Instructional Performance Research Articles

Diane E. Peters. Canadian Music and Music Education: An Annotated Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations. Lanham, Md.: The Scarecrow Press, 1997. xvii, 476 pp. ISBN 0-8108-3275-5 (hardcover)

Diane E. Peters. Canadian Music and Music Education: An Annotated Bibliography of Theses and Dissertations. Lanham, Md.: The Scarecrow Press, 1997. xvii, 476 pp. ISBN 0-8108-3275-5 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 20, numéro 1, 1999, p. 1-171) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

From the Studio to the Classroom: Critical Thinking and Pedagogical Performances

From the Studio to the Classroom: Critical Thinking and Pedagogical Performances

Pedagogical Performances in Kleist's Shorter Essays

The writings of Heinrich von Kleist provide an opportunity to examine a particularly intense engagement with eighteenth-century views on the theory and practice of pedagogy, an engagement that brings out some of the tensions and potential contradictions in these views. Kleist never worked as a professional teacher, but pedagogical situations and opinions appear repeatedly throughout his work. It is striking, for example, how easily and naturally he assumes the role of pedagogue in his correspondence. His letters to Wilhelmine von Zenge often sound insufferably didactic to modern ears. At one point, over a period of several months during the spring and summer of 1800, he even went so far as to send her a series of questions on various ethical issues, which she then at his request answered in writing and returned to him to be corrected (508-13, cf. also 967). 1 He also felt it necessary to write her an instructional essay, Uber Aufklarung des Weibes, in which he expounds his concept of Pflicht, and more specifically his ideas on motherhood as the primary duty of women. Such texts indicate that, for Kleist, being Wilhelmine's fiance also meant being her tutor, especially in matters of ethics. His attitude towards his half-sister Ulrike is similar. Even though she was several years older than Kleist and he was often in the position of asking her for financial assistance, many of his letters to her contain advice on how she should live her life. In one letter from May 1799, Kleist begins by stating: Wenn ich von jemandem Bildung erhalte, mein liebes Ulrikchen, so wunsche ich ihm dankbar auch wieder einige Bildung zuruckzugeben (486). Here he writes of Bildung almost as if it were some sort of commodity that could be exchanged, and he goes on to present Ulrike with a healthy quantity of it in return for the assistance she has given him in their common pursuit of die Wahrheit [...], der wir beide aufrichtig entgegenstreben und in welcher wir uns auch gewohnlich

For: Anti-Racist Education

This paper argues that democratic education in a racist society requires anti-racist pedagogy. Because traditional approaches to democratic education conceive racism in terms of personal prejudice, they cannot adequately address the problems that racism actually poses. Racism is structural and institutional as well as embodied and ideational; if education is to do more than refine social expressions of and responses to racism, it must take on racism as a way of framing meaning and value. The paper argues that this cannot be accomplished, however, if anti-racist education is conceived in terms of reactive or corrective argumentation. This is because a reactive or even a corrective response to racist arguments accepts the terms of racism even in arguing against them. To avoid invoking the very assumptions and framework we mean to discredit, we must shift out of the racist framework altogether. What this means for education, the author argues, is that we need to appeal to art and performance as ways to reframe and reconceive race relations. The paper closes with examples of a performative pedagogy addressed to anti-racist goals.

Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again

The recent controversial transformation of the humanities is due partly to the institutional acknowledgment of diversity and partly to critics' efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the categories of identity on which programs devoted to the study of diversity are founded. This double agenda creates anxiety over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university. My essay offers a means of working through this tension: a performative pedagogy based on a descriptive theory of the dynamics of passing. I exemplify this dynamic by reading debates on white feminists' appropriation of black women's writing, comparing student responses to the 1934 film Imitation of Life, and discussing Fannie Hurst's novel on which the film is based. I posit the pedagogical relation as the privileged site where passing, which is inevitable in any subject position, can be enacted and made explicit.

When the Distressed Teach the Oppressed: Toward an Understanding of Communion and Commitment

J ane Tompkins' 1 990 essay, of the Distressed, decries the preva­ lence of what she calls the of pedagogy in col lege classrooms-that is, a model, perhaps unconsciously, centered entirely on the teacher ' s performance in front of the students. She calls instead for a more student-centered approach, based at least in part on the model Paulo Freire ( 1 970c) describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Tompkins' essay prompted a number of forthright responses. Most emphasized the difficulty of enacting Tompkins ' recommendations for teaching because of overwhelming course loads; a lack of institutional prestige and/or support; students who just don ' t care ; or a nostalgic and lingering fondness for performance pedagogy. Tompkins ' concept of performance-based pedagogy and the responses it occasioned indicate a healthy willingness among teachers of reading and writing to discuss pedagogy. Nevertheless , I remain troubled by attitudes toward students embedded within this exchange. Certainly Tompkins advocates using student-centered techniques; her invocation of Freire conjures up a powerful dedication to students. Freire 's commitment to students, however, his commun­ ion with them, results not from mere technique but from his spiritual foundation in l iberation theology. I will .explore the implications of this idea first by cons id­ ering how people have responded to Tompkins, and then by examining the links between her argument and Freire ' s in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and other, perhaps lesser known, writings. I want to raise the possibility that, while we may consider ourselves student-centered educators in a Freirean sense, we have, in fact, taken only tentative first steps on an arduous journey.

Seductress or schoolmarm: On the improbability of the great female teacher

This paper explores the question of the relation of gender and pedagogy by inquiring into the importance of gendered bodies in the construction of the great teacher as a cultural phenomenon. I ask whether men's teaching — male diction as a mobilizing of desire becomesmalediction (seduction) when it is produced out of the pedagogical performances of women. In examining this question, I do not adhere to the predictable tradition of critical feminist scholarship, given the extent to which, paradoxically, this tradition can make examination of the issue more difficult. I do allude to the newer tradition of psychoanalytic feminism, but, in the main, I draw on literary criticism as a more fertile theoretical terrain because of its potential to disrupt theory and to disturb the disciplinary boundaries which prevent feminists from “saying it otherwise.” Questions raised include: Must the image of a great female teacher be a contradiction in terms? Has it been otherwise? Could it again be so? What conditions would be necessary to achieve this?

Is there a lesbian in this text? Sarton, performance and multicultural pedagogy

The heightened emphasis on multicultural education highlights the need for classroom practices that foster conversations about race, gender, culture, and class. This essay describes problems which have emerged in performance studies classes when students have confronted questions of cultural diversity, moments when student, poem, teacher, class, and cultures all seem to collide, sometimes with wondrous, and sometimes with merely explosive, effects. The essay makes a case for dealing with cultural context even when the cultural context is not explicitly evoked in the poem—in this case, analyzing a poem by May Sarton as a lesbian love poem, a label Sarton herself would contest. Making the argument on these difficult grounds highlights some of the issues of visibility and invisibility that occur when one attempts to create a truly multicultural classroom. Finally the essay sketches out a variety of strategies designed to encourage cross‐cultural exchange in the classroom.

Teacher Education Pedagogy: Dominant Discourses and the Process of Problem Setting

Pedagogy is a major concern of teacher education. Within this paper three pedagogies are discussed: performance pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and postmodern pedagogy. The case is made that in order to understand which particular pedagogies are privileged within physical education teacher education, it is useful to analyze the discourses on which they are based and the process of problem setting, which acts to define or set certain problems that require certain solutions. The problems that dominate the physical education profession tend to be those that address technical or instrumental issues, which in turn privilege performance pedagogy as the appropriate solution. The political processes involved in such problem setting are discussed with reference to dominant discourses and the nature of contemporary professional practice. It is argued that privileging performance pedagogy in teacher education is limited in vision and continues to produce physical education teachers who conceive of teaching as essentially a technical matter with little sense of the social, moral, and political aspects of their work.

TAs on TV: Demonstrating communication strategies for international teaching assistants

We present in this paper a technique for employing videotaped segments of actual classroom performances by U.S. and international TAs. This is a method for training ITAs in specific, definable skills in English language, U.S. academic culture and pedagogical performance, while at the same time developing communication strategies for coping with largely undefinable future communicative needs in their work as teaching assistants. After a brief discussion of previous research on lecture comprehension, focusing especially on the effect of discourse markers, we describe our procedure for developing and using the videotaped materials in an ITA training program. We conclude with a discussion of the evaluation of the materials and suggestions for further research.