Performative Writing as Training in the Performing Arts (original) (raw)
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This case study conducted by a writing specialist and a theatre specialist examines the ways in which writing to learn and learning to write took form in a course in which the ultimate goal was a staged production for a live audience. Using naturalistic methodology that deployed both ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to analyze the teaching and learning that transpired in Theatre 490: Experimental Theatre Studio, analysts reviewed the syllabus, assignments, production journal, responses to learning-to-write assignments, students' written final reflections, anonymous end-of-term course evaluations, a video of the final staged performance, and responses to a questionnaire completed by students nearly two years after the staged performance. Findings that incorporate video clips from the staged performance shed light on elements of teaching and learning that pass undetected when written artifacts alone are used to assess learning, including ways in which students learn fr...
"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?
Educational Psychologist, 1982
Three Perspectives on Writing Three Perspectives on Writing Three Perspectives on Writing into the process from several perspectives, and questions whose answers would contribute to a more comprehensive theory. With our first flashlight, we see writing as a communicative act. The observation that to write is to communicate, though commonplace, has major, and sometimes surprising implications for a theory of writing. It forces us to focus on the active role of the reader and leads us to an emphasis on the audience in choosing tasks for beginning writers. With our second flashlight, we see writing in the context of a taxonomy of communicative acts. We explore the differences between writing and conversing, writing and lecturing, writing a play and writing a story, and spotlight the important theoretical and practical implications of these differences. Our third flashlight focuses on writing as a decomposable process whose product must still fulfill an overall communicative function. To this end, we train the flashlight sequentially on various subprocesses of writing
Writing Through the Visual and Performing Arts
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While doctoral writing in the broader academy is a site of anxiety and contestation (Paré, 2019), doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts inhabits an even more contested space. For social and institutional reasons, the visual and performing arts are relative newcomers to the practice of doctoral writing (Baker et al., 2009; Elkins, 2014), and with theses that incorporate a creative/performed component, whole new ways of doctoral writing have opened up, including such features as new academic voices; highly innovative forms of typography, layout, and materiality; and varied relations between the written and creative components. Understanding such diverse texts requires a multi-valent approach to recognise the ways in which doctoral writing has been re-imagined in this context and the ways in which the academy can re-imagine a legitimate space for such academic work. In this chapter, we use a broadly social-semiotic framework to demonstrate the value of Legitimation Code Th...
What we know about writing, and why it matters
I'd like to start by thanking the conference organizers for asking me to speak here today. As I will argue in what follows, every invitation to write is -or can be -an invitation to think, to reflect, and to learn. The elements of any writing task -the topic, the audience, the occasion, the purpose -interact to construct a unique intellectual and social opportunity. As I was writing this paper, with this moment and this audience in mind, I thought in particular ways about my 30 years in the field of Writing Studies and about what we know about writing and why that knowledge matters. In the past three decades, there have been dramatic developments in the study and teaching of writing. Theorists, researchers, and teachers have created a complex and detailed account of writing by drawing on a rich variety of sources, including the classical rhetorical traditions of Greece and Rome, contemporary studies of cognition, the sociology of knowledge, research into academic and workplace writing, new literacy theories, the digital revolution, and the current cross-disciplinary fascination with discourse. The result is a body of knowledge about writing that has profound practical and pedagogical implications for teaching, thinking, and learning across the curriculum.
How we talk about the work is the work: Performing critical writing
Performance Research, 2018
Performance begins to have its effect long before the encounter with it, beginning with the first thing we read or hear about it, which may even be more memorable than the work itself; and its work continues in the thoughts and conversations that take place afterward: dialogues and exchanges that may be responding to written accounts as much as to experiences of the work themselves. Critical writing is part of this cycle of making and imagining. It can shape the contexts in which work is made and received, playing not just a responsive role but actively shaping how and what it is possible to make, see, do, and say. And critical writing is also shaped by the circumstances in which it is written, as part of systems of production and distribution.This article gives examples of a number of initiatives by individual writers, artist collectives, and festivals that test forms of critical writing that are as experimental as the practices to which they relate. Drawing on the author's experience running workshops in critical writing practice, it takes inspiration from the expanded field of writing as theorized and practiced in performance writing, placing these ideas in relation to a writing practice that conceives itself as ‘criticism’. It is intended as a practical guide that might be used by writers or workshop leaders to cultivate their own critical writing projects, and to inspire imaginative thinking about writing and conversation as creative practices in their own right.