Spoiling the Game: Anarchy or Normality

Joint Conference Paper with Dr Lee Campbell

In the process of performative pedagogies, tutors move through a number of selves and identities as part of a never-ending transformational educational story. Through the principles of framing play (Schechner, 1990), tutor student power relationships appear to become fluid and ever changing and the processes through which teaching takes place is open and endless. The tutor’s power appears to be neutered, yet paradoxically and simultaneously the principles given by tutors as truth knowledge, are uncontested and demonstrate the power of expertise, hereby the ideologies of the Institution are upheld. Teaching is disrupted and suspended as a performative act through the role of the Trickster. Roland Barthes (Barthes, 1978) describes the imaginary contract between Students and Tutor and requires what he calls Pell Mell (from the French pêle mêle, meaning rushed, disorganized, reckless and headlong). Tutors deploy the tactics of disruption to deliberately suspend or interrupt teaching.

The first part of our presentation will see Meller set out a theoretical framework to debate the possibilities of performative pedagogy and disruption for challenging institutional orthodoxies, proposing the power of disruption as pedagogic strategy to not only provoke students’ participation but also to demonstrate how performative pedagogy can be effectively deployed to break implicit rules surrounding the exchange of power relation between student and tutor. Campbell will then respond by speaking about his focused usage of interruption in the learning environment.

Barthes, R., & Heath, S. (1978). Image-music-text. Macmillan

Schechner, R., & Appel, W. (1990). By means of performance: intercultural studies of theatre and ritual. Cambridge University Press.