Teaching with Confidence in Higher Education

Applying Strategies from the Performing Arts

Richard Bale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367193652
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Presenting higher education teaching as a performative, creative, and improvisational activity, Teaching with Confidence in Higher Education explores how skills and techniques from the performing arts can be used to increase the confidence and enhance the performance of teachers. Guiding readers to reflect on their own teaching practices, this helpful and innovative book proposes practical techniques that will improve higher education teachers' abilities to lead and facilitate engaging and interactive learning sessions.

Encouraging the creation of inclusive learning experiences, the book offers insights into how performative techniques can help place the student centre stage. Drawing on a variety of performing arts contexts, including acting, singing, stand-up comedy, and dance, as well as interviews with academics and performers, the book helps readers to:

• Critically analyse their own practice, identifying areas for improvement
• Manage their anxiety and 'stage fright' when it comes to teaching
• Become more aware of both their voice and body, establishing professional techniques to improve physical and vocal performance
• Learn to improvise in order to prepare for the unprepared
• Understand the concepts of active learning and inclusivity within the classroom.

Raising awareness of good practice as well as potential areas for development, Teaching with Confidence in Higher Education is ideal for anyone new to teaching in higher education or looking to improve student engagement through the performance aspects of their teaching.

“The lecture is the obvious format that highlights the link between teaching and performance. We just have to think about the lecture hall as an auditorium. There is an oratory tradition to these spaces, but the Greeks referred to the stage as the orchestra, which means the dancing place. Nowadays, lectures also add a huge screen and project presentation slides, so our students are sitting in a kind of cinema. This can, perhaps inevitably, build a sense of expectation of the lecturer to fulfil the role of performer.”

Anna McNamara, Interview 9

When we are teaching, to some extent we have probably all had the feeling that we are performing; that we are ‘playing a role’; that we are ‘on stage’; that we are acting a part. However, I would like to say from the outset that I do not view teachers as actors: this perspective places the teacher centre stage, which is unhelpful in a higher education landscape where we are focusing more and more on student-centred approaches and active learning (see Chapter 7). It is also clear that teachers are not actors; they are themselves, perhaps variations of themselves, but themselves nonetheless. I return to this point below.

A current trend in higher education in many countries is the shifting relationship between students and their universities. This is driven by the increasing marketisation of higher education, from the emergence of for-profit colleges in the United States (e.g. Angulo 2016) to increasing tuition fees in the United Kingdom. All of this leads to greater consumeristic expectations of students. For example, a Universities UK survey (2017) of just over 1,000 undergraduates revealed that almost half of students (47%) considered themselves to be customers of their universities. This in turn has implications for the professionalisation of teaching in higher education and the subsequent scrutiny of teaching quality and teaching performance. Here, we are not concerned with performance in terms of quality management, and review and evaluation of teachers’ performance. Instead, we focus on the teacher’s own notions of performance, mindful of the potential for teachers to experience greater (performance) anxiety as a result of the increased focus on teaching quality and consumeristic relationships with students.

Many aspects of life can be and have been explored through a performance lens, and it has been argued for many decades that our everyday interactions have aspects of a theatrical performance. Specifically in the higher education teaching context, the academic and performer Lee Campbell (2019) has written about the role of performance in pedagogy, culminating in the publication of an edited volume on critical performative pedagogy. Zooming out from higher education, the renowned sociologist Erving Goffman devised the concept of dramaturgical analysis. He observed that people ‘behave’, or ‘act’, differently in different situations, and with different people, preserving a private presentation of self for the backstage space. Goffman (1956) outlined his ideas in his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In this chapter, we start from this premise that we present ourselves in different ways in different social contexts, and we look specifically at the teaching context. We will explore some of the key terms used throughout the book and attempt to define concepts which are relevant when considering performance aspects of a teacher’s role.

Teaching as Performance or Teaching is Performance?

Teaching is about reaching people with your subject. Performance is about reaching people with your message.

Kate Nasser, Interview 3

In discussing teaching and performance, it is important to clarify precisely how we consider teaching and performance to be related: do we say teaching is (a) performance or do we just describe teaching as performance? What is the difference? As is evident by the topic of this book, we often tend to refer to almost anything as being a performance. A famous example is the quote from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which Jacques begins a monologue with “All the world’s a stage,” characterising life as a play being performed by us, the actors. However, McAuley (2010) cautions against considering an ever-increasing number of scenarios and contexts to be performances. As Schechner (2013) points out, an important factor in determining whether something is deemed to be a performance is what cultural, social, and historical conventions count as performance. This means that what is performance is not static but changes over time and from culture to culture, and lines between what is performance and what is an everyday activity often become blurred. A contemporary example is the fast-paced and often dramatic world of politics: at the time of writing, the highest political office, the US President, is currently occupied by a former reality TV star.

It is unlikely that current social or cultural conventions, anywhere in the world, would categorise teaching as being performance. However, anything has the potential to be viewed as performance. Schechner (2013: 41) gives the example of maps as performance, explaining that, in their various forms, maps perform certain functions, such as depicting clear, but artificial, boundaries between nation states, or portraying the northern hemisphere with relatively bigger territories as compared to land masses in the southern hemisphere, showing the world from the preferred viewpoint of the colonial powers. Schechner concludes that as provides a useful way of viewing a particular topic through the lens of something else, without committing to a firm comparison between the two.

What the ‘as’ says is that the object of study will be regarded ‘from the perspective of’, ‘in terms of’, ‘interrogated by’ a particular discipline of study.

(Schechner 2013: 42)

This is what is at the heart of this book: encouraging reflection on our teaching practice and performance; considering teaching from the perspective of performing arts; in terms of skills and techniques used by performers; interrogated by performance studies, all of which designate teaching as having elements of performance without describing the teacher inherently as a performer, an actor, or a sage-on-the-stage character.

What is Performance?

Returning to the point above about marketisation and consumerisation of higher education, the notion of performance draws our attention to standards, success, and potential consequences for substandard performance. In the arts, performance is about entertaining (an audience) and pursuing a creative endeavour. However, neither of these concepts of performance captures the essence of performance from the perspective of a teacher. The influential performance theorist and theatre director Richard Schechner (2003: 8) identifies several characteristics which are unique to performance, namely demonstration or showing of skills or talents, audience members, ordering of time sequences, and a high degree of self-awareness on the part of the performer. It is possible to see how this idea of performance can be used to frame a teacher’s performance. Teachers simultaneously demonstrate their own skills of presentation, explanation, and so on, but they also guide their ‘audience’ – their students – to learn new skills and to gain new knowledge. For any teacher who has planned a class, it is also apparent that time is never your friend, and it is important to consider carefully how long the different segments of the lesson will take, and how these interrelate. Finally, as teachers, we are encouraged to be reflective practitioners, casting a critical eye over our own practice both during class and afterwards in order to reflect-in-action and to reflect-on-action (Schön 1983) (see Chapter 2). This means we have a high degree of self-awareness.

In terms of the extent of performance and where it might arise, Schechner (2013: 31) identifies eight situations in which performances might occur:

1. 1 in everyday life – cooking, socialising, ‘just living’
2. 2 in the arts
3. 3 in sports and other popular entertainments
4. 4 in business
5. 5 in technology
6. 6 in sex
7. 7 in ritual – sacred and secular
8. 8 in play

Schechner acknowledges that this list is by no means exhaustive, and that many of the situations overlap and form integral parts of each other. He uses this list simply to highlight that performance is a ubiquitous construct, found everywhere, but that it is also difficult to define or to determine its limits and boundaries. For Fleming (2016), what distinguishes performance from everyday life (number 1 in Schechner’s list of situations) is the emphasis on reflection and awareness of self during the activity, in our case teaching. This means that we can move away from the more obvious notions of performance, such as standing on a stage and speaking in front of an audience, and focus instead on the self-awareness, self-reflection, and, in some ways, the vulnerabilities of the teacher. This, in essence, is where teaching meets performance.

What Does it Mean to Perform?

As we have seen from Schechner’s depiction of performance above, the act of performing occurs in a variety of ways, from the obvious performance on stage or screen, to performing roles at ceremonies or social events, to navigating performances in everyday life, such as performing a job role in the workplace. We are usually quite aware when we are performing, and we can quite easily spot the difference between ‘being ourselves’ and ‘playing a role’. Or is this always the case, particularly in the workplace, and even more specifically, in teaching?

Pause for Reflection:

Think about how you are as a person in everyday life and how you are when you are teaching? How do you think your friends and family would view you if they saw you in a teaching context? Would they find your everyday ‘persona’ different from your teaching ‘persona’? Do you think you have a teaching (performing) persona?

The questions above aim to provoke reflection about who you are when you are ‘just being you’ – if such a thing even exists – and who you are when you are performing the role of a teacher. Friends and family members, who know me solely in a social, non-working/teaching context, have often remarked that they find the idea of me ‘standing in front of a class’ funny, interesting, intriguing, strange – and other adjectives of choice. What I take from this is that they are used to seeing me (perform) in a particular context – everyday life – and so they find the idea of me performing the role of a teacher, which they know well from their own experiences of being taught themselves, funny,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Teaching and performance
• 2 Mirror, mirror… reflecting on and reviewing your teaching performance
• 3 Performance anxiety and stage fright
• 4 The voice
• 5 The body
• 6 Improvisation: Preparing for the unprepared
• 7 Performance, active learning, and inclusivity
• Concluding remarks
• Appendix: Interview transcripts
• Index