Performing/Writing/Learning Bodes and Texts: Critical Pedagogies and Performances in the Composition Classroom (original) (raw)

"Wait, where am I supposed to be standing?" asks Geena. "On the porch, waiting to enter the house," say some of the students, but Molly, who has been reading ahead for her part, says, "but the report says that now you're leaving the house, so you're in the foyer with me." Geena and Molly are standing facing each other with a chair in between them, in the middle of a group of seated students. The chair represents an imaginary doorway, so Geena steps past the chair so that she is now standing with Molly, and they laugh, holding their copies of the police report. Someone from the circle asks, "But when did she, I mean he, him, the police officer, when did he enter the house?" Someone else suggests, "Geena should be facing away from Molly because it says here he, uhh, Molly, is yelling at, uhh, Geena, I guess." The above interchange happened in a classroom about two years ago, in Fall 2009. The students involved were not my students-I was invited by their professor to facilitate a brief performance exercise that evening, and I hesitate to read much more into the interchange than simply provide it to illustrate a kind of embodied pedagogical performance that I will describe later in this essay as I make a case for more comprehensive composition pedagogies that involve such performances. For now, I write the above as an invitation to experience an occasion where two people, 'Geena' and 'Molly', are endeavoring to reconstruct a sequence of events from a police report (see Appendix) about a particular incident that had been widely covered in the news a few weeks prior to this meeting. They are being aided in this effort by their classmates and by myself as their facilitator. What I remember most vividly about the brief exchange above, and about similar instances when I tried this again in other settings, is the range of movement and questioning that emerged from multiple participants around a key but extremely brief and missing segment of text in the report: was the police officer outside or inside the residence? And what was he doing in the foyer? In the dozens of news reports I had read about the incident, not a single reporter had picked up on these key questions-but these students, within a few minutes of performing the report, had instantly stumbled upon a turning point in the text. What more questions and avenues for investigation/research could the students have picked up on if they had Performing/Writing/Learning Bodies and Texts :: hari stephen kumar :: page 2 decided to write more thoroughly about the incident and their embodied experiences trying to reconstruct it based on an allegedly 'objective' police report? What alternate explanations and arguments might have emerged if students had drawn from such embodied experiences to engage each other in persuasive dialogue around those areas where their reconstructions differed in their interpretations and assumptions? Given that the incident in question involved a situation particularly charged with various dimensions of identity politics, between a veteran white male police officer and a distinguished African-American male professor, what did it mean for the embodied subjectivities and positionalities (my own included as a brown immigrant male teacher) in that room to re-enact such a tensive encounter?