Performance Theories in Education

Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity

Bryant Keith Alexander, Gary L. Anderson, Bernardo Gallegos, Bryant Keith Alexander, Gary L. Anderson, Bernardo Gallegos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135616854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity breaks new ground by presenting a range of approaches to understanding the role, function, impact, and presence of performance in education. It is a definitive contribution to a beginning dialogue on how performance, as a theoretical and pragmatic lens, can be used to view the processes, procedures, and politics of education. The conceptual framework of the volume is the editors' argument that performance and performativity help to locate and describe repetitive actions plotted within grids of power relationships and social norms that comprise the context of education and schooling. The book brings together performance studies and education researchers, teachers, and scholars to investigate such topics as:
*the relationship between performance and performativity in pedagogical practice; *the nature and impact of performing identities in varying contexts;
*cultural and community configurations that fall under the umbrella of teaching, education, and schooling; and
*the hot button issues of educational policies and reform as performances. With the aim of developing a clearer understanding of the effect, affect, and role of performance in education, the volume provides a crucial starting point for discourse among theorists and teacher practitioners who are interested in understanding and acknowledging the politics of performance and the practices of performative social identities that always and already intervene in the educational endeavor.

1

Introduction: Performance in Education

Bryant K. Alexander

California State University, Los Angeles

Gary L. Anderson

New York University

Bernardo P. Gallegos

Washington State University

“Performance” like the very nature of “education” is a contested term. W. B. Gallie (1964) offered his notion of contested terms. “The 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 ‘likely,’ but as of permanent potential critical value to one’s own use or interpretation of the concept in question” (pp. 187–188). Hence throughout this book, the authors engage in varying uses of the term performance—using 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 “critical pedagogy” is often constructed—as a critical lens of examining the “underlying power relationships that structure our world” 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 bodies—hence a displayed enactment of ideology and enfleshed knowledge—influenced 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 binary—between Judith Butler’s (1990a, 1990b, 1995) constructions of performativity as stylized repetition of acts that are socially validated and discursively established and Lyotard’s (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 “doing” 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 “in-class” politics of education, as well as the broader spectacle of educational reform and policymaking—we also extend and broaden Greg Dimitriadis’ (2001) recent efforts in Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice, “to link claims about the performativity of identity to grounded pedagogical practice and policy initiatives” (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. “A performance paradigm prevents the reification of culture into variables to be isolated, measured, and manipulated” (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. “In everyday communication,” he argued, “people 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-actors” (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. “Ironically, 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 inequality” (Levinson & Holland, 1996, p. 1). In this volume, Pineau states that, “the emergence of the performance paradigm has enabled a dialogue between performance studies and educational theory that may indeed, develop into a ‘language of possibility’ for both disciplines” 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 Goffman’s work to elaborate a performance theory of cultural reproduction and resistance in schools, describing the “expressive practices” of teachers and students as “communicative labor” toward meaningful exchanges. McLaren (1986) has drawn on anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on ritual performance to understand how “being schooled” 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 other’s 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, people’s 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 event—the difference and link is that teaching is “doing,” 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:

1. the presence of acting/active bodies;
2. the practice of audiencing (or receptive and reciprocal enactment between teachers and students);
3. the aestheticized transactional communication process of any theatricalized event that is crafted with intent with many backstage performances that affect content, form, and function;
4. the overarching political influence of society on curriculum; and
5. 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 “performative writing” 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, “performative 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 isn’t 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/life”—and 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 Pineau’s (1994) essay “Teaching Is Performance: Reconceptualizing a Problematic Metaphor” frames this section. This first chapter, originally published in the American Educational Research Journal, is germinal in examining the “analogies between teaching and performance” 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 Pineau’s 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 performance—what to teach, why to teach it, how to teach it—and 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 body—too visible when its physicality is unruly or “unauthorized,” 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 “Bodily Excess and the Desire for Absence: Whiteness and the Making of (Raced) Educational Subjectivities,” 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 whiteness—as both material fact and politicized agenda—affects 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 teacher–ethnographer 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 “under surveillance” and to particular types of performances that are constantly observed, measured, defined, and ultimately ranke...