Analysing Avner Eisenberg’s clown pedagogy as well as Alison Hodge’s core training, viewed here as clown training insofar as the ensemble becomes a space for solo emergence, the article formulates a training utopia that exercises—that is, rehearses, practises, educates, keeps working—an Arendtian freedom in action and thereby extends an invitation for all to be a Greta Thunberg.

Towards planetary performance pedagogy: digital companions in multipolar classrooms

This article proposes ‘planetary performance pedagogy’ as a theoretical and practical framework for spatially and temporally distributed teaching and training in higher education, combining remote and experiential modes of interaction to facilitate an awareness of multiple planetary perspectives. Our argument deploys the creative potential of several concepts that we develop within this framework: the idea of the planetary classroom, the digital companion, and the multipolar performance prompt. We develop these concepts in relation to a series of experiments conducted by the authors using mobile technologies and video-conferencing platforms in performance pedagogy and training settings, connecting across different continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) with a focus of activity around a Practice Research class at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. In using asynchronous communication over Telegram text and video messages, collaborative Google Docs, and multimodal performative lectures over Zoom, our research questions have taken on an even more urgent dimension as the COVID-19 pandemic has radically transformed the delivery of higher education, as well as our wider awareness of the economic and material flows of globalisation. But we argue that the experiential and somatic values of performance might find new manifestations in a technologically distributed teaching practice, complicating the binary model of face-to-face versus anonymous multi-user, and instead creating hybrid and multi-bodied ways of moving through and engaging with the world and its pedagogical and technological inequalities.

Co-teaching difficult subjects: critical autoethnography and pedagogy

ABSTRACT Building on existing studies on co-teaching and teaching difficult subjects, this article examines the development of our co-teaching relationship, as educators with marginalized identities, teaching on difficult subjects in a graduate critical consciousness course. The authors used the theoretical and methodological intersection of critical performance pedagogy and critical autoethnography to examine and situate their experiences in co-teaching. Three pedagogical practices were identified in co-teaching difficult subjects that included: 1) the negotiation of individual and collective space, 2) the navigation of voice between collaboration and personal expression, and 3) and the role of affect in the classroom environment. The study contributes to an emerging discussion on what it means to transform teaching in higher education around difficult subjects. By focusing on co-teaching, this article sets the stage to reimagine graduate teaching as a collaborative process between more than one instructor and students with a focus on power, privilege, oppression, and social change.

Performing Gender: A Creative Drag and Burlesque Course in Higher Education

ABSTRACT Performing Gender is an interdisciplinary course studying the history, media, and creation of drag and burlesque performance. This article outlines the academic, emotional, and transformative journey that my students and I embarked on during the Fall 2018 semester. We built a Drag Family House, went to a professional show off-campus, examined our ideas around gender, the binary, and gender performativity, and put on a drag/burlesque show. This course is an example of how I practice performance pedagogy and how I include the community in which these styles of performances take place.

Cartas entre artistas pesquisadoras professoras

Uma conversa, um compartilhar experiências. Este texto é um conjunto de três cartas entre pesquisadoras-artistas-professoras. Estela escreveu a primeira delas relatando sua experiência como professora-artista em busca de pedagogias da performance. O formato de sua carta suscitou o desejo de diálogo entre outras mulheres cuja experiência era semelhante. Sendo assim, Ines, Juliana e Raquel dispuseram-se a respondê-la falando sobre suas metodologias e refletindo sobre os desafios que enfrentam nas salas de aula da escola, da universidade e do instituto federal. Além de serem pesquisadoras-artistas-professoras, entrelaçam-se os interesses no campo da performance e da dança seja pensando na cena, no ensino-aprendizagem ou nas possibilidades de escrita acadêmica.

Performing remote pedagogy: reductions, omissions, and interventions

ABSTRACT In this piece, we contend with what it means to craft a pedagogy during an ongoing global pandemic. Our experience is fluctuating, frenetic, and fragmented. Drawing on our commitment to critical performance pedagogy, and Berlant & Stewart's (2019) “hundreds,” we craft an essay that is similarly scaled down, distilled, and splintered as a way to with resonating as well as dissonant experiences. For perhaps, in this moment, as we realize what is gone, we realize, not as much is gone for us as is gone for others. Perhaps, we realize what is gone is our reluctance to change what was before. Perhaps, we change things we did not think of changing before. Perhaps, we start to change things we should have changed sooner.

Critical Review : A Strategy for SNS-based Writing Practice to Leverage Less Proficient Students’ Participation and Pedagogical Performance. Lee, Kwang-Soon & Kim, Bong-Gyu(2014)

Critical Review : A Strategy for SNS-based Writing Practice to Leverage Less Proficient Students’ Participation and Pedagogical Performance. Lee, Kwang-Soon & Kim, Bong-Gyu(2014)

Performance Pedagogy: Performing Fluxus Pedagogy in a Contemporary Lithuanian Context

Educators practice performance pedagogy as the method where an educator/facilitator is seen as a performer or actor (Pineau 1994, p. 4). This paper presents an analysis of the historical roots of performance pedagogies in Fluxus pedagogies and performance pedagogy practices within participatory art events in Lithuania as exemplified by festivals AN88 (1988) and AN89 (1989). The case of my research rests on the contemporary implementation of performance pedagogy techniques during the course The Temporary Department of Time, Space, and Action for BA students at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. This research aims to define the concept theories within performance pedagogy in the art academy education, which developed behind the terms Human Semiotics (Andersen 2002), Hyper Performer,1 and InterMedia (Higgins 1984). This project was implemented using the strategy of critical utopian action research in the context of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The empirical material was gathered during my employment as a guest lecturer and the implementation of my pedagogical internship at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.2These concept theories are defined through. a reflexive analysis of archive material on the historical origin of performance pedagogies, originating in Fluxus pedagogies, local Lithuanian participatory art, and data from the contemporary case of my project The Temporary Department of Time, Space and Action (2018), in the form of archive material, photographs, interviews, observations, notes, and my diary. The results of this research are the application of performance pedagogy concepts and terminology to the art and education projects and the definition of the key concept theories within this field. These results can be useful for artists and those practicing university pedagogy.

Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art and Design Education, Lee Campbell (2020) (ed.)

Review of: Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art and Design Education, Lee Campbell (2020) (ed.) New York: Peter Lang, 290 pp., ISBN 978-1-43316-640-2, h/bk, £64.00

A microanálise da aprendizagem musical autorregulada como ferramenta para o desenvolvimento da pedagogia da performance

This article presents a literature review about the Self-regulated Learning Microanalysis, one of the methodological approaches developed in the last decades to measure and evaluate the learning process in different contexts. I present a historical overview of the development of measure/assessment processes and tools for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), the microanaly-sis approach in Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1977a), and self-regulated learning (Cleary & Zimmerman, 2001; Kitsantas & Zimmerman, 2002), besides the recent proposals for the application of this evaluative/interventional technique in the musical field. This review seeks to support the arguments in favor of the viability of adopting microanalysis as a solid methodological approach and an effective didactic and academic tool for the development of performance pedagogy.

A microanálise da aprendizagem musical autorregulada como ferramenta para o desenvolvimento da pedagogia da performance

This article presents a literature review about the Self-regulated Learning Microanalysis, one of the methodological approaches developed in the last decades to measure and evaluate the learning process in different contexts. I present a historical overview of the development of measure/assessment processes and tools for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL), the microanaly-sis approach in Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1977a), and self-regulated learning (Cleary & Zimmerman, 2001; Kitsantas & Zimmerman, 2002), besides the recent proposals for the ap-plication of this evaluative/interventional technique in the musical field. This review seeks to support the arguments in favor of the viability of adopting microanalysis as a solid methodological approach and an effective didactic and academic tool for the development of performance pedagogy.

Can Culturally Specific Perspectives to Teaching Western Classical Music Benefit International Students? A Call to Re-examine “What the Teacher Does”

Institutions that teach Western classical music in higher education in the West have been increasingly reliant on international students from Asia, particularly China to fulfil recruitment targets. This article examines research in music performance tuition and the general higher education literature on pedagogy for international students. After demonstrating that Asian musicians feel the presence of a covert racial and cultural prejudice caused by assimilationist values in both Western classical music and in higher education, it reviews various approaches to teaching international students in higher education and brings this into dialogue with research on music performance pedagogy. Identifying various pitfalls of attempting to promote a greater awareness of students from different backgrounds, such as stereotyping and the indiscriminate use of racialized discourses, it argues nonetheless that a greater sensitivity to cultural difference is needed in music performance tuition. By reconsidering through an intercultural lens what teachers currently do and their beliefs about music and teaching that they transmit to their students, music education research can play an important role in breaking down assimilationist attitudes to the performance and teaching of Western classical music.

Performative pedagogies of care and the emerging geographies of school exclusion for students with disability

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine how performative practices of care that are primarily focused on academic achievement and learning outcomes have contributed to the creation of geographies of exclusion within mainstream schools for students with disability. Through a study of a 12-year-old student diagnosed with autism in a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, I maintain that performative care makes certain groups of students ‘intelligible’ by responding to their needs while rendering others as unrecognisable care subjects in schools. The cognitive ableist bias underpinning performative care provides students with academic abilities with the necessary permissions to develop a sense of belonging to the mainstream school while creating boundaries of exclusion against those who do not embody the qualities of performative student subjects. I maintain that an approach to care as a public good and a relational ethics can help create more inclusive social geographies within mainstream schools for students with disability.

Performative pedagogies: feeling the experience of being (the) social in twenty-first century learning

ABSTRACT This article explores the application of theatre and performance pedagogies to broader contexts of interdisciplinary teaching and the increasingly diversified student body. It further attends to the affective dimensions of the twenty-first century digital classroom. In doing so, it proposes that a pedagogy of ‘meta-affect’ opens out the capacity for students to become critically aware of how socialities of the digital classroom are built through affect. It draws on German-based collective Rimini Protokoll’s Remote X to show how performative visualisations of the smooth affects of digital culture enable for the development of students’ capacities to conceptualise models of real-world change.

Beyond the NS/NNS Dichotomy: Exploring the Potential of Translanguaging in CPP Practice by Korean EFL Teachers

As a crucial part of English teacher education, this study aims to critically reflect on the commonly experienced issues related to EFL learning and teaching in South Korea. Within the theoretical and methodological framework of critical performative pedagogy (CPP), this study focuses on the analysis of Boalian forum theatre, directed and enacted by seven graduate students majoring in English education in a graduate course. The results of the critical discourse analysis of the forum theatres reveal that the participants experienced the internalized native/non-native speaker dichotomy in communication with native-English speaking teachers at school, regardless of their backgrounds in English learning and teaching. Additionally, the concept of translanguaging can be applied to the Korean school context as an alternative view on Korean-English bilingual practices. The implication of this study emphasizes the importance of teachers’ critical reflection of their own experiences in the EFL context and the application of CPP as an alternative teacher education model for EFL teachers.

Improved Pedagogical Practices Strengthens the Performance of Student Teachers by a Blended Learning Approach

This study is aimed at exploring the innovative teaching and learning approach called Blended Learning approach to improve the academic performance of student teachers, which also enhances the quality education. Blended learning approach is an integration of both face-to-face and online learning. It is designed as orientation of program, lesson plan, analyzing educational resources, determining educational objectives, assigning EDMODO platform for teaching learning process, designing teaching learning process and tools for teaching of science. The present study consisted of 53 student teachers. The innovative teaching and learning approach of Blended Learning was used in teaching the Experimental group which comprise 29 student teachers, while the Conventional method was used with the Control group which consists of 24 student teachers. The experiment lasted for eight weeks. The study findings revealed that there were significant differences at 0.05 level in the mean scores of the test in favor of the experimental group. The findings also pointed out that there were statistically significant differences at 0.05 level in the participants’ pedagogical performance level before and after implementing the Blended learning method of teaching in favor of the post application (Awad Soliman Keshta, 2013). This was endorsed to the Blended Learning Program in teaching of science program. In the light of the study results, it is suggested that education stakeholders should adopt the innovative teaching method as blended learning method in teaching and learning process at teacher education level and conduct workshops for teachers to enhance teaching learning process. This integration of technology tool creates effective learning environment and promote self -learning which in turn improves student teachers pedagogical performance level.

El significado de la práctica docente, en voz de sus protagonistas

La existencia del presente artículo obedece a la necesidad apremiante por parte de los profesionales de la educación de poner en la mesa de discusión sus experiencias y saberes, a fin de reconstruir su pensamiento pedagógico. El presente documento, en un intento por conocer desde la empírea lo dicho hasta el momento sobre su ocupación, busca recuperar su voz y con ello aportar conocimiento al área de la práctica docente, razón por la cual se plantean como objetivos de investigación: Conocer los aspectos que conforman el ser y el quehacer en esta actividad; interpretar los significados que construyen acerca de su actuación pedagógica; así como comprender la construcción de su saber pedagógico en relación con su labor. La metodología de investigación se aborda desde una postura cualitativa, mediante el estudio de caso, este posibilita la revisión exhaustiva de 43 maestros estudiantes de diferentes generaciones que cursaron la materia de «Análisis de la Práctica Docente» de un programa de Maestría en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Uno de los resultados encontrados, rescata que estos actores en cuestión saben que su ejercicio involucra sus percepciones sobre el entorno que le rodea, entorno impregnado de múltiples interacciones. Como conclusión, el análisis crítico y reflexivo de su actuar requiere tanto de un diálogo colectivo como de una interpretación de acciones.

The personal is pedagogical (?): Personal narratives and embodiment as teaching strategies in higher education

This article is a piece of “self-reflexive action work”. In it, I critically explore the pedagogical value of infusing my personal narrative and embodiment as a queer person into the content of a series of lectures on sexuality and gender. In an academic culture that promotes objectivity, incorporating one’s personal narrative and embodiment into the learning space as an educator is often criticised for being excessive and disruptive. I argue that if approached strategically and with an ethic of care, infusing personal stories and embodiment into educational content is pedagogically performative with the potential to challenge dominant cultural ideologies like heteronormativity. I use autoethnographic memory work, reflections from my teaching diary and theoretical insights from various critical theorist and pedagogues to make an argument for a queer, dialogical performative pedagogy that contributes towards the possibility of students who are able to think critically about their own gendered positions and relations within a wider context of heteronormativity.

Lessons from outside the classroom: performance pedagogies in Portugal, 1970–1980

In the 1970s, Portuguese performance art exhibited itself as a language of experimentation in the local artistic scene with increasing public visibility. This prominence, which led to regular festivals and live events, was, however, not accompanied by any formal education or the integration of performance into the curriculum of art schools. In this article, we argue that the Portuguese approach to a performance pedagogy occurred mainly through a double path. On the one hand, through the convergent actions of two important critic-curators with relevant international connections in the area of performance, namely Egídio Álvaro and Ernesto de Sousa. On the other, through the singular activities of an association of artists, the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC), which had an institutional relationship with the students’ academy (Associação Académica de Coimbra) of the University of Coimbra. The CAPC takes the pedagogical and performative utopia of an art-life relationship a step further, at a time which shared the ethos of the democratic revolution of 1974. This generation collaborated with the international performance scene, not only developing projects with Wolf Vostell, in Malpartida (Spain), but also organising an important exhibition of Portuguese performance at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1984).