Performing Teaching

In Art, Design & Performance we might see ourselves as artists first and educators second (Shreeve 2009). Art and design teachers (in common with teachers in other creative disciplines) are creative practitioners in relation to both their creative activity and their teaching. Creative practice is concerned with making and so too teaching.

In Performance, such a duality sees Tutors at once performing teaching and teaching performance. Through mapping the parallels between creative performance practice and teaching practice I will argue that a particular mode of creativity plays a central role in Art and Design education.

Through surfacing and acknowledging the complementarity between teaching and creative performance practice I will seek to make the roles of the artist and educator less oppositional (Orr and McDougall 2014).

If we draw out the synergies between creative practice and teaching practice we are able to bridge and map behaviours from creative practice into educational scholarship. I will illustrate this by offering a case study where performance approaches are deployed as a methodological frame to research teaching in performance design.

In this presentation, I unfold how creative performance practitioners (and their students) use disruptive devices to construct knowledge and develop learning. I explore the ways that these approaches (for example a commitment to process and reflexivity) can support the pursuit of pedagogic scholarship and enquiry.