Critical Performative Pedagogy: A Dramatic Pursuit of "Dissociation"

• In Event: 16.022 - Critically Dramatic Conversations: Complications in Drama/Theater Research for Social Justice and Equity

Abstract

Why do you like theatre? “Being able to let go of everything.” “I can create who I want to be from scratch.” “It’s stepping into the unknown.”

In this paper we present an alternate model of data analysis that plays in the potentialities of “dissociation” — an existential space where the site of learning may occur in the process of rupture. We consider how a lens of dissociation may help create a landscape where predetermined outcomes and institutionalized ways of knowing are challenged and subverted. We use critical performative pedagogy and emergent literacy theory as a means to articulate our notions while theorizing what it could mean for students to “let go of everything”, step into the unknown and ultimately reconnect, with their socialized selves. Raising questions of identity, autonomy and self worth through first hand accounts of drama education explorations with youth, we lay out drama research in processes of disjuncture, joy and play.

We position our challenge as Critical Performative Pedagogy (CPP) and work to rethink the performance of meaning and the prospects of new forms of data analysis. We situate our notion of CPP alongside Butler (1990) as she articulates that “Experience, discourse and identities are interrelated whereas identity is perceived as constructed and constructing in relation to the regulatory practices and discourses that aim at creating a false or fictional stable self through ‘culturally intelligible grids’”. In this way, classroom events, either inside or outside of a dramatic curriculum, are perceived as “spectacles” that are produced at the intersections of culture and identity in the making (Diamond, 1996; Pineau, 2005). Ultimately, this creates a dynamic emergent exchange amongst all members of the “learning event” where “…classrooms are perceived as spaces where students and teachers perform and imagine multiple social realities addressing political issues, moving beyond superficial understandings of ‘difference’, ‘the other,’ or assumed ‘naïve’ notions of empowerment” (Author#1, 2007). Additionally, we work to interrogate notions of dissociated space as they intersect with the possibilities of the “dissensus” as understood by Rancière to be in the challenging space created by a “multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (2008). Together this framework undergirds our understanding of a site for disassociation.

This paper begins to re-examine an arts-based learning study in a preschool from 2012. This study was of a qualitative exploratory design (Marshall and Rossman, 1999; Saldaña, 2011) influenced by non-representational emergence (Deleuze and Guatari 1987). In order to re-explore a previous study through a “dissociated” lens we draw upon Leander and Boldt (2012) who explain “Life is understood as Emergent, having no natural directions of growth or boundaries or barriers.” The challenge to develop research that perpetually emerges calls on researchers “To run counter to the expectation that we should be seeking to represent what actually happened or to locate causality in the subject of the event” (Leander and Boldt 2012).

Authors

• Gustave John Weltsek-Medina, Indiana University

• Clare Hamoor, Blue School