Identifying Performative and Meta-Performative Skills pertinent to Teacher Development.

This article is based on a series of diagnostic workshops conducted at a teacher training centre in Istanbul focusing on how Performative Pedagogy can inform Teacher Education. Performative Pedagogy provides embodied, participant-led, solution-oriented, multiple voiced opportunities for reflection and dialogue on critical incidents teachers’ face. In addition, participants highlighted a number of performative skills pertaining to developing awareness of self, others and setting that are fundamentally ignored in current competence-based teacher education programmes. Finally participants uncovered meta-performative skills revealing aspects of their identity and reflection on why teachers act in the way that they do.

Background to the workshops

I work in a teacher training centre in Istanbul training pre-service and in-service teachers from a spectrum of cultures and linguistic backgrounds. The environment demands self-aware, reflective teachers who are collaborative, demonstrate inter and intra-personal qualities, adaptable, able to embrace diversity in multi-cultural and multi-linguistic contexts while solving emergent problems, adopting a range of roles and in most cases having to perform in a language which is not their mother tongue. Typically, the teacher education they receive focusses on cognitive, instrumental and propositional knowledge leaving them often feeling ill-equipped, disillusioned and ill-prepared to meet the behavioral challenges of teaching a class in situ. To fill this gap, I have turned to performative pedagogy and to an examination of its applicability to teacher education.

Performative approaches to learning demands skills that combine physical, cognitive and affective domains. Teaching is performative in that it is based on judgements formed through action (heuristic); it is influenced by contingencies that happen in real time and are unpredictable (improvised); it involves physical and emotional engagement (embodied) and learning is created in the process (emergent).  “Teachers are taught how to instruct but not how to engage their students emotionally”. (Wahl, 2011, p. 21).

Post pandemic it is opportune to consider the importance of the embodied physical presence of learners and teachers in the learning encounter as this raises fundamental issues as to the nature of teaching and learning. Teachers are rarely trained in skills to assist them to be physically present, emotionally aware and able to improvise creatively to emergent needs. The potential of embodied methodologies and the need to acquire performative skills is ignored in teacher education which remains firmly entrenched in a competence driven paradigm. Metaphorically teacher education provides ‘the map’ (the official version of the journey route) but omits ‘the story’ (the feelings of the journey’s experience).

Research on teacher education has moved somewhat from defining what a teacher is, does or believes to a more ‘bottom up’ perspective of examining how teachers learn (Allwright 2001). Despite a move to more teacher introspection, teacher education is still rooted to the assumption that teachers need core disciplinary knowledge (Yates and Muchisky 2003) and knowledge of pedagogic skills which will be moulded into expertise through classroom experience. In contrast the underlying philosophy behind performative pedagogy is that there is a direct relationship between affective, cognitive and physical domains so we need to ‘feel’ something as well as understand it. Vygotsky refers to ‘perezvanhie’ a Russian term meaning ‘learning through experience’. In other words, we need to experience the state of confusion (liminality), a state of being in limbo between knowing and not knowing, before transformation is possible. Development is conceptualized as participatory, action oriented, holistic and requires a performative-humanistic understanding of ‘teaching and learning with head, heart, hands and feet’ (Schewe, 2013).

Definition of Performative.

The term ‘performative’ was first coined by Austin in 1962 to refer to a limited set of verbs that both describe and require the performance of the act simultaneously: ‘I name this ship Titanic’. The term was picked up 20 years later by Postmodern thinkers (Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu) who re-defined ‘performativity’ to include any iterative action that involves social interaction and presence (embodied), indeed any action that involves people coming together to communicate meanings and affirm cultural and social values (i.e. protest marches, sports events, political rallies, concerts). Today with the advent of Performance Studies performativity has a wide remit encompassing gender, race and has opened up significant ways for rethinking language and identity.

Features of Performative Pedagogy.

Performance pedagogy has evolved from ‘drama in education’ (pioneered by Heathcote in the 1960s) and is inherently participant centred. The key characteristics are role playing, improvisation, context specific topics and reflection and discussion on the part of the participants. Like Heathcote, the dramatist Augusto Boal’s philosophy (as depicted in his book ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’) involves learning through re-enactment of scenarios but differs in that learning starts with an awareness and analysis of the present context (oppressions) and involves re-enactment and reflection to uncover solutions and promote action/ change. Boal’s methodology is indebted to his mentor the pedagogue Freire who foregrounds the movement of powerless (oppressed) people from being acted upon (objects) to initiating action and becoming subjects of their own lives. For Freire this process of ‘conscientization’ is dependent on replacing the banking system of education (filling learners with the academy’s version of knowledge) with a dialogic approach to learning.  So, while Freire broke the hierarchical divide between teacher and student, Boal did so between performer and audience and by extension performative pedagogy conducts a similar dismantling of the positioning of Teacher and Teacher Educator.

The Findings

These workshops, by identifying the performative and meta-performative skills required by teachers contributes to both the participants’ personal development as well as informing Teacher Education in general. No doubt that becoming more aware of who you are and where you are going is key to professional development. Teachers share experiences and commonalities, become more comfortable with personal disclosure, and come to experience and enjoy a new level of articulation and self-efficacy.

Workshop Objectives

1.         Diagnostic.

The workshops generated a lot of written data, oral reflection and discussion that provided valuable information about participants perspectives of Performative Pedagogy and how it is relevant to their development as teachers.

2.         Methodology.

Performative Pedagogy provides participant-led, authentic content to generate solution oriented, embodied interventions, reflection, and dialogue of lived experience as well as offering a safe dramatic, fictional distance to encourage personal disclosure and multiple perspectives.

3.         Pedagogic

Participants identified numerous performative and meta-performative skills that emerged primarily through the workshop activities. The methodology provides participants opportunities to develop performative skills of raising their awareness of self, others and their context and reflect on their beliefs, behaviour and feelings while performing the activities (meta-performative).

4.         Transformational

There is a need for training in performative methods and for educational practices to understand the potential of the arts in transforming consciousness, refining the senses, and enlarging the imagination, and requiring teachers with awareness of performative skills. Performative Pedagogy introduces teachers to a range of techniques to raise awareness of the performative and reveal a fresh landscape of creative embodied expression, enjoyment and gratification.

References

Allwright, R, 2001. Three major processes of teacher development and the appropriate design criteria for developing and using them, in: Research and Practice in Language Teacher Education: Voices from the Field. CARLA, Minneapolis, pp. 115–134.

Schewe, M., 2013. Taking Stock and Looking Ahead: Drama Pedagogy as a Gateway to a Performative Teaching and Learning Culture. Scenario 2013.

Yates, R., Muchisky, D., 2003. On Reconceptualizing Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly 37, 135.

Wahl, S., 2011. Learning to teach by treading the boards. In Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education (pp. 19-22).