Teaching Performance Practices in Remote and Hybrid Spaces

Jeanmarie Higgins, Elisha Clark Halpin, Jeanmarie Higgins, Elisha Clark Halpin

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000599299
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Bildung
• Thema: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

This collection of insightful essays gives teachers' perspectives on the role of space and presence in teaching performance. It explores how the demand for remote teaching can be met while at the same time successfully educating and working compassionately in this most 'live' of disciplines.

Teaching Performance Practices in Remote and Hybrid Spaces reframes prevailing ideas about pedagogy in dance, theatre, and somatics and applies them to teaching in face-to-face, hybrid, and remote situations. Case studies from instructors and professors provide essential, practical suggestions for remotely teaching a vast range of studio courses, including tap dance, theatre design, movement, script analysis, and acting, rendering this book an invaluable resource. The challenges that teachers are facing in the early twenty-first century are addressed throughout, helping readers to navigate these unprecedented circumstances whilst delivering lessons, guiding workshops, rehearsing, or even staging performances.

This book is invaluable for dance and theatre teachers or leaders who work in the performing arts and related disciplines. It is also ideal for any professionals who need research-based solutions for teaching performance online.

Part I Pedagogies of Care for Digital Spaces

Chapter 1 Reevaluating Rigor with 2020 Hindsight—A Manifesto for the Ungraded Classroom

Jane Barnette

DOI: 10.4324/9781003229056-3

In recent years, public institutions of higher education have become more reliant on tuition revenue for survival and the process of learning, in turn, has become more transactional. “Transactional models of education identify students as consumers and teachers as retail workers who must please their customers (an inhumane model for retail sales as well as the world of learning)” (Denial 2016). In response to this pressure, many professors have doubled-down on their commitment to what they define as academic excellence, as evidenced by (what they consider) rigorous assignments. However, it is not coincidental that the word “rigor” is short-hand for rigor-mortis and derives from the Latin word for stiffness. As digital pedagogy trailblazer Jesse Stommel suggests, “most meanings of the word ‘rigor’ have no productive place in education, unless you believe school (and disciplinary culture) should be about policing, punishing, and gatekeeping—again with the effect of excluding already marginalized voices” (@Jessifer, Twitter June 27, 2021). Indeed, demanding rigor in the classroom accomplishes exactly what its Latin root suggests: it hardens and freezes students, encouraging them to create and labor from a place of fear. Conversely, to teach in/through compassion enlivens students, allowing them to stretch and grow, not only in the subject matter of the course being taught but in their very humanity and capacity for empathy.

Approaching the labor of teaching with kindness or compassion at the forefront also aligns with neuroscience discoveries—contrary to previous beliefs that students’ emotions impede learning, we now recognize that “emotion and cognition are supported by interdependent neural processes” (Immordino-Yang 2016). Learning depends not only on intellectual capacity, then, but also on emotional receptivity. Students are more receptive when they feel brave and can trust their classmates and teacher, but this connection between emotion and knowing goes further when we recognize “that we only think deeply about things we care about” (Immordino-Yang 2016). Teaching critical thinking relies on having the capacity and emotional range to attach meanings to feelings and the courage to allow those emotional connections to form.

Arguably, students who select theatre courses (and especially those who major or minor in theatre or performance studies) are already familiar with the vulnerability required of actors, whose emotional flexibility and accessibility has long been part of actor-training. Yet to assume that all students in any class, including an advanced acting class, are neurotypical would be foolhardy and discriminatory, so these insights about emotions and cognition only help teachers recognize part of the problem; they do not offer pedagogical solutions.

While teachers cannot control the emotional range or wellbeing of our students, we can improve our affective approach to teaching, by embracing kindness as well as offering an ungraded experience. As historian and pedagogy scholar Catherine Denial offers, “a pedagogy of kindness asks us to apply compassion in every situation we can, and not to default to suspicion or anger.” Doing so “means recognizing that our students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educational model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave” (Denial 2019). When this approach is coupled with techniques of ungrading, the entire experience of teaching and learning transforms.

Particularly for remote performance classrooms, where risk-taking and failure are crucial steps in the artistic process, flexible pedagogy has never been more necessary. To learn performance analysis, design, or technique without the benefit of face-to-face interaction encourages increasingly deeper rifts between teacher and student, as well as between students perceived as “talented” and their peers whose skills are not yet obvious. In contrast, ungraded pedagogy empowers students to take control over how (much) they learn and establishes a foundation of trust for the professor that enables everyone’s creativity to flourish.

With appreciation for the irony that the phrase “20/20 hindsight” now evokes, I recognize that the following provocations for teaching performance practices were made possible (or at least, rendered visible) because of the shared trauma that those of us who taught (and learned) during 2020 in the wake of stay-at-home orders and widespread digital (and hybrid) education mandates endured. Without the necessity of change, brought on by a lethal airborne virus, I likely would have continued teaching as I had for decades: in a graded classroom, with expectations of “rigor” at the root of my curriculum. And the students, in turn, would have evaluated me based on how well their learning and life obstacles could be balanced against my (perceived) rigor. Instead, thanks to the precarity brought on by the events of 2020 in the United States, we became hyper-aware of our needs and limitations—our innate humanity, as Denial would have it, rose to the surface, and made it all the more evident how inhumane the practice of rating students has always been.

What follows, then, is my proposal for radical change in university teaching methods. Because this proposal is so very situated in the “hindsight of 2020”—because it emerged out of the collective trauma wrought by the near-global mismanagement of COVID-19, alongside the strategic cruelty of the 45th US president—it takes the form of a manifesto, rather than a traditional essay. “To write a manifesto,” after all, “is to announce one’s participation, however discursive, in a struggle against oppressive forces” (Janet Lyon, qtd. in Gane, 2006, 219). I choose this format to mark a break with the past and to provoke others to do the same. In doing so, I call upon Donna Haraway’s observation that “there is a kind of fantastic hope that runs through a manifesto” (qtd. in Gane, 2006, 222). I write this manifesto to conjure and nurture the joy of teaching and learning that so many of us mourn losing, or believe is possible, even if we have yet to experience it ourselves.

The Invocation

I call upon curiosity, which is related to care.

My muses are Natalie Loveless and Julia Frodahl.

—This is citational practice.

“Etymologically, curious has the same root as careful or curate: to care. It brings warning (caution), desire (to know), and considered choice (the care at stake in curation) together as the name of the (pedagogical) game.”

(Loveless, 47, emphasis original)

“Compassion is the willingness and ability to feel someone else’s suffering, and to wish to help alleviate that suffering. The word passion originally means suffering … from a Buddhist perspective, where there’s passion there tends to be attachment, and attachment is a cause of suffering.”

(Frodahl, Interview)

I assert that curiosity is crucial for genuine learning to take place. The student must be driven by an abiding desire to discover.¹

I claim that the economy of grading students interferes with cultivating their curiosity. By the economy of grading, I refer to the transactional qualities of contemporary higher education—the banking model of education defined by Paolo Freire (1970) that “understands knowledge as information bits that are depositable [sic], retrievable, and usable at some moment completely separate from the original scene of learning—like a toolkit that … protects us—all of us!—from the anxiety associated with ignorance” (Loveless 49). From this perspective, teachers hold knowledge that they can transfer to students who earn grades worthy of receiving that knowledge. The language reveals the intent: to earn suggests the transaction assumed in grading. It presumes worthiness connected in the transaction and situates learning in a capitalist, consumer-driven setting. Students are not consumers. They cannot earn knowledge. The empty thing they receive—a grade—only matters because it benefits the transactional model by providing the capital—the grade—upon which neoliberal education depends.

Adding the “l” to earning to make learning entirely transforms the gerund. We learn because we want to know, because we study, because we care.

When students care more about earning (a grade, a wage, a role) than learning, teachers become gatekeepers and supervisors who judge worthiness rather than mentors who inspire discovery.

I want to inspire students; I want students to inspire me. I want to cultivate compassion and curiosity in my classroom.

Therefore, I commit to a pedagogy of kindness, without traditional grading.

Three Parts of the Ritual

Having invoked curiosity and care, I turn now to the ritual at hand: teaching. Because all aspects of the ritual cannot be covered here, I highlight three distinctive parts, all of which are crucial to an ungraded pedagogy of kindness: (1) the flexible syllabus, (2) compassionate conversations, and (3) offering constructive feedback based on kindness.

The ritual begins with the syllabus, which is traditionally crafted before the course begins, before the teacher interacts with the students enrolled. While it is prudent to have boundaries in mind before the class begins, I assert that syllabi must be written in collaboration with students, incorporating their collective decisions. Curating the syllabus in cooperation with students aligns the ethics of the course with my intention to cultivate curiosity and compassion. Here, we are reminded of the shared root that curating, care, and curiosity share—the three Cs of this ritual.

Curating honors the expertise of the instructor, who has (presumably) chosen the scope of the course, and (or) chosen key readings and experiences that will facilitate exploring the subject at hand. Once these decisions have been made, however, they must be ordered, both in time and space. Within the restrictions set by the university (the dates of the term, the meeting days and times of the course, and any breaks or exam dates designated by the academic calendar, for example), students-as-curators can and should have the flexibility to rearrange the timing at will, until they reach consensus. The question of space applies to all classrooms, but especially those grounded in performance in digital and hybrid formats: in what digital and/or in-person spaces the scholarship will be presented, and to whom, are decisions to be made by the students, from among options offered (or agreed upon) by teachers.

Once these basics are established—when and where we will study and present—the real work begins. Variations abound for approaching student labor in ungraded paradigms, but one constant cannot be overlooked: the importance of metacognition. Knowing what and how you comprehend is crucial to teaching and learning, as scholars have established, but ungraded approaches move the needle beyond simply thinking about thinking. “Grading and assessment are two distinct things, and spending less time on grading does not mean spending less time on assessment. Assessment is inevitable,” as Stommel (2020) claims (36). In addition to the instructor’s inevitable contributions to evaluating the learning, however, in an ungraded classroom it is vital for students to evaluate themselves.

This can take several forms, occurring in small ways throughout the term, but I find it useful to require self-evaluations at least at midterm and before the university final exam period begins. True followers of the ungraded path (who are nevertheless obligated to enter university-sanctioned grades, rather than pass/fail or the like) will enter the exact grade a student assigns themselves for the course, but I reserve the right to adjust these proposed grades, typically so that I can raise them for students (usually female-identifying or members of the global majority) whose assessment is too modest or too harsh, in light of their peers.²

In addition to whatever self-evaluation checkpoints the class agrees upon, the expected labor of the students must be considered. There are numerous options for approaching this, including establishing a contract with a baseline grade for all students, contingent on an agreed-upon number of assignments completed, as well as (in many cases) an agreed-upon number and degree of absences or tardies allotted.³ While my department—like many theatre departments—has a tacit expectation that students must attend virtually every class period, and adheres to the industry standard of timeliness (“to be early is to be on time”), with the hindsight of 2020 I no longer take attendance. Central to the premise of compassionate pedagogy is the tenet of believing students, and believing in them (Denial 2019)—therefore, if a student misses class, I must assume they had good reason. Ultimately, those students who have excessive absences but cannot (or will not) drop the course have opportunities to consider the weight of these absences in their self-evaluations, based on their unique challenges.

Once the syllabus has been determined as a class collective (a process that will take at least the first week, if not the first two-three weeks to establish), the next consideration for the ritual of teaching is how we might foster compassionate conversations. This concept is tangential to “difficult” conversations, a term that usually signals the discussion of “hot button” issues, such as “varying interpretations of religion; race, gender, and sexuality; genetic testing; evolution; immigration; and many more” (“Difficult Dialogues” 2021). Scholarship about discussions in educational settings also frequently evoke the concept of brave and safe spaces.⁴ While similar, my use of compassionate conversations is meant to designate an approach based on both the pedagogy of kindness and an ungraded classroom. At the root of the difficulty experienced in discussing “hot button” topics, leading to the need to designate spaces as either brave or safe, is judgment. As Frodahl notes,

compassion (and the changes it makes possible) comes from the ability to see beneath the surface. Specifically, to see the suffering that lies beneath every single act of harm and every dangerous belief… Because here’s the thing: shaming, judging, and severing almost never has a transformative result.

That said, as she recognizes, “anyone subjected to racism, homophobia, and misogyny shouldn’t also have to bear the burden of enlightening everyone” (2021). Unlike brave spaces, which can easily fall into the trap of falsely equating experiences and suggesting that “historical inequiti...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: In Defense of “Stuff”: Teaching the Ephemeral Theatre of Things
• Introduction: Teaching Performance Practices in Remote and Hybrid Spaces
• Part I Pedagogies of Care for Digital Spaces
• Part II Dance and Movement
• Part III Doing Theatre Online: Research, Rehearsal, Production
• Part IV Materiality/Ephemerality: Teaching Design and Production Now
• Index