Reception: Performance as Pedagogy Working Group

You are cordially invited to join us for the inaugural reception of the Performance as Pedagogy Working Group funded by the Humanities Institute.  The reception will take place on Wednesday, November 16 from 2:00-3:30 in the Archives of the Folklore Center (218 Ohio Stadium between gates 18-20, 1961 Tuttle Park Place Columbus OH, 43210). 

 

The Performance as Pedagogy Working Group aims to explore the value of performative and experiential approaches as methods for fostering critical thinking and embodied understanding in university classrooms. In addition to providing a forum for interdisciplinary discussion around this theme, a central objective of the Working Group is to function as a resource for helping faculty move from performance-based classroom practices to the articulation of these pedagogies as publications. 

 

Experiential and performance-based pedagogies foster applied and immediate student engagement with cultural practices and concepts, linguistic expression, social challenges, aesthetic values, global and local dynamics, issues of representation, tensions of continuity and change, to name a few broad areas. Some applications for which faculty report positive results in undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike include: performance as a tool for broaching difficult, uncomfortable, or emergent subjects; emulation as a vehicle for exploring indigenous sensibilities; group participation as a way of overcoming anxiety, shyness, and other learning inhibitions; ethnographic participant observation as a path toward empathetic cultural understanding;  improvisation as mechanism for activist, experimental learning and teaching; performance as immersion experience; playfulness and cognition: the emancipatory power of the ludic; public performance as an education in professionalization; performance as method for second language acquisition.

 

This new Working Group allows us to formalize these discussions, provide a platform for fostering interdisciplinary dialogue on this topic, expand this developing network on campus, consolidate efforts, give visibility to the pedagogical value of performance-based approaches, seed interdepartmental and interdisciplinary collaborations, and support publications that will confirm OSU’s progressive outlook on higher education.

 

Please join us on November 16 to learn more about the Performance as Pedagogy Working Group, get a sneak-peak at our late Autumn and Spring line up of hands-on workshops that demonstrate performance-based and experiential pedagogies, and weigh in on plans for the group from your own classroom experiences.

 

On behalf of the co-conveners of the Performance as Pedagogy Working Group, we look forward to seeing you there!