Pedagogies of Inclination

• In Event: Curriculum Scholars, Literature, and the Women Who Have Influenced/Inspired Us: Commemorating Dreams and Necessities

Abstract

In 2015, William Pinar’s and Madeleine Grumet’s Toward a Poor Curriculum (TPC) was published in its 3rd edition. Initially published in 1976, Pinar and Grumet took their title from Polish Director and teacher Jerzy Grotowski’s book, Toward a Poor Theatre. Growtowski (1933-1999) practiced a dramaturgy that was influenced by the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Antoin Artaud, both of whom felt increasing skepticism of the social structures of their time that had allowed for global warfare. Their collective political project dedicated itself to cultivating a critical consciousness among actors in order to create performances that challenged normative conventions and the press of hegemony. Growtowski believed that it was incumbent upon the actor to co-create theatrical events with its spectators - to interact with them with the aim of challenging normative perspectives and understandings. This pedagogy of inclination asks that the actor recognize when s/he may find it necessary to make contact with difficult aspects of society on behalf of the spectator so that the spectator is able to recognize an aspect of society previously denied.

In TPC, Grumet draws on Growtowski’s methodologies to create an autobiographical method grounded in psychoanalysis that, in her words, “strips away the encrustations of stylistic conventions, proscenium illusions, cultural myths. …in a poor curriculum we turn our focus from the artifacts themselves, the Bunsen burner, … modular scheduling… to the ways in which the individual student confronts them (89-90).” “Poor theatre,” like the “Poor curriculum,” is a performance and pedagogical approach that sheds itself of excess, lavish sets and expensive, corporately sanctioned curriculum and builds on the refined methodologies of the actors/teachers.

This presentation opens the archive of Grumet’s scholarship in the areas of theatre, autobiography and psychoanalysis to inform another archive – that of Italian photojournalist, environmentalist, feminist, and anti mafia activist, Letizia Battaglia. Battaglia, once a student of Growtowski’s, has, since 1972, created an archive of over six thousand photographs of the mafia’s internal war in Sicily. Bound up with traditions of social documentary and biography, Battaglia’s public pedagogy, informed by the principles of Growtowski’s theatre, can be read as a performative event that works to create shared political spaces of action for deliberation, and the recovery of difficult knowledge that has been disavowed or denied. Like the story-telling practices of Grumet, Battalia believes the obligation of the public pedagogue is to bring the narratives of people who have been rendered ‘bare life’ by politics and history into a larger conversation. Both Grumet and Battaglia hold the assumption that life narratives offer an alternative to the philosophical universalism and disembodied categories that efface bodily existence and sexual, socio-economic and racial differences.

My analysis of interviews with Battaglia’s archive of photographs and public pedagogical tactics is informed by the scholarship of Grumet, Adriana Cavarero, and Hannah Arendt. My closing remarks will focus on the relevance of understanding TPC as a pedagogy of ‘inclinations’ that has valuable implications for educators, students, and communities in an era of state sanctioned corruption and the demise of public education.

Author

• Paula M. Salvio, University of New Hampshire