Quiet Isn’t Always Peace: A Performance Poem on What’s Wrong With Science of Learning

• In Event: The Belly of the Beast: Resisting Racial, Gendered, and Sexual Oppressions Through the Power of Performance

Abstract

Objective/Purpose:
With the rise of the Science of Learning approach to compulsory education, teachers and teacher-educators have now been told by the Australian government that all teacher-preparation courses in the country must be using this direct-instruction approach by 2025. This is a radical revisioning that rejects student-centred learning and teaching, and critical theory education, with a preference for direct instruction and rote learning. This performance gives voice to some of the reasons why this kind of ‘sage on the stage’ mono-directional pedagogy has been abandoned several times in the past, in widely diverse global cultural eras.

Theoretical framework:
Performance autoethnography (Harris 2016; 2022) builds on embodied research that advances understandings of both creativity and learning as relational, emergent and collaborative (e.g. Amabile, 1995; Lucas, 2001; Vygotsky, 1984). It also challenges binaries including creative/analytic, student/teacher, essential/non-essential education texts. This performance utilises Tami Spry’s (2011) demand that in good performance - like in good education - one must understand the body navigating concepts of self, culture, language, class, race, gender, and physicality. This performance directs attention to new materialist and affective experiences of educational encounter, encourages transdisciplinary and transsectoral resistance to censorship in our schools and our lives, and highlights the value of diverse voices and perspectives made whole through the arts in school and academic educational contexts.

Methods and data:
This paper uses performance autoethnography as an arts based method to focus on recent educational reforms in Australia, where the presenter lives. By bringing this rebuttal to a national prioritisation on Science of Learning approaches into the body, this performance adheres to Spry’s (2011) injunction to bring politics back to the body, the breath, and the senses. I also draw on Nigel Thrift’s articulation of non-representational theory to remind the audience that research that eschews representational truth-claims is legitimate research and can offer higher impact through the somatic and sensory enquiry of felt and lived experiences. Lastly, the performance calls on Maggie MacLure’s use of the term ‘glow moments’ in attending to data - moments that animate themselves, that have their own lives, and that seek to be activated rather than gathered or interpreted.

Results and significance:
By resisting contemporary waves of retraction and injustice in education, this presentation reminds us that our bodies and voices are central to that resistance, and that speaking and embodying alternative futures is a powerful tool against oppression. From the new imperative to use Science of Learning approaches in all schools in Australia, and the censorship which may be strongest in Florida today but is moving across the globe, this presentation asserts that just because a phenomenon is currently widespread, doesn’t make it just, or in the words of Amanda Gorman, that “the norms and notions of what ‘just is’, isn’t always justice.” In this presentation, we stress the significance of the human body and speaking truth to power to continue to resist injustice in education, one person at a time.

Authors

• Daniel X. Harris, RMIT University

• Mark B. DeGarmo, Mark DeGarmo Dance