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Introduction: Performance in Education
Bryant K. Alexander
California State University, Los Angeles
Gary L. Anderson
New York University
Bernardo P. Gallegos
Washington State University
âPerformanceâ like the very nature of âeducationâ is a contested term. W. B. Gallie (1964) offered his notion of contested terms. âThe recognition of a given concept as essentially contested implies recognition of rival uses of it (such as oneself repudiates) as not only logically possible and humanly âlikely,â but as of permanent potential critical value to oneâs own use or interpretation of the concept in questionâ (pp. 187â188). Hence throughout this book, the authors engage in varying uses of the term performanceâusing its many variations, permutations, and applications in a process of excavating, cultivating, and illuminating even newer ways of seeing the potency of performance as a theoretical lens in education. More importantly, it is an effort at using performance in the manner in which âcritical pedagogyâ is often constructedâas a critical lens of examining the âunderlying power relationships that structure our worldâ and particularly the processes and politics of education (Leistyna, Woodrum, & Sherblom, 1996, p. v).
The definitional uses of performance in this book range from the strategic and the often aestheticized engagement of bodily activity with the intent of knowing through doing and showing, performance as systems of physical training in dance correlated to the habituated ways in which student bodies are cast and controlled in the classroom, performance as a strategic rhetorical construction of social influence, performance as it relates to cultural practice and the materiality of bodiesâhence a displayed enactment of ideology and enfleshed knowledgeâinfluenced and motivated by the politics of race, gender, power, and class in the forms of folklore, ritual, spectacle, resistance, and protest; to performance as a mechanism for measuring outcomes and effectiveness.
The corresponding notion of performativity is also explored and maybe contained in a more clearly defined binaryâbetween Judith Butlerâs (1990a, 1990b, 1995) constructions of performativity as stylized repetition of acts that are socially validated and discursively established and Lyotardâs (1984) construction of performativity as it relates to maximizing efficiency by controlling outcomes and creating a culture of accountability. These orientations to performativity are held in stasis throughout the book as they inform the processes of âdoingâ education in relation to the individuals and collective desires of those who have stakes both in outcomes and in the embodied engagement of the process.
For our purposes in this collection of chapters, performativity helps to locate and describe repetitive actions plotted within grids of power relationships and social norms within the context of education and schooling. By focusing on the everyday performances and âin-classâ politics of education, as well as the broader spectacle of educational reform and policymakingâwe also extend and broaden Greg Dimitriadisâ (2001) recent efforts in Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice, âto link claims about the performativity of identity to grounded pedagogical practice and policy initiativesâ (p. ix). This collection of chapters capitalizes on the growing understanding in educational research of the performative aspects of teaching, leading, testing, accountability, and policymaking.
To begin to view these phenomena as elaborate performances is to challenge current approaches to research that ground leadership, reform, and pedagogy in scientific, rational discourses. These approaches fail to understand the ways these phenomena exist as symbolic actions that serve to legitimate a particular set of social relations. Performance studies scholar, Dwight Conquergood (1986) argued that construing culture as performance ensures that the interpretive act will not succumb to a cognitive reductionism. âA performance paradigm prevents the reification of culture into variables to be isolated, measured, and manipulatedâ (p. 57). Arguing for a more dynamic utilization of culture he contends that culture is never a given, but rather is alive with all the unpredictability associated with social actors making decisions such as deciding to perform a familiar narrative or disrupt it. âIn everyday communication,â he argued, âpeople reconstitute culture as they articulate or imply the premises upon which they predicate, and the values by which they assess, their own social performances as well as those of their co-actorsâ (p. 57).
The classroom, with teachers and students engaged in the processes of education establishes culture. It becomes a practiced place; a site in which diverse beings come together in order to engage and negotiate knowledge, systems of understanding, and ways of being, seeing, knowing, and doing. This negotiation occurs through social performance; engaged practices of relations and interrelations. âIronically, schooled knowledges and disciplines may, while offering certain freedoms and opportunities, at the same time further draw students into dominant projects of nationalism and capitalist labor formation, or bind them even more tightly to systems of class, gender, and race inequalityâ (Levinson & Holland, 1996, p. 1). In this volume, Pineau states that, âthe emergence of the performance paradigm has enabled a dialogue between performance studies and educational theory that may indeed, develop into a âlanguage of possibilityâ for both disciplinesâ providing strategies of intervention and enhancement of the most altruistic goals of education (see p. 36).
The social theorist who perhaps has explored the notion of social performance in most detail is Erving Goffman. His Presentation of Self in Everyday Life has been appropriated by Starratt (1993) in educational leadership and Foley (1990) in educational anthropology. Starratt explores the ways that educational leadership involves learning roles and scripts. Foley draws on Goffmanâs work to elaborate a performance theory of cultural reproduction and resistance in schools, describing the âexpressive practicesâ of teachers and students as âcommunicative laborâ toward meaningful exchanges. McLaren (1986) has drawn on anthropologist Victor Turnerâs work on ritual performance to understand how âbeing schooledâ involves a series of ritual performances on the part of administrators, teachers, and students.
Drawing on his study of Indonesian peasants and slave narratives, James C. Scott (1990) has framed social exchanges between dominant and subordinate groups as public performances. He argues that subordinates engage in offstage, hidden discourses that cannot be spoken in the presence of dominant groups. Thus, reading public discourse is trickier than we have previously thought, given that both subordinate and dominant groups engage in elaborate performances in each otherâs presence. Although social performance may be partly determined by power relations, the utility of performance in the analysis of everyday lives, places agency at the center of any discourse seeking to explain the dynamics of any social site.
To some extent, peopleâs lives may be scripted by biology, culture, social structure, and relations of power. Many of these factors are self-determining, yet others can be assumed, resisted, transformed, magnified or even transcended, as society places stigma on certain embodied presence and practice. The extent to which people enact assigned assumed-to-be-natural roles and the degree, to which they enact counter roles or modify existing ones, provides an analytical space in which to rethink current conceptions of pedagogy, policy, and leadership.
This book for the first time brings to educational research a communications and performance studies lens. It brings together educators and theorists from performance studies, educational policies, and educational foundations to examine and explicate the potential of looking at education through multiple perspectives. Teaching is a performance event, as well as being a performative eventâthe difference and link is that teaching is âdoing,â but it is also the repetitive act of doing that manifests its existential and practical presence. Teaching is a collaborative occasion brought to fruition by at least five codependent variables:
- the presence of acting/active bodies;
- the practice of audiencing (or receptive and reciprocal enactment between teachers and students);
- the aestheticized transactional communication process of any theatricalized event that is crafted with intent with many backstage performances that affect content, form, and function;
- the overarching political influence of society on curriculum; and
- the tension and tensiveness of cultural and political resistance to and of knowledge negotiated with passion and necessary compassion.
Setting the Stage
The chapters in this volume range in stylistic approach from what some have called âperformative writingâ and essays with a very strong narrative and autobiographic approach, to rather traditional scholarly and ethnographic essays that survey a broad range of theory and experience. Yet not to draw a distinction or vary judgment among these approaches, Della Pollock (1998) stated, that performative writing while evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, and consequential is also citational. In particular she said, âperformative writing is not a genre or fixed form (as textual model might suggest) but a way of describing what some good writing does. All good writing isnât necessarily performative. Nor would all the writers cited here consider their work performative. Performativity describes a fundamentally material practice. Like performance, however, it is also analytic, a way of framing and underscoring aspects of writing/lifeââand in this case writing educational life (p. 75).
The chapters are organized into three interrelated parts: First, how performance can and is being used as aesthetic frame, practiced embodied engagement, and a critical reflexive lens of viewing teaching practices, teacher-student interactions and the materiality of bodies in the classroom; second, how performance is linked to the productions of identity and conversely how they function in maintenance, resistance, and subversion of power; and finally, how processes and institutional structures of education such as reform, ritual and research are inherently linked to performances of social, political, and cultural spectacle.
Part I: Performance and Performativity in Pedagogical Practice
The republication of Elyse Pineauâs (1994) essay âTeaching Is Performance: Reconceptualizing a Problematic Metaphorâ frames this section. This first chapter, originally published in the American Educational Research Journal, is germinal in examining the âanalogies between teaching and performanceâ that pervade educational literature. This work provides a firm foundation of reconceptualizing performance as a generative metaphor for educational research based on theoretical and methodological points of contact between what is constructed as instructional communication and performance. It asks which aspects of educational experience open themselves up to performance-centered research and explores issues around which new research agendas can be developed in both disciplines.
Capitalizing on Pineauâs call, in chapter 3 Bryant Alexander constructs the classroom as a site of cultural performances that whether planned or emergent, become the resources for teachers and students to engage a critical pedagogical reflexivity. Toward that effort, he structures his chapter around three autoethnographic, performative, and pedagogically reflexive case studies. In each, he implicates his own subjectivities as a Black-male-gay teacher with personal and politicized agendas that affect and infect the pedagogical endeavor. He then teases at the very questions that undergird both pedagogy and performanceâwhat to teach, why to teach it, how to teach itâand most importantly, how to make meaningful sense of pedagogical and performative experience.
In chapter 4, Judith Hamera explores the corporeality of bodies in education with an articulate indebtedness to feminist theorists and critics. In particular she states that every pedagogical system or genre simultaneously presupposes and organizes its own embodied student-audience. Systems of physical training do this explicitly. Here, bodies are inserted into vocabulary, routines, and relations with history and authority. Her argument uses these systems of physical training to expose aspects of the pedagogical body hiding in the light of university classrooms. The chapter begins with stories illustrating the contradictory nature of the student bodyâtoo visible when its physicality is unruly or âunauthorized,â and invisible even to the students themselves, when that same physicality performs its domestication. Next, she turns to systems of physical training and how these can be used to begin conversations about technologies which produce, albeit incompletely, this domestication. Finally, she argues for performing the domesticated body in bad faith, as a tactic of playful critique.
In some ways, in his chapter entitled âBodily Excess and the Desire for Absence: Whiteness and the Making of (Raced) Educational Subjectivities,â John Warren makes the necessary and critical move of engaging, both the critical pedagogical reflexivity that Alexander calls for in his chapter and the detailed focus on the materiality of bodies that Hamera engages in her chapter. He focuses these on his own interests in White Studies and how the performance of whitenessâas both material fact and politicized agendaâaffects and permeates the educational endeavor. In particular, the chapter is a tenuous and necessarily tensive attempt to work through theoretical issues of whiteness and cultural power, bodily presence and absence, purity and danger. Warren promotes a critical educational practice that acknowledges bodies in the classroom (and our treatment of those bodies) in meaningful ways. His chapter signals the necessary caution and care in studying race performance in the classroom, positioning the White teacherâethnographer as both participant and observer, subject and object, in an essay that is as much about process as it is about product.
Part II: Performance, Power, and the Politics of Identity
In chapter 6, Bernardo Gallegos draws on the work of performance theorists, Bakhtin (1986), Goffman (1959), Pollock (1998), and Scott (1990); postcolonial theorists, Chakrabarty (2000), Ghandi (1998), and Prakash (1994); and reproductive theorists, Anyon (1980), and McLaren (2003) to explore educational policies, rituals, and performances within the context of colonialism and United States Imperialism. Drawing on previous work with colonized indigenous youth, he explains the complexities associated with attempting to frame the educational experiences of children of culturally and economically marginalized communities. Gallegos interweaves theoretical and cultural analysis (Bahktin, 1985) with autobiographical fiction in an explanation of educational resistance in a Mixed Blood (Coyote) Native American community in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Gallegos argues that educational practices such as sorting provide fertile spaces to study and understand educational performances and their relations to metanarratives that reproduce configurations of power. After all, the beginning of the school career for children is their introduction to being âunder surveillanceâ and to particular types of performances that are constantly observed, measured, defined, and ultimately ranke...