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– VOLUME 2 | NUMBER 1 | 2008 –

VOLUME 2 | NUMBER 1 | 2008

Exploring Artistry and Creativity in Educational Teaching and Research.

VOLUME 2 | NUMBER 1 | 2008 The Journal of Artistic and Creative Education (JACE) is an on-line journal that can be accessed at jaceonline.com.au JACE is a peer-reviewed journal published twice each year that explores issues of artistry and creativity in contemporary research and teaching, and the interface between them. The journal seeks to promote praxis, to provide an evidence-based bridge between arts and artistic practice, creative practices in educational contexts, and learning research and theory in all these areas.

Editor

Dr Wesley Imms, University of Melbourne

Editorial Assistant

Chris Sommervelle, University of Melbourne

eEditor (Graphics)

Dion Tuckwell, University of Melbourne

eEditor (Web)

Michael Dunbar, miek.com.au

Editorial Board Professor Susan Wright, University of Melbourne Dr Neryl Jeanneret, University of Melbourne Dr Christine Sinclair,
University of Melbourne Dr Barbara Kameniar, University of Melbourne Mr Robert Brown, 
University of Melbourne For details concerning our journal focus, information for contributors, and contact details, please access our website on www.jaceonline.com.au ISSN: 1832 - 0465 Published in Australia Publisher: Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010.

JACE is peer reviewed as per section 4.3.4 of the HERDC Specifications.

CONTENTS Editorial: ARTISTRY AND EDUCATION: FOUR PERSPECTIVES

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Wesley Imms “DELIBERATELY”, “EXPLICITLY”: REDISTRIBUTING POWER. AN ARGUMENT FOR USING VISUAL RESEARCH METHODS IN AN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT.

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Helen Toon TEACHING STORIES: A REFLECTION ON TEACHING RESIDENCIES

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Kathryn Ricketts RESEARCHER-PLAYWRIGHT AND THE RESEARCH-PLAY

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Thomas Turner PERFORMING EDUCATION Julie White & Lynda Smerton

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Please Note: This issue has been reformatted from its orignal. As of March 2012 pagination has altered.

Editorial:

ARTISTRY AND EDUCATION: FOUR PERSPECTIVES

Wesley Imms University of Melbourne

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A strength of Rickett’s article is the personal narrative that is inter-woven throughout her text. Through it, she brings to the fore her faith in the research value of the particular, the experiences of a particular person in a particular circumstance. The researcher playing the artist playing the teacher presents unique challenges, and her discussion of this fragile yet important state of mind helps readers understand a little of the structure of the A/r/tography phenomenon that is currently emerging in North America. It gives us rich material to again consider the quite separate, but quite related, qualities responsibilities and actions of the researcher, the teacher, the artist.

Julie White and Lynda Smerdon’s article is also concerned with relationships, in this case the often problematic interaction between teachers, researchers and those who dictate and implement government policy in education. While focusing principally on curriculum and pedagogy, the authors frame their discussion within the current debate on creativity. This is a topic now so fused within a larger political agenda, the article suggests, that educational priorities are perhaps being lost? White and Smerdon use a teacher-researcher partnership context to nicely frame a larger set of questions, questions that are pertinent and challenging and make the reader consider who are the ‘winners and losers’ in educational policy implementation. This sense of the embattled versus those who machinate show us that there also exists an artistry in the political.

I would like to thank the authors for their patience during the reviewing and editing phases of this edition of JACE, and the Editorial Management Team for its advice and support. In particular I would like to acknowledge Ms Hang Tran, our Editorial Assistant, for her excellence performing this role.

September 3, 2008.

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The interplay of artistry, creativity and education can have many faces; four of them are presented in this edition of JACE. The common link is that of artistry and relationships, but provided from within quite different circumstances; as an artist in residence, as a researcherplaywright, as an emerging researcher in the arts, as two experienced teacher/researchers. While they present four differing perspectives, they are united by their belief in the power of the arts to enrich and enhance education.

Helen Toon’s article describes an emerging researcher’s exploration for a new paradigm within which the arts would serve as a vehicle for equitable researcher/teacher relationship. While collaborative ethnography situated within the arts is the main focus of this paper, it owns a strong political sub-text; ‘visual research’ methods are ideal for challenging the status quo of what Toon describes as the reproduction of neo-liberal policy in education. This article explores how visual research methods facilitate a teacher-centric style of research, one that circumvents the occasions where academia might assume superiority over the classroom practitioner.

Thomas Turner from Arizona State University revisits for us how theatrical play constitutes quality narrative research. Turner emphasises how this methodology provides a unique directness of data, and a high degree of transparency of the analysis of these data. He argues that the play’s physicality quite literally gives voice to the subjects of research, that the play locates the researcher’s practice within social experiences, and that the play empowers the audience to witness and participate in research findings. The viewer ‘becomes’ the actor as they observe and engage with the play.

Kathryn Ricketts from Simon Fraser University in Canada uses her experience as an artist in residence in two school-based programs, one each side of the Atlantic, to explore specific qualities of being an artist/ teacher/researcher. Although the residencies were conducted on separate continents, Ricketts finds consistent commonalities existing between them, in particular the way they provoked a personal investigation of the interplay between herself as an artist, a teacher and a researcher.

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“DELIBERATELY”, “EXPLICITLY”:

Helen Toon University of Melbourne Helen Toon is currently undertaking a Masters of Education at the University of Melbourne. She also works as one of the Teaching and Learning Coaches the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development have employed across the state in a bid to enhance student learning outcomes in schools targeted as underperforming. She would argue that the tension generated by these two positions (‘apprentice’ researcher and teacher ‘expert’) has proven highly productive in intellectual terms (if somewhat draining).

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REDISTRIBUTING POWER. AN ARGUMENT FOR USING VISUAL RESEARCH METHODS IN AN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT.

Abstract This paper advances an argument for the use of visual research methods as a collaborative focus in qualitative educational research which not only concerns itself with a postmodern, poststructural interest in what Law and MacLure term ‘baroque’ research methods (i.e. closely focused ground level research focused on the intricacies and complexity of the context) but also as a means of accessing the embodied experiences of teaching. Drawing on work by O’Loughlin, as well as that of Packard, Prosser and Harper, I seek to build a theoretically persuasive case for the use of collaborative and negotiated research data which aligns with these concerns.

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A visceral argument My concern here is a modest one, to put forward some initial thoughts on what Moss (2008) has named the struggle of educational research with ‘usability’, that is, the issue that educational research is “rarely taken up on the inside of schools by practising teachers and leaders.”

(Moss, 2008b. p. 236) Bound up with this is the idea that generally research is done of and to rather than with teachers. However, as a practitioner, I would argue – provocatively – that practice knowledge may frequently be in advance of theoretical knowledge. On this basis, therefore, there is an obligation that researchers consider ways of building research partnerships beyond the usual action research projects, in order for research participation to be useful for the participants, both as a process of participation and in terms of providing valued end results. In other words, I am suggesting that the process of research be weighted equivalently with the product.

The use of visual research methods – for example, photo elicitation, drawings, video stills, visual narrative – may go some way to addressing the imbalance between research process and product, and help in answering the question Moss (2008) asks, “Who benefits from research?” Such research tools may simultaneously achieve several ends. These ends include: a more equitable, negotiated research relationship (reshaping the power dynamic between participant and researcher); an explicit linking of research participation to teacher learning and teacher professional development; and access to the embodied experience of teacher practice. The first intention is a commonplace outcome, though no less important for being that. The other two, wound inextricably with my practitioner status/ positioning, appear to be less commonly discussed but potentially significant to the use of research in schools, linking as these methods do to the local and the particular.

The research territory: Accessing teachers’ epistemological paradigms In what research context do I advance this argument? My own research proposes an excursion into the territory of how teachers understand student capacity – what students can, will and should do

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– and if and how these understandings change depending on career stage. What discourses and theoretical frameworks do teachers access to articulate their ideas about student capacity? This is part of a larger interest in how these perceptions and descriptions of student capacity (or as it might be termed, ‘ability’ or ‘facility’ or even ‘competence’) influence what and how teachers teach – their acts of selection and omission from curriculum offerings. More broadly again, it is part of my curiosity about how teachers take up and mediate curriculum reform in their classrooms and what role perceptions of student capacity may play in this mediation. Stevens, Pendergast, Carrington, Bahr, Kapitzke, and Mitchell (2007) talk of the “…epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people” (2007, p. 107). In part it is teachers’ ‘epistemological paradigms’ that I wish to access in this project, both as a way of exploring teachers’ curriculum design and curriculum delivery decisions.

Senses, sensibility; Embodiment entwined with a metaphor of the baroque However, epistemological paradigms are situated bodily, and the idea of embodiment is a critical dimension of this inquiry. As Lakoff and Johnson (1999) observe, “…the qualities of things as we can experience and comprehend them depend crucially on … our bodily interactions with them, and our purposes and interests” (1999, p. 26); “…our bodies contribute to our sense of what is real” (1999, p. 30). Our bodies mediate our thought categories, our concepts and paradigms; they cannot be separated one from another; there is no mind/body split.

“Our bodily experience is the primal basis for everything we can mean, think, know and communicate” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p. xi). O’Loughlin’s (1998) work on embodiment in education ‘fleshes this out’. Her identification of ‘practical consciousness’ (as opposed to the usual ‘discursive consciousness’) is a pivotal insight: At the level of discursive consciousness … one may refrain from exhibiting discursively conscious prejudice of one kind or another (e.g. racial, gender bias). One may, none the less, at the level of unconscious meaning, through various

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behaviours, convey derisions, distaste, hostility for some people while signalling approval, admiration and liking for others… This habitual antipathy to certain ‘others’ may persist in situations which discursively deny it, usually in complex ways. It manifests itself in a myriad of bodily positioning, gestures, orientations and verbal and non-verbal expressions.

(1998, p. 291) My research seeks to explore the idea that one manifestation of ‘practical consciousness’ may be curriculum selection and enactment.

Given the messy, contradictory complexity of schools, the concept of embodiment is particularly compelling in framing school-based research. The diversity and complexity of schools is echoed in our own visceral and emotional experience of them and, adapting Haraway (1988), “…the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity” (p. 589) seems a more pertinent point of view from which to explore life in schools. Haraway offers here a segue to recent work by Law (2004) and MacLure (2006), amongst others, on a baroque research sensibility or practice. Her differentiation of position, either within or above, prefigures MacLure’s observation that “…the Baroque has come to stand for an entangled, confounded vision that resists the god’s-eye perspective…” and does not seek to ‘rise above’ (2006, p. 731). Baroque research methods “resist building hierarchies, frameworks, abstraction or other methodological crows’ nests from which to look down from a distance on the details … of educational scenes” (MacLure, 2006, p.

733). Rather they “honour the obligation to get entangled in the details and decorations” (MacLure, 2006, p. 731).

The idea of a baroque research practice focuses the attention of researchers to small areas of practice (recalling Jane Austen and her “two inches of ivory”) in order to observe the global within the local (Law, 2004), the layers of detail, in much the same way as one might with a baroque artwork. Baroque artwork is noted for the elaboration and complexity of its detail (as well, curiously, as its appeal to the visceral and sensual: notions of embodiment again). It

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does something more however. It also helps – with its rejection of the ‘god’s-eye view’, or in Haraway’s terms “the view from above”, to provide a methodological lens through which to view the issue of research ‘usability’.

The modernist project of synthesis, interconnection and universality seems to pervade much educational research; it appears that many educational researchers believe that melding together disparate elements works to achieve a universal knowledge or understanding, which, having been achieved, can be generalised to effect change and improvement.

As Law notes, implicit in the idea of the universal is the proposal that “different individuals or instances within a set of relations are indeed consistent with one another or … convergent” (Law, 2004, p.

23). Could it be this convergence, this fusion, which is problematic for teachers? I would argue emphatically that working in schools, researching in schools, requires approaches that “can get at the messy and indeterminate world of the social context and practice” (Moss, 2008b p. 240), and which can get entangled in and with the ‘student body’, ‘bodies of knowledge’, the ‘face•to-face’ and students ‘out-ofplace’ (Somerville, 2004). What is valued – by teachers and researchers both – is local, partial, grounded in ‘detail’, ‘specificity’, the ‘implicit’ (Law, 2004).

Teachers know that all classrooms, all children are different. Research that focuses on patterns and trends offers the opportunity to exempt themselves as ‘exceptions’. I suggest that crucial teacher embodied knowledge is absent from a large proportion of educational research, and in its absence much of this research is ‘unreal’ in the sense that Lakoff and Johnston note: “Real people have embodied minds whose conceptual systems arise from, are shaped by, and are given meaning through living human bodies” (1999, p. 6); “…our sense of what is real begin[s] with and depend[s] crucially upon our bodies” (1996, p. 17).

When these meanings are abstracted and decontextualised, and the specificity and detail is lost in the pursuit of an overarching pattern, then establishing the connections to the immediate and ‘real world’ may simply be too hard in a time-poor profession. As a way of capturing the specificity, volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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the implicit, the detail, the visual mode may lay claim to a promising usefulness, a suitable baroque sensibility. Moreover, as I will argue below, the use of visual research methods also opens up a collaborative partnership possibility.

The ideological terrain Such an interest in collaboration and power needs to be situated inside current educational and economic worldviews. This interest in how teachers mediate curriculum arises within the broader context of significant curriculum reform in Australia over the past decade: from the “New Basics” in Queensland to Tasmania’s Essential Learning Standards. In Victoria the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) were introduced in 2005; quite late in the national reform wave. At the heart of this curriculum reform is a shift towards more active learner engagement based on constructivist assumptions about the ways in which learners build and acquire knowledge.

This has important consequences for the role of the teacher in the classroom. How do teachers articulate this change in role emphasis (from expert and authority to facilitator and guide)? What do they say about the role of the student? How do constructivist ideas about the nature of knowledge, and how knowledge is achieved, match with their own?

At this juncture it is important to caution that the very use of the term ‘capacity’ is indicative of my space and place in time, drawing as it does from current discourses of human ‘capital’, ‘capacity’, ‘development’ and ‘continuous improvement’; what has been termed the “audit culture” (MacLure, 2006). To talk of ‘capacity’ reveals the ideological terrain my professional Teaching and Learning Coach self, whose brief is to “improve teacher capacity” (Departmental role description, 2008), inhabits, and the degree to which neo-liberal rhetoric has permeated my lexicon and thus the way I frame the world.

In the same way, it is important to understand the emphasis being placed on teacher performativity in current educational reform

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literature and reform moves, both in Australia (for example Hattie, 2003; Ingvarson, 2003; Rowe, 2002) and internationally (for example, Elmore, 2004; Fullan, 2006; Marzano, 2003, 2004). This emphasis on teacher performativity naturalises current discourses around the culture of managerialism in schools, and tacitly supports the chronic underfunding of public school systems (see for example, Ball, 2003a, 1998; White, Scholtz, & Williams, 2006). As Law (2007) and Ball (2003a; 1998) remind us, the foregrounding of one element (in this case being ‘teachers’) allows for the strategic backgrounding of other elements, such as funding and resourcing decisions.

To go further, ‘teachers’ appear to have become a site in education within which neo-liberal emphasis on the value of education as a key mechanism for achieving individualisation and developing “… the forms of human, and in some cases social capital required by the economic system…” (Avis, 2003a, p. 317) collides and colludes with the growing anxiety of the middle class about the process of credentialing, arguably the mainstay of their trajectories of upward mobility (see for example, the work of Ball, 2003a and 2003b, and Brantlinger, 2003). Pinioned by the spotlight of a dominant discourse, teachers are closely scrutinised to ensure that they are maximally contributing to national economic competitiveness whilst simultaneously ensuring continued middle class success. As Brantlinger (2003) argues, fostering equity is a luxury the middle class cannot afford in intensely competitive times. Nonetheless, ‘capacity’ is a useful term on which to work with teachers in exploring their views of students. It has connotations of space and roominess, of being ‘capacious’, as well as of something simultaneously finite in the sense of being contained and discrete. Paradoxically, it can also be infinite in the sense of being expandable or capable of growth and extension. I reason then, that the term ‘capacity’ might encourage participants to explore multiple factors which they see as contributing to student performance. However, in order to disrupt the possibility that the work and the words of participants could be co-opted by neo-managerialist discourse, I feel a responsibility to enlist research methods that actively resist claims to generalisability

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and transfer. This statement begs the question, “Does understanding of how one is situated foster strategic choice?”

Herein lies a segue to a central question of this research, “Can the use of visual research methods help teachers to explore and examine their own situatedness, to come to see how their ‘conceptual systems’ draw upon the environment in which they work?” In utilising datagathering techniques that negotiate understandings, do we, in Stronach and MacLure’s term, “force a new space” (1997, p. 5) inside which teachers might explore? This emphasis on agency emerges as an important tension in the literature examining teacher mediation of reform.

Positioning teachers in reform narratives: teachers as consumers (of reform and of research) What emerges strongly from the literature on educational reform is the idea of teachers as “objects to be changed” (Squire, McKinster, Barnett, Luehmann, & Barab, 2003, p. 470), passive receivers of research and policy who “should merely take our word for how their students might best be served” (Van Galen, 2004, p. 671). Hargreaves identifies this as the problem of ‘knowledge utilisation’ and Moss as a problem of ‘usability’. The way in which “…abstract, generalised, propositional knowledge detached from everyday school life…” (Hargreaves, 1996b, p. 106) is foisted onto teachers as a reform without due regard for their prior knowledge or working contexts means that a sense of professional agency is absent. As several researchers identify, in part this tension between formal (i.e. researcher) and practical (i.e. teacher) knowledge (Fenstermarcher, 1994) is about “…the boundaries between teachers and researchers, knowers and doers, and experts and novices…”, “…what can be researched by whom…” (CochranSmith & Lytle, 1996, p. 22 and p. 21) and about who is deemed to “… own, define and act as gatekeepers of what is to count as professionally worthwhile knowledge.”

(Hargreaves, 1996b, p. 105) Appropriating Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) it is about “the hierarchy of knowledge”.

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Following Somerville (2006) I would also argue that what is at work here is “a hierarchical binary…[where] ‘the highest status is reserved for the most abstract and immaterial learning, … and the lowest status is accorded to concrete, material learning, much of which we learn in daily embodied actions’.” (p. 281) In other words the Cartesian dualism of the mind/body split creates a divide between practitioner and researcher knowledge in which practitioner knowledge is implicitly inferior, reflecting concerns about ‘academic rigour’ and ‘generalisability’. Inescapably then, teachers and researchers operate out of different, conceptual systems and different worlds and – curiously, given their wealth of practical experience in an applied realm – it is the teachers who are found wanting. The hierarchical binary Somerville identifies needs to be replaced by a more productive collaboration which allows border or boundary crossings, of and for mutual benefit. Appreciating the significance of embodiment is a key transitional understanding. And the need to understand embodiment calls for methods which, as Law notes, capture specificity, detail, ‘everything’. It seems essential that researchers write with rather than about (Lynch and O’Neill, 1994 p. 312) in order to tease out the creative agency in responses to policy (Ball, 1994), seeing teacher mediation of reform as a capacity to innovate as opposed to a failure to implement. In so doing, a counter hegemonic discourse arises about the inherent professionalism of teaching, ‘talking back’ to ideas of performativity and managerialism and setting up a reclaimed “…re-formed teacher professionalism, one that … accord[s] with the new conditions of risk and uncertainty…” (Avis, 2003, p. 320). As Ball quoting Clegg (1989) notes, “Control [or dominance] can never be totally secured, in part because of agency. It will be open to erosion and undercutting by the action, embodied agency of those people who are its object” (Ball, 1994 p. 11). What is front and centre here is the idea that the research site should simultaneously inform and transform.

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Adopting what Ball has called “a stance of critique and inquiry” (cited in Thomas, 2003, p. 10), a central concern of my research is to create “a space for critical thinking, for meaning making, for making choices, for taking responsibility, for developing new types of conversations and practices” (Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 1999, p. 17). That is, that the research becomes something for the participant. With Mitchell, I see “…strong and unavoidable links between research, practice and professional development…” (2003, p. 199), and therein an imperative to move into participatory, collaborative inquiry. In Lassiter’s terms I wish to undertake “…a more deliberate and explicit collaborative ethnography [which] revolves first and foremost around an ethical and moral responsibility to consultants – who are not involved as ‘informants’ but as co-intellectuals and collaborators who help shape our collaborative understandings” (cited in Deppeler, Moss and Agbenyega, 2008).

The guiding epistemology is that knowledge is “…contextually situated, local and partial…” (Richardson 2000, p. 154) and jointly or co•constructed. To quote Dahlberg et al. (1999): …learning is not an individual cognitive act undertaken almost in isolation within the head of the child. Learning is a cooperative and communicative activity, in which children construct knowledge, make meaning of the world, together with adults and, equally important, other children. … Learning is not the transmission of knowledge taking the child to preordained outcomes, nor is the child a passive receiver and reproducer. (p. 50) Seeking to generate a space within which might develop new types of conversations and practices presupposes that research participants are not passive; neither receivers nor reproducers but persons of agency and volition. Inescapably we come back to O’Loughlin’s argument that it is time to attend to the body as “…a locus of energy and … of action…” (1998, p. 277), to take up the idea of embodiment as “… communicative, relational and interactive…” (1998, p. 281) in order to achieve new understandings. Envisioning such an outcome requires a broader conception of research methods than as just tools for data

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collection. Research methods become potential models, transferable tools for the classroom and the research site becomes an exchange. If participants do not see transferability in the tools and the possibility for application and further exploration of the knowledge generation, then the generative potential of the research site remains latent.

One of the goals of research is to elicit new information, to examine and probe “visible but unseen” everyday behaviours (Prosser, 2007, p.

16). In utilising research methods which model a process of disruption which could transfer to the classroom, both as support for an action research model and as support for a more democratic classroom, an effective teacher-researcher balance can emerge to elicit new information in a collaborative manner. “By becoming researchers teachers take control over their classrooms and professional lives in ways that confound the traditional definitions of teacher and offer proof that education can reform itself from within” (Bissex & Bullook, cited in Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1990, p. 9). In other words, drawing on my practitioner self, I am suggesting that some research methods, in particular visual research methods, might simultaneously act to gather data and to model tools for classroom use, thus linking the role of research participant to an opportunity for professional learning. This idea of multi-level research resonates with ‘baroque’ research methods, “…entangled in the details” (MacLure, 2006, p. 731).

The power of the visual Deploying visual research methods becomes a natural extension of ideas of agency, action, collaboration and joint action. Visual research methods are strongly associated with “…shifting the ethical agenda from one defined solely by the researcher to a more collaborative model” (Pink cited in Packard, 2008, p. 63). As Packard identifies: “Using visual methods is not simply a way to record or display data, but rather is a way to generate new knowledge, to tap into existing resources which would otherwise lie dormant, unexplored and unutilized” (Packard, 2008, p. 63).

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A quick word here on what visual research methods actually ‘look like’ and how they might be used within an educational research project.

Visual research tools can embrace photography (both moving and still), drawings, video stills, as well as collage, montage and construction.

The power of such tools is the access they can provide to unspoken assumptions and the unexplored. As Harper writes: “When we photograph, we re-create our unexamined, taken-for-granted perceptions…” (2000, p. 194), an idea reinforced by Warren (2005), “The process of making a photograph probably tells us more about the photographer than what he/she has chosen to photograph” (cited in Packard, 2008, p. 72).

Visual elements can combine with standard research tools and practice in order to draw forth more detailed responses. For example, the use of questionnaires which, combining the written and the visual, contain images to be annotated or described in some way by teachers. Such responses help to provide emergent categories which may help to shape new questions. Commonly, researchers utilising visual research tools work one-on-one with participants, equipping them with a camera and asking them to take photographs of things of importance to them and then later, together, discussing and unpacking these (see, for instance, Packard, 2008; Bach, 2001). I am interested in adapting and applying this idea in a focus group, asking participants to generate individual drawings following a “Think, Pair, Share” model of individual response, partnered discussion, and general group discussion. Such an approach is intended to stimulate thinking and focus on the ideas, not the drawing abilities (stick figures and annotations will be as valuable as more rounded portraits)! Building on the individual drawings, it would be fascinating to equip teachers with cameras and ask them to spend a week visually reflecting on the discussion, bringing back their photographs to discuss and unpack these in light of their reflections.

The idea of doing this collaboratively as a group while also explicitly drawing in theoretical work (as, for example, in Stevens et al., 2007) and their “epistemological paradigms”). To enrich and complicate the

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discussion would be fascinating, as would the challenge to find ways of taking these tools back into the classroom.

What would happen for instance, if a Year 9 class were asked to reflect on themselves within certain categories and capture that thinking in still photographs? What areas of overlap and divergence with the teachers work would we find? How might this open up the classroom for further investigation and a different sense of ‘capacity’ and competence? How could this become a self sustaining exploration and inquiry?

Other visual research techniques might include the use of photo arrays (a common strategy used in marketing focus groups, where a range of photos is shown to provoke discussion). The trade off here is a saving of time against the loss of the personal and specific detail.

Recent work by Bain King (2008), Lemon (2008) and Packard (2008) provide alternative models and ways of working with the visual.

My reading of visual methods emphasises two principal features: an interest in shifting the power balance between participant and researcher, and a consequent interest in and acknowledgment of the co•construction of knowledge between participant and researcher.

Packard notes: “Employing participatory visual methods democratises the research relationship through the process of mutual discovery and refinement of the research agenda…” (2008, p. 65), what Wagner (2002) describes as “interactive, dialectical, collaborative logic” (p.

165). Harper (2002, p. 23) puts it very simply: “When two or more people discuss the meaning of photographs they try to figure out something together. This is, I believe, an ideal model for research”.

There are strong parallels with O’Loughlin: her suggestion that “…a self is constructed in relational matrix…” (1998, p. 290) and is “…essentially relational and interactive…”

(1998, p. 281) fits here, as does Lakoff and Johnson’s observation that “…the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world” (1999, p. 37).

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Jointly, they reflect on the significance of this. Cooperatively they explore further, the research immeasurably enriched by the process, in fact, the research inseparable from the process; once again, baroque notions of ‘entanglement’ and linkage.

While I recognise that visual research is far broader than the use of photographs, Harper (above) stresses not only the “…equitable partnership with research participants…” (Packard, 2008, p. 63) and joint meaning making, but also how it captures a further principal of visual research – the importance of taking time. As Prosser notes: “Visual methods … slow down the act of looking…” (Prosser, 2007, p. 23) and in so doing “…encourage deeper reflection on perception and meaning” (Prosser, 2007, p. 13). A key question is whether, by deploying visual methods, a space can be generated within which teachers can ‘see’ themselves – literally – differently? Can such methods act as “…the bridge between image (semiotic) and verbal (symbolic)”? (Somerville, 2004, p. 53). I think so.

Enmeshing the arguments I set out to argue that the use of visual methods in qualitative educational research might facilitate the opportunity for a multilevel research approach, in keeping with postmodern, poststructural ambitions and in order to answer the question of who (and what) research is for. Of considerable interest to me as practitioner/ researcher is the idea that participation in the research should offer some ‘payback’, afford an explicit and deliberate opportunity for professional learning and growth beyond a random, accidental exchange of ad hoc ideas in a space of ‘talk’. I am interested in bringing Lather’s concept of the “…less bounded space…”, a generative space within which we leave “…a place for what we cannot envision to emerge” (cited in de Carteret, 2008, p. 239) into play within the ‘facilitating’ space of a focus group. This is the idea of structuring for the spontaneous in order to gather all ideas and thoughts, those “…complicating connections…” (MacLure, 2006, p. 738) and “…

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unanticipated associations…” (Lugli, 2000, cited in MacLure, 2006, p.

737) which generate new insights and lines of investigation. As Harper writes, such an approach also promotes “…dialogue based on the authority of the subject rather than the researcher…” (Harper, 2002, p. 15) and may produce information not considered before by the researcher, opening up “…new, unpredicted issues and questions…”

(MacLure, 2006, p. 729) – the provenance of the post modern.

Closely aligned with this is the concern that the power differential between participant and researcher should be explicitly foregrounded in order that it be minimised as far as possible and always remain top of mind for the researcher. A crucial underpinning of this commitment to equitable partnership is a fundamental belief in the co-constructed and situated nature of knowledge. The standard idea of the focus group is thus transformed, becoming a community within which meaning is negotiated and constructed. This is consciously a desire to model an experience in the hope that for at least some participants it seeds the idea of transference into classroom practice.

As Petrosky argues: “Learning and inquiry techniques and re-figuring stances towards knowledge require experience. They cannot be learned abstractly from lectures, seminars or books; they have to be experienced” (2006, p. 91).

Teachers experiencing the power of exploring ideas together become a model of what students might experience if afforded the same opportunity. The idea of sharing and collaboration are about interaction and relational exchange, and return us to ideas of embodiment. There is a strong argument to be made that if embodiment is experienced and expressed relationally (gestural as well as spoken) then working collectively is required in order to draw out expressions of embodied experience. And critically, here is the possibility for border crossings from the community of theory into the community of practice and vice versa. The professional experience of teachers is embedded in community (the community of classroom, staffroom, neighbourhood); community and collaboration frame all teaching interactions, notwithstanding any notions of privatised, isolated classroom teaching. Research which acknowledges that in practice through judicious method selection, as well as in theory,

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might be the redress for ongoing issues of research usability. Visual methods, with the emphasis on collaboration, co-constructed knowledge and time for contemplation and reflection present as powerful methods. Moreover, they readily translate as tools for the classroom context (although with what intention and effect is the subject of another study).

Research is a serious business, no matter how small scale. It intrudes into and impacts upon the life of those who participate, and in the case of teachers, on the lives of their students, and beyond that, their communities. Surely that requires some realignment of the purposes and beneficiaries. Ultimately then, I think there is a moral and ethical imperative for research to open up “…new possibilities and expectations, alternative inquiries and solutions, opportunities for new understandings and new ways of seeing” (Dahlberg, et al., 1999, p. 17) as much for the participants as for the research audience.

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TEACHING STORIES:

Kathryn Ricketts Simon Fraser University Kathryn Ricketts has been working for the past 26 years in the field of movement and visual arts. Her work has been presented throughout Europe, South America, Africa and Canada. She ran her own company (ricketts dance co) in Copenhagen, Denmark, and later a three-year professional dance training program called MainDance, as well as her professional company Plan B Dance Productions. For the past 10 years Ricketts has been working with a focus on social / political issues within arts-based performance residencies. Ricketts is currently engaged in the Arts Education Doctoral program at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Her research involves working with Embodied Poetic Narrative as a means of exploring ‘identity’ and ‘place’ within marginalized groups.

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A REFLECTION ON TEACHING RESIDENCIES

Abstract This paper hinges on moments of reciprocity and receptivity that occur during two teaching residencies in England and Canada.

Although these reflections are sourced from two residencies and provoke thoughts both specific and general regarding the tensions and integrations of pedagogy and art practices, they act as catalysts to further inquiry as I continue my work through a broad range of residencies and build further relationships with teachers in a wide scope of contexts. The paper raises key issues concerning how we play the roles of artist, teacher and researcher, and how the artist/ teacher/researcher (the a/r/t/ographist) wrestles with the challenges of integrating public pedagogy with practice. The paper reflects on how this inquiry provokes me to engage in these residencies with the curiosity and passion I bring to the stage, and in turn asks how to balance this with the thoughtfulness and responsibility I employ in the classroom. The two residencies – New VIc, London, England and Windsor High School, Vancouver, Canada – represent the values of silence and listening as pedagogical practices. In both residencies the students call us to a place of reciprocity whereby activity emerges through a respectful discourse. These stories speak to patience, trust and the courage needed to take the silence and begin the listening as a necessary factor in our shared (teacher/student) moments together.

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Introduction I am a graduate student on the intense journey of articulating a methodology called ‘embodied-poetic-narrative’. I have a particular interest in issues of identity and place with marginalized groups such as immigrants, seniors and youth at risk. My practice is dance and I meet education with a belief that art practice must be embedded in all that we do. As teachers this includes the sharing and modeling of knowledge. In the first year of my masters degree I arranged a variety of research sites in and around London with the intention of testing on foreign ground a methodology based on these principles. One of the sites was New VIc College in East London where I taught a group of approximately 15 students who had returned to school several years after dropping out. They were trying to finish high school long after many of their friends had graduated, and they carried with them the remnants of substance abuse and violent interventions – both physical and emotional. I was to spend several hours per day with these students for two weeks, ending with a scheduled performance, along with other schools, in a 400-seat theatre at the end of the residency. My agreement with the host teacher was challenging; it involved me leading a meaningful creative process, culminating in a well-rehearsed piece, with students who had absolutely no interest in being present in the room.

As we approached the site my host/coordinator attempted to prepare me for the class by stating that the demographic was the most economically challenged in all of England and added that the behavioural issues that come with this condition were not exempted here. My interest, I claimed, was to work with those on the margins, and this residency provided me with yet another opportunity. For me, however, it became more than just an opportunity. This residency and the one to follow were to become exemplars of the shift that I believe needs to happen between researcher, subjects and sites. In both stories a transformation occurred whereby positions and location shifted allowing ultimate reciprocity between all participants, a key factor in what I would consider to be an optimum learning space. Bhabha (1998) writes of this as a ‘diagonal’ event:

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The true void – out of balance, caught between one temporality and another – becomes such a gathering place that stands in an oblique relation to itself and others. As a ‘diagonal’ event it is, at once, a meeting place of modes and meanings, and a site of the contentious struggles of perspective and interpretation. (p. 30) The context of creating a performable piece was merely a catalyst to the cultivation of a space of sharing – sharing personal stories, vocal, written and imagistic. These stories are rooted in the teller but tethered to all of us and as they surface we begin to experience the intersections that touch us deeply – quickening tolerance, compassion and empathy.

Once this matrix of personal meaning-making has been constructed, we then begin to sequence the material into dance/theatre vignettes.

At this point in the process there is a sense of surrendering authorship as the piece actually makes itself almost invisibly, like the ouija board piece moving slowly towards yes or no with listening fingers lightly resting on its surface. In this way of combining research and artist, I echo a methodology generated by a team of scholars from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada led by Rita Irwin called a/r/tography. In this methodology, through an active inquiry, the roles of artist, researcher and teacher are hyphenated creating an interdisciplinarity and wholeness with our work/play. This is referred to as a fusion of knowing, doing and making: Theory as a/r/tography creates an imaginative turn by theorizing or explaining phenomena through aesthetic experiences that integrates knowing, doing and making: experiences that simultaneously value technique and content through acts of inquiry; experiences that value complexity and difference within a third space. (Irwin, 2004, p. 31)

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Heidegger (cited in Bowers, 2005) proposes that language speaks us: to clarify, we are caught in kind of determinism within our creative acts that invites, at some point, an act of surrendering to an invisible and uncontrollable force. Language speaks us, as we speak language.

Similarly, I have come to understand that in the process of creating work through the generation of personal stories – under a shared and collectively chosen issue – that at a certain point the dance/theatre has a mind/heart of its own. Bowers (2005) writes of this when talking about the combination of culture and personal stories: “Recognizing the tension, which avoids representing culture in terms of generic or linguistic determinism, can be understood most readily in terms of an insight attributed to Martin Heidegger that ‘language thinks us as we think within the language’.” (p. 44) The Warm Countries We Are Lucky Enough To Teach In and Stormy Weather are two stories which are also catalysts urging myself as researcher to enter into an arena of ‘oneness’ and to cast aside the location “I” and “other”, offering the stories mined from deep below and placing my fingers on the ouija piece alongside my students.

Lambert (cited in Kretchmar, 2005) likens this to the experience of a team of rowers and the sense of one in this activity, calling forth a sense of immediacy and reciprocity: There is no friction: we ride the natural cadence of our strokes, a continuous cycle. The crew breathes as one. Inhale on the recovery, exhale as we drive our blades through the water, inspiration and expression. In. Out. Row with one body and so with one mind. Nothing exists but: Here. Now. (pp. 124-125) If I can allow myself to enter a space of vulnerability and take the risks I ask of my students, will I dispel scepticism and replace it with authentic engagement?

Residency 1: Warm Countries We Are Lucky Enough to Teach In This report covers a two-week residency with a group of young adults upgrading their academic standards for entry level to university.

This was undoubtedly a marginalized group with challenging circumstances; violence at home, low economic status and substance

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abuse. Despite these socio-economic challenges they were able to come to school every day although sometimes two hours late after a host of complications beyond my imagination. My primary objective was to work from their issues not what I may project to be their issues. When conducting an introductory circle, they all replied that they were not interested in dance and after a few personal offerings I could discern that their notion of blame would be an excellent theme. I responded to their introductions by saying I was honoured to be working with them and that I would probably change their minds about dance.

They were pleased with the theme but sceptical of dance. We began our warm up with loud music and rigorous movement mixed with ‘bratty banter’ (it seemed like the route to go). They came along with me accepting the challenge and enjoying the atmosphere, which was being carefully cultivated. No one could tell or could care less that I was scared to death. This was by far the most challenging group I had worked with to date. Everyday I continued to build their stamina, develop physical skills i.e. fluidity, dynamics, musicality, strength and agility with broad sweeping movements, exploring level changes, three dimensionality, rhythmic shifts and jump phrases, of course accompanied with loud raucous music. I was able to make them move, sweat, hoot and holler despite their scepticism. Occasionally they were combusting with newfound energy taking moments to jump up against walls and skid across the floor and at other times they returned to the familiarity of lethargy, but always complaining about the repetitions, the rigor, the duration. I believed that there was a secrecy to the endorphins rejuvenating their bodies and they were embarrassed and unsure of how public they wanted to be revealing these welcomed shifts in their physical being.

It was a dance in itself navigating the student’s erratic landscapes of engagement – some in the room, some out. I remember teaching a group of heroin addicts in Denmark where in the middle of class a nurse would arrive to administer methadone to some of the students.

They would disappear for a few moments and then return to class.

We would carry on with the class as if it was only a sip of water needed. My New VIc students would come later after looking after their two-year-old sister (their mother, too drunk to get out of bed). volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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They moved through narrow spaces of tension and violence, finding solace with the puppy-like love in the room. They would sit on laps braiding hair, or carefully draw pen tattoos, then revert to punching, kicking, pushing, insulting – just enough to have an edge yet soft enough to return to the cuddles.

Figure 1.

Moving through narrow spaces of tension, love…

We were all alchemists mixing regret with anger and longing but most importantly with a belief that compassion can be the underbelly of everything. Slowly through the days I felt the atmosphere cohere, we were creating an ecosystem. I was ‘Kaffrin from Canadaw’ and together we were creating a structure where exposure was allowed, invited. A poem, a song and a few very great moves, then refining, rewriting, repeating…

Figure 2.

Together we were creating a structure…

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The group began to dress for the class, some with special hats, others with chain medallions and others with very tight dance pants and mid torso ‘tanks’. I was honoured; they were inviting me in and celebrating this transition. As the show drew nearer the tensions and heat of production descended on our ‘camp’; the songs needed music, stories needed to be memorized, and movement needed counts.

This contrivance of structures brought an unwelcome challenge to the space and threatened my newly formed relationship with the students. Repetition and rigor were necessary. I needed to assume, as a leap of faith, that respect for me would prevail but friendship might dissolve as I demanded punctuality, clarity, endurance and consistency. Somewhere I am sure they understood that I demanded it only because I knew they were capable of it. They came every day; they complained constantly, resisted belligerently, and yet came every day. Their clothes seemed cleaner, aftershave began to linger in the room, and they stayed during breaks. I was again honoured and very grateful that I was able to read the signals and hold them close as I grinded through the physical/practical challenges.

The last day of rehearsal was the most difficult; transitions, cues, entrances and exits, all the ‘stuff’ that is considered hugely insignificant in their lives that seem to work in broad sweeping sketches. Like the reckless impulses of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, these students are the ‘Pollocks’ of East London splashing energy with reckless random impulses. The rehearsal was ended with a final task, to record the stories that would be used in the performance.

The time was right, the environment was ripe with trust and charged with the excitement of a pending show. A necessity of limited budget and resources forced me to record their voices in a broad sweep around the circle, overlapping voices not by editing with expensive digital equipment but instead as I moved slowly with my recording device cueing with my hands when to speak and when to stop. The students were exhausted and with their lounging, cuddling postures they listened to the instructions; “talk about blame – start talking when my hand goes up – stop when the hand goes down”. The stories flowed with ease. The week had been fantastic, it was indeed a very warm country we were in, the time zone was our pumping hearts, the wires of communication were wide-open eyes beaming support and respect across the circle. volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Figure 3. Exhausted, lounging, cuddling postures -the lines of communication were open…

Their stories, emblems of their scars and their pride, flowed readily, with ease and generosity. Got it! I pressed stop and whisked it off to an on-site technician from the college who would mix it with our music overnight.

The day of performance Technical rehearsal was scheduled at 8:00 A.M., an hour of the day they rarely consciously witness. They were all there, complaining, resisting, insulting, but they were all there. Moving onto the stage for rehearsal harkened two important memories; one a film from 1996 and the other a dance rehearsal with my company in Egypt.

Memory 1: This memory is from the film “Best Shot” which was changed from the more politically mischievous name “Hoosiers”.

The movie centres on a high school basketball team, which against all odds made it to some kind of championships. Outrageously nervous, the team stands shivering on the official court, their gaze scanning the seating capacity with wide eyes; they are deer caught

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in a conceptual headlight. The coach throws a measuring tape at the team captain and tells him to measure the distance of the hoop to the floor, then emphasizes the distance is the same as their cozy home town gym: “let’s get to work.”

Memory 2: My company is performing in an international festival in Cairo. We have arrived at the Royal Theatre and the dancers are standing like the basketball players, deer on the stage feeling the headlights. I am 50 rows back. A local tea merchant makes his way over to me, he has bare feet and is wearing a long white gown, an ornate silver canteen is strapped to his back with a hose that winds around to the front of his neck. A tray with small empty glasses is extending from one hand. I assume he is asking me if I would like some tea. I am about to scream in absolute overwhelming joy and fear combined – what exoticism, what luck! Instead I shake my head and tell my dancers to use the second velvet wing to enter and to take six extra steps to compensate for the large stage. I have made the measurement from hoop to floor and it is identical to the integrity and commitment we have at home. I ground them and myself with details of our work – it is the passport to my safety as a foreigner, anywhere… anytime.

I relay the basketball story to the students deciding that this is a better choice of the two. They get through the technical rehearsal but not without the cultivation of some nagging doubts. Will they meet the performing space with the reverence it deserves? Will they feel the headlights?

The Performance The students take the stage with a quiet grace, honesty emanates from every pore. They suddenly seem soft and yet there is strength from the core as they move from scene to scene flawlessly. I am watching but my pounding heart is masking my experience. I am careful to call sound and light cues and to disguise the tight throat and shallow breath, sweaty palms and restless weight shifts. They have finished on a single pinpoint of spot lighting illuminating the face of an angel (who is normally cursing and swearing throughout rehearsals) singing

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her story while the rest of the students extend their hands to touch hers (a quiet high five). Electric charges of faith and empowerment are transmitted between them on stage but we know what it is. The light fades with her lingering last note and the audience jumps to their feet. It is so clear when performance becomes so much more than the accumulated efforts of creation, rehearsal and presentation and yet the only way an audience can indicate acknowledgement and appreciation is by their piercing silence during the performance and to stand up howling and slamming hands together when it is all over.

As creators and performers, we have to accept this limitation with a certain amount of grace. There is so much more to be said and if we are lucky and can catch this as the audience filters out, then we can excuse this limitation even more.

On that night, I had that chance; one of the students came over to me and said “Well Kaffrin from Canadaw, you did change our minds!”

Residency 2: Stormy Weather “The teacher brings lesson plans, learning methods, personal experience, and academic knowledge to class but negotiates the curriculum with the students and begins with their language, themes and understandings.” (Shor, 1996, p. 5) I am currently a guest artist in residence at a high school collaborating with an exceptional drama teacher and an extraordinary grade 11 class. This residency locates me as both artist and teacher and allows me to both experience and witness relationships with students in the creative process. I am navigating the white-water rapids of resistance and diversity. It has been a gift to be working with such a progressive and sensitive teacher who is working to shift the grounds of conservatism in education. The honesty and humility I feel from her teaching practice matched with an outstanding rigor and vigour inspires me to come earlier and stay longer on the days that I teach. For months we have been on a journey with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and as is customary with my teaching I am sure I must be the biggest learner in the room. Twelfth Night begins with a massive storm at sea resulting in the main characters Viola and Sebastian struggling to survive as they are cast from the ship to the angry sea. My identity as a choreographer/dancer/teacher was to

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take the central image imagined for the play and use it to animate (kinaesthetically) parts of the play – develop skills, research material, construct sequences and prepare for production. The ship, the storm and the sea became vital in my prosaic quest as I began to write about the intricate relationships between the teacher, the learner, the environment and the curriculum. Within this complexity lie also the tensions among the sub-categories of these roles: the generalist and the specialist classroom teacher, the professional practicing artist and the community facilitator, the recreational and career-focused drama student. Feeling lost within the white-water rapids of some of education’s hegemonic constructs is, I am sure, quite common. I commend the teachers who are able to sustain their standards and vision despite the walls that sometimes move closer. How can all crew members feel secure on board the ships that heel and bay in extreme conditions of class sizes, diversity of student needs, and diminishing resources, emotional, administrative and financial? In the case of my current residency, I am inspired and reassured that there are teachers that do ensure the safety of integrity within the storms present in their working environments. As the loving siblings Viola and Sebastian must find their way through the turmoil of a violent sea, how do we account for the losses in our teaching environments? How do we link faith and trust when there may be critical events or negligence beyond this environment?

Sumara (2001) writes about these merged borders between life and the learning environment: … the Commonplace Book activities, as described in the reading experiences presented earlier, show that the common-sense understanding of what constitutes self/other, mind/body, personal/ collective, fiction/non-fiction, literary/non-literary do not exist as tidy demarcated categories but, instead, exist ambiguously and fluidly in relation to one another. Most significantly, these activities illuminate the processes by which human beings experiences are necessarily organized by remembered, currently lived, and imagined identifications and relationships. (p. 168) As usual with Shakespeare the lyricism of his complex shifting of identities, intention, perception and meaning inevitably filters down

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to a central location – Love. And as we shift in our relationships in the classrooms, we move through the ties that are tightened and slackened off, as we would adjust the sails in unpredictable winds to achieve optimum motion forward. I have watched sailors curse and stomp when just as the adjustments are made to shift course, strategizing a new tack to capture the wind – the wind shifts. Navigating involves duelling with forces that are unknown. When the best we can do in controlling our environments is to recognize patterning and deduce a predictability, all of this is to no avail when we come to the storm of hormones that gusts and blusters within teenage bodies as youth navigate their own paths with equally strong forces. As Arnold (1867) describes so beautifully, nothing is predictable: Dover Beach The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

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Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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How are teacher-student relationships built strong enough to weather rough conditions but light enough to release, to understand and embrace the temporality and unpredictability of their own conditions? Students who may usurp the greater part of emotional resources one year are in the following year met with compassion; as if a fog has lifted, the care and conscientiousness that has always been there, despite the cost, is revealed. With other students there is sometimes an imposed anonymity, a kind of anaesthetizing for the sake of emotional sustainability.

The fulcrum shifts. The ropes are loosened and my work with the students starts with the initial stages of introducing the notion and possibility of embodiment and orienting them to my language, style, personality and most importantly, my code of ethics with the working environment of the theatre. At the same time, some of our accountability is determined by the formal and informal assessment required by teachers’ public school environments. Compromises are also made due to exhaustion or for the sake of securing ease in classroom culture and climate.

As a guest, and with the support of the public school teacher, I have the advantage of demanding a particular code of behaviour in my class, which is adhered to during the ‘honeymoon’ stage of the residency. Then it becomes lost in the next stage of the residency.

I have a window of opportunity before this happens where I can introduce the healthiest challenges. I take the students through a rigorous warm up that introduces another kind of heart in the body – not the heat of peer•pressure-induced humiliation, not the heat of newfound sexuality, but the heat of simple physical exertion – a rare state of the body for many digitally driven teenagers. There are complaints, groans and haphazard resistance but when we decide to combine some of the exercises with music the performative aspect of their work is introduced and a silent engagement permeates the room. We then begin working in partners with the notion of counterbalance. This is a device for partnering where embodied fulcrum is the key component. The partners either push into each other or pull away creating an integrated standing structure whereby co-dependence is established. The fulcrum is established silently and it shifts almost subliminally as one student moves an elbow one

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centimetre to the right or shifts a foot closer to the other. There is a tentativeness in the room for many reasons; most importantly they are touching. Whereas relationships are often established and maintained with derogatory, debasing banter, here they are not only touching but they are ‘saving’ their partners from falling. I teach the students how to fall before this counterpoint skill is learned. “What is the worst that can happen?” I ask, “if the fall is one metre down?”

I realize that it is the existential notion of failing, not falling, that builds the fear. The investment of trust, the promise that can and often is broken, is paralleled in the teacher/student relationship where both parties are wary of the possibility of the shifting fulcrum, or even of accidentally letting go and falling. A test is stolen, a misplaced comment appears on a blog; this is the falling, similar to what Pineau calls the ‘ideological body’, in using drama to engage in literary interpretation, the participants bring the whole person – language, mind, body and culture – to the creation of the drama world. (cited in Medina, 2004, p. 146) To continue the metaphor, I return to the ship and am always amazed and in awe of sailors who can lithely move about on a deck that seems to mischievously shift, forcing the centre of balance to be as fluid as the ocean below (hence the possibility of sea sickness). On the other hand, one of the saddest and most desperate images for me is of the rigging coming undone and the sheets left flapping aimlessly in the wind. This happens when a student recedes to a cool, vacuous detachment as opposed to maintaining the heat of engagement or even the fire of resistance; it is a moment when the anchoring of a relationship, even if it is just momentary, has been lost and the centre must be recovered.

I am currently at the stage with the students where time, in terms of both duration and frequency, has worked in my favour thanks to a generous grant from funding partners that recognize the importance of depth as a result of time. They have learned skills in embodiment.

They have felt the rigor of working for concentrated periods, managing the ebb and flow of their energy and avoiding what Barba (1995) would call “squandered” energy, and they continue to navigate the surges of intensity that come with a production. The sometimes-

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unpredictable winds change our course and remind us that all of this work is not necessarily about The Twelfth Night but rather what Medina (2004) refers to as the edges of the text, a place where we are encouraged to look beyond the literal confines of narrative to a re-imagined space of personal interpretation, a space where multimodal explorations allow for a breadth and depth in understanding.

The time we have spent together resonates far beyond the stage and getting it done for opening night. We are setting precedents and are now charting our course for the inevitability of storms ahead. We are establishing the faith that weathering the turbulence is a choice worth taking. As Shakespeare wrote: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev’n to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

(Sonnet 116)

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Figure 4. Poster from the play Program notes: Just as the characters in this play had to survive the storm at sea, as well as the storms in their hearts, we have survived and learned from the stormy as well as the delightful days of this voyage together.

There were both sunny rehearsals and rehearsals laden with cold wet wind, and we all learned to navigate our way with grace and openness.

I have enjoyed every minute of this creative period knowing that I was in excellent company with both the students and teacher/director. This process was new for most in the production, demanding courage, diligence and humour; and just as a good sailor finds his way on a keeling, slippery deck, these students have found the balance to make this journey. The memories of this time together will resonate long after the dimming lights of the final scene. Thank you for this time! (Ricketts, personal correspondence, 2007)

Summary The Warm Countries We Are Lucky Enough To Teach In and Stormy Weather are emblems of lived experiences and the surfacing of personal stories which are paramount in the creative process. This process is disruptive and often uncomfortable as the direction of our narratives can echo rhizomatic patterns without a linearity both in content and in the traditional governance of the context, i.e. director/ actor. Appelbaum (1995) writes about this as an invitation to action, volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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There is a moment in which personal or cultural history stands before two diverging pathways. One leads to a repetition of the known, the tried and true, the old, the established. It is safe, secure and stable. The other finds a renewed importance in the unknown, the uncharted, the new, the dark and dangerous. Unfettered by accepted categories of thought, it might be immediately hidden away from view, out of fear or repugnance. The moment I speak of is not choice in the sense of deliberative reason but an action that choice stands on. (p. 16) George Belliveau (2004), play builder and researcher, writes of similar challenges in his recount of a similar process: The collective process brought out some doubts, and there were ups and downs in the group dynamics. The trials of writing a collective script were apparent. Some people felt that no voice guided the script and that it was all over the place, with too many ideas floating around. (p. 43) Throughout the challenges of these processes I believe that authenticity and courage are the driving forces that keep nudging creative material into the space, and we are in fact the vessels that are both filled and emptied by this material, these personal stories.

This state of filling and emptying calls me to look at this dynamic space of exchange often referred to as the third space (Irwin, 2004, p. 31) or the interstitial space. This borderless region is also reflected upon in Heidegger’s analogy of the jug; the potter who shapes the jug does not only mould the clay but shapes the void, the emptiness, “The vessel’s thingness does not live at all in the material of which it consists, but rather in the void that holds it.” (Bhabha, 1995, p. 19) In this way, I see the learning/creative space I work within to be an empty space, a void which is the result of a reductionary process of stripping away scepticism, stigmas, biases and fears, an open space of invitation to explore the unknown and remembered together. Bhabha (1998) speaks of the transitional space of such a void, Shakespeare of the removal of ground, Appelbaum (1995) of The Stop. In Barba’s (1995) definition of this pre-expressed moment it is called sets, and the Japanese Noh master Azume (cited in Barba, 1995) speaks of this

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space as Ju Ha Kyu. Viktor Shklovsky writes about the technique that locates the interstitial space, the in-between temporality, as “the act of making strange” (cited in Heathcote, 1984). This is the dynamic space of stillness, the brimming of emptiness where conflicting spaces meet to form new meanings. These are but a few references to this phenomenon of space; this true void – out of balance, caught between one temporality and another – becomes a gathering place that stands in an oblique relation to itself and others. As a ‘diagonal’ event (Bhabha, 1998, p. 30) it is, at once, a meeting place of modes and meanings, and a site of the contentious struggles of perspective and interpretation.

When students experience the power, intensity and then the relief of presenting under lights for a captivated audience they are, of course, exhilarated – endorphins combined with wonderment – “how did that happen?”, “It went by so fast!”, but underneath there lingers a trembling, a resonation that in many cases has rarely seen ‘the light of day’. spoke and they listened, and more importantly we spoke and we listened, unearthing voices that have been muffled over time for reasons too extensive to include here. In this process we begin to trust the body as an informant to parts of self that have been lost, buried or forgotten. This space of embodied triggering ultimately brings the power of the student’s meaning making process to the learning space and becomes a resuscitation of the inspired learner. Behnke (1990) writes about his as physical force patterns: “In particular, it will describe how tacit knowledge, of which learners are normally not aware, and which is triggered unconsciously by sensations of force patterns which can be accessed and exploited to improve learning.”

The ‘self’ begins to whisper in this process of surfacing stories. Within this process of creation and presentation the participants feel the shift from ‘I’ to ‘We’ as they witness the impact stories have on others.

They experience the stirring that occurs in themselves when listening to their co-participants’ stories. It is in these moments of action and reflection that we combine theory and practice, dissolving the binary that often objectifies our participants, neuters the learning space and ostracises us from the heart of the work. Conquergood (2002) writes about this beautifully:

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But de Certeau’s aphorism, “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across,” also points to transgressive travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract – “the map”; the other one practical, embodied, and popular – “the story.” This promiscuous traffic between different ways of knowing carries the most radical promise of performance studies research. Performance studies struggles to open the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin of the binary opposition between theory and practice. (p.145) Performing the work is not done as an authorization, nor as a validation of the process, but rather as a means of testing the power of the story. Can we cast these personal nuggets not only across the room in the rehearsal studio but across the chasm that divides the performer from the spectator? Can we use “heart” as our slingshot into the black space where we know 200 people passively ‘await’ for an ‘experience’? Yes we can as, I hope, has been shown in the teaching stories of these two residencies. The performances are ignited with meaning after the applause and whistles and hoots, after the lights go up and the performance experiences meet in a collision of accolades and humilities. Or do they?

There are moments that, lived on the stage, will be deciphered by the students, either immediately or sometimes after a period of reflection. They are the invisible moments of stillness and silence when a performing space becomes charged with the voltage of personal meaning-making. This possibility, this availability, can transfer from the performing space to the witnessing space, and this is when the audience may whisper back “you are telling my story.”

Notes The author would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of ArtStarts, Windsor High School, East London Dance, as well as the mentored support and collegiality of George Belliveau, Kelly Davidson and Marjorie Dunn.

Permission to publish the images contained in Figures 1, 2 and 3 was obtained by the author from all participants.

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References Appelbaum, D. (1995). The stop. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Arnold, M. (1867). New poems. Boston, MA: Ticknor & Fields.

Barba, E. (1995). The paper canoe: A guide to theatre anthology. London: Routledge Press.

Behnke, E. (1990). On teaching phenomenology of the body: A preliminary report. Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body Newsletter.

Retrieved March 21, 2008, from http://www.google.com/search?sour ceid=navclient&ie=UTF•8&rlz=1T4RNWE_en___CA205&q=Behnk e%2c+Elizabeth+%281990 %29%2e+On+Teaching+Phenomenology+ of+the+Body%3a+A+Preli minary+Report+Study+Project+in+Pheno menology+of+the+Body+Ne wsletter%2c Belliveau, G. (2004). Struggle to success: collective drama on anti-bullying.

Canadian Theatre Review, 117, 42-44.

Bhabha, H.K. (1998). Making emptiness. London: Hayward Gallery and the University of California Press.

Bowers, C.A. (2005). The false promises of constructivist theories in learning.

New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research. The Drama Review 46 (2).

Irwin, R.L., & de Cosson, A. (2004). A/r/tography rendering self through artsbased living inquiry, Vancouver, Canada: Pacific Educational Press.

Kretchmar, S. (2005). In L.L. Griffin & J. Butler (Eds.). Teaching games for understanding: Theory, research, and practice, (pp. 119 - 213).

Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Medina, C.L. (2004). The construction of drama worlds as literary interpretation of Latina feminist literature. Research in Drama Education, 9(2), 145 – 160.

Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating authority in critical pedagogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Sumara, D.J. (2001). Learning to create insight: Literary engagements as purposeful pedagogy. Changing English, 8(2), 165 – 175.

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RESEARCHER PLAYWRIGHT AND THE RESEARCH-PLAY

Thomas C. Turner Arizona State Universityy Thomas Turner is a third-year Doctoral student in Curriculum Studies at Arizona State University. At ASU he serves as the President of the Curriculum and Instruction Graduate Student Union. He holds a BFA in Acting/Directing from Northern Kentucky University, an MA in Theatre Arts from University of Nevada Las Vegas, and a MEd in CrossCultural Teaching from National University. Mr Turner has twenty years of professional experience in all aspects of theatre. His research focuses on the use of the Performing Arts in research and education.

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Abstract This paper explores the idea of using a theatrical play as narrative research. There is a brief examination of the history of theatre, focusing on some of the innovations to the structural and thematic elements of the written play. Attention is placed on the research-play, its recent history, as well as its ties to narrative research. The impact of theatrical genre, and the role it plays in intended learner outcomes desired by the researcher-playwright, is also discussed. Finally, there is an examination of symbol systems, and the ways they may be utilized to create a style of narrative research that has emotional, experiential, and intellectual impact for an intended audience.

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History of the Play Throughout history, humans have used playwriting and performance to impart moral, religious, and social learning. The roots of the “play” are found in ancient rituals in with which early humans hoped to curry favor with their gods. The ancient Egyptians began to formalize their rituals into passion plays. These passion plays brought to life the Egyptian gods and helped to educate Egyptian citizens on the history of their gods. The Greeks were the first to recognize the value of a structured play written by an accomplished playwright. During major festivals and religious holidays, the Greeks would award prizes to winning playwrights.

Through the use of a skilled playwright, the Greeks were able to explore emotional concepts such as catharsis. In watching the mistakes, trials, and tribulations of leaders and gods, the common citizen would learn a powerful lesson, as well as have a cathartic experience which was intended to release emotional tensions in the audience members. With the Greeks, plays became carefully structured with complex plots, characters, and social and moral lessons.

In the Middle Ages, all Catholic masses were conducted in Latin, regardless of the local language. The Catholic Church struggled with ways of imparting the moral lessons of the bible and the canon laws of the Catholic Church to the non-Latin speaking public. One solution was the morality play. The intent behind the morality play was for the audience to identify with the central character, and through the journey of this character, the audience would learn the steps necessary to lead a moral life. The morality play was developed to teach a moral lesson, and in order for a reader to understand the intended lesson, she had to identify with and vicariously experience the journey of the protagonist character in the play.

Elizabethan drama was often used to present stylized pictures of historic events and figures. Plays such as Shakespeare’s Henry V and King John served as history lessons for the common citizen. Plays were also used as points of reference in discussing both moral and political issues.

Attending a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III might reinforce the historical legacy of the English monarchy, and be used to compare the decisions made by the characters in the play with decisions of the current monarchy. In the mid-to late 1800s, playwrights such as Henrik

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Ibsen and August Strindberg began to use the theatre to expose complex and controversial social issues. A Doll’s House and Miss Julie examined the social oppression of women, and the extreme steps the main characters were forced to take in order to escape that oppression. These plays were extremely controversial and influential in the discussion of women’s rights.

Today, playwrights have unlimited styles, genres, and topics to choose from. Arts-based researchers such as Johnny Saldana (1999), through Ethnodrama, are using plays to give voice to groups of people whose voices were either ignored or marginalized by traditional researchers.

The artistic options available to today’s research-playwrights are limited only by their imaginations, and the walls placed before them by the old guard of the traditional research paper.

History of the Research-Play The concept of using a theatrical play and production as a tool for research, while relatively new, is nonetheless making strides within the research community. One of leaders in this field of research is Johnny Saldana.

Saldana’s work comes from a theatre perspective and uses the terms “ethnodrama” and “ethnotheatre” to describe the concept of using the performing arts as research. In his book Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre, Saldana explains, “Ethnotheatre employs the traditional craft and artistic techniques of theatre production to mount for an audience a live performance event of research participants’ experiences and/or the research interpretations of data.” (2005, p. 1) While Saldana’s work is directly related to his work as a theatre practitioner, it is important to stress that it is not and should not be a tool only to be utilized by theatre professionals. In her article “Certain Expectations: Using Ethnodrama as Transformational Theatre” Karen Mueller Bryson describes how the creation of the play Certain Expectations was “one of several methods I used to display the results of my dissertation research in human sciences.” (Bryson, 2005) After collecting interviews from “high•achieving undergraduate students from low-income, first generation backgrounds”, Bryson realized that a play would be the strongest way to not only present her research, but “capture the voices of the students themselves and provide a forum for their voices to be heard.”

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The giving of voice to participants in the research is one of the strongest reasons for conducting narrative research. The “giving of voice” is particularly effective through the use of a play as research.

The Research-Play and Narrative Research In the world of qualitative research, the research-play has it roots in narrative-based research, particularly through narrative analysis. In his article Narrative Configuration in Qualitative Analysis, Donald Polkinghorne defines narrative analysis: “researchers collect descriptions of events and happenings and synthesize or configure them by means of a plot into a story or stories” (1995, p.12). Polkinghorne goes on to describe two styles of qualitative data classifications which may be utilized in narrative research, “synchronic” and “diachronic”. Synchronic data is “framed as categorical answers to questions put by an interviewer and provides information about the present situation…” (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 12). While useful as qualitative data, for Polkinghorne, synchronic data lacks “the historical and developmental dimensions” (p. 12) necessary for effective narrative storytelling which is critical for narrative research. Synchronic is interested in answers to questions and points of view of participants such as how a person feels about his life or a particular subject.

The second type is “diachronic data”, Diachronic data “contain temporal information about the sequential relationship of events. The data describes when events occurred and the effect the events had on the subsequent happenings. The data are often autobiographical accounts of personal episodes and include reference as to when and why actions were taken and the intended results of the actions” (p. 12). While reading Polkinghorne’s description, it is easy to see that diachronic data is inherently a story rather than answers to questions, which are a result of synchronic data. It is through the use of diachronic data that the playwright is able to create a “storied narrative” through the use of a research-play. Compare Polkinghorne’s description of diachronic data to David Ball’s (1983) description of “action” in a play: “Action occurs when something happens that makes or permits something else to happen. Action is two ‘something happenings’ one leading to the other.

Something causes or permits something else.” (p. 9) Ball goes on to say “…

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the first thing to discover is how a play goes from one place to another.

Find the event of each action, then the second, then the connection between the two.” (p. 9) Through Ball’s definition of theatrical action it is easy to see how a research-play is a natural way to illustrate diachronic data. The structure of a play is designed to tell a story, and diachronic data by its very nature is a story waiting to be told. Telling that story is the job of the researcher-playwright.

The Researcher-Playwright In order for a play to be effectively recognized as a viable research method, the researcher-playwright must examine what type of learning outcome she would like to see from her intended audience. In answering this question, the researcher-playwright will be able to effectively select a genre that will support the intended outcome. If the researcherplaywright would like the audience left with a clear enhancement of certainty about the subject matter, then a morality play or even an epic play would be an excellent choice. These styles of writing are intended to lead the reader to clear answers. From its inception in the middle ages, the morality play was intended to leave the audience with absolute understanding of what was expected of them. In what way could a researcher use a morality play to examine and report on their research?

One example would be if the researcher has researched the best method for the prevention of school violence, and discovering that reporting it to an authority is the most effective prevention method, using what they have uncovered, then writing a morality play demonstrating why it is more important to report a friend who is participating in the violence, rather than keep silent to protect a friend. The play could not only utilize the quantitative data found in the research results, but might also be based on actual experiences of members interviewed for the qualitative data section of the initial research.

The epic play could be used to demonstrate the outcomes of long term research. If the play follows the life of a student who is a victim of school violence for example, it would demonstrate the impact the events have over a long period of time. It could also show how the event caused the victim to interact with others over the course of his life. For example, because of the violence suffered by the victim, he now inflicts violence

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on other people. Both of these choices would have clear messages on the impact of school violence.

If the research-playwright would like to encourage an enhancement of multiple meanings, he may choose a dramatic genre such as the review or Forum Theatre. If the research-playwright has researched the same subject of school violence, but would like for audiences to raise questions about the impact of violence rather than give them clear answers, the play could be structured so as a Forum Theatre scenario to outline situations and problems as a result of school violence, yet leave the audience without the playwright’s perspective on how to solve any problems. This would leave the responsibility of solving the problem with the community. In the review genre, the playwright would write several short sketches or monologues from different perspectives. This would allow the audience to see the problem from several sides. Rather than only showing the perspective of the victim, such as found in the morality play, the review could show the polyvocal perspectives of the victim and the attacker. This may be especially enlightening when trying to demonstrate research that has uncovered both the reasons for the violence, as well as how to prevent it.

In the next section I explore the ways in which a play and a production of that play could be used to illustrate the human experience, which is often difficult if not impossible to highlight in a traditional research paper.

Symbol Systems A major advantage of using a play over the research paper is that the researcher is able to show many of the underling meanings found within the social experience of the research. Coulter (1999) explains: The many different ways of speaking result from different social experiences, different values, and different assumptions. Professions, classes, regions, ethnic groups, and generations have distinct languages which are more than jargons, but reflect particular ways of organizing experience and contingent historical and social forces. (p. 6)

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While Coulter was making this argument in favor of using the novel as research, his argument works equally well for a play. In fact, the play has an added advantage over the novel, because through a performance, the audience is able to sensorially experience the research. While a writer may be able to write in a way that demonstrates many different ways of speaking the playwright is given the advantage of hearing her words spoken. The audience does not have to attempt to decode the spelling and grammar choices in order to experience a particular dialect; all they need to do is listen.

The production of a research-play also allows the audience to both witness and participate in complex systems that are absent in the reading of a research paper. Symbol systems are a set of cultural tools used for coding and decoding information. In writing a play, the playwright puts together a set of symbol systems that are then decoded by a reader/audience. These include such symbol systems such as language, cultural canons, behavior, and social power structures to name a few. Some of the additional symbol systems involved with a theatrical production are the literary style of the play (morality play, melodrama, comedy, etc.), the use of language (iambic pentameter, Trans-Atlantic speech, contemporary, etc.), staging of production (arena, thrust, proscenium, etc.), and design of production (costumes, scenery, lighting, etc.).

An argument could be made that if there are no current productions of the research-play, then the symbol systems involved in the production of a play are not relevant to the ideas discussed within this paper; the ‘play’ becomes no different from a research paper. However, I would like to argue that for a reader to truly understand the message and intent behind a play, she must become the director, designer, and actors as they read the words on the page. An attempt must be made to utilize the symbol systems necessary to read the play as if it were a live theatrical production. In the very act of reading the play, a reader’s imagination is brought to life in a way that is a separate experience from the reading of a research paper. The play creates a place where the research moves and breathes with the voices and experiences of the characters of the story.

The traditional research paper is primarily the voice of the researcher, as interpreted by the reader.

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Research as a Work of Art While there may be a responsibility placed onto the audience to understand and utilize the symbol systems of the play, the playwright must carefully select not only the symbol systems utilized, but construct them in a way that will have the greatest impact on the reader.

The reading of a play should not be the same experience as reading an education journal. While the intent of both may be to express new ideas and discoveries, the play is adding in many cases the concept of emotion; it is also placed into an additional realm of a “work of art”. In becoming a work of art the relationship between writer and his work becomes more interactive. In The Kind of Schools We Need, Elliott M. Eisner (1998) describes this new relationship: “The work of art – by which I mean act of creation – does not follow an unalterable schedule but is a journey that unfolds.

The relationship of the maker to the work is not that of lecturer to listener, but a conversation between the worker and the work”. (p. 84) This is the same relationship that must be created between the reader and the work. As a reader of the play, it is also important that a journey is undertaken. While the journey is created through the playwright, the reader must openly bring her knowledge and experiences along in order to fully participate. It is not enough to read a research-play from a strictly intellectual, cognitive point of view. In order to avoid this, the reader must be willing to bring personal experience and emotion to the text, “emotions are seen as aiding in the process of symbol encoding and decoding, rather than as somehow opposed to ‘sheer’ cognitive activity”. (Gardner, 1983, p. 104)

The Research-Play as Experience It is also important to point out that if the playwright is only writing a research-play to outline research with no intent to impart emotion or theatrical experience, then why choose a play? On the other hand, what responsibility does the playwright have to the research? In the introduction to Howard Gardner’s essay, “A Cognitive View of the Arts”

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the editor quotes Gardner: “By manipulating symbol systems, the artist shapes form and gives voice to his perceptions, ideas, and feelings” (1983, p. 102). As the “artist” the researcher-playwright is giving voice to not only her research but to her “perceptions, ideas, and feelings,” and then placing them into a literary format that will hopefully facilitate the same response in an audience. There is a risk, however, that the emotion of the material will overshadow the information that the researcher attempts to impart. This may or may not be the intended learner outcome of the researcher-playwright. Through the careful selection of the intended learning outcome, and the selection of the genre, the researcherplaywright controls the process. It is also important that the researcher understand the power and responsibility of the genre she chooses, for it is within this choice that the researcher-playwright will guide the audience on an intellectual, physical, and emotional journey. In the text Experience and Education, Dewey (1938) writes, “It thus becomes the office of the educator to select those things within the range of existing experience that have the promise and potentiality of presenting new problems which by stimulating new ways of observation and judgment will expand the area of further experience” (p. 75). Simply substitute the word researcher-playwright for “educator” and you have an excellent description of the “office” of a research-play. In the foreword to his play Drinking in America, playwright Eric Bogosain (1986) expresses a similar idea to Dewey: I had wanted to make performances about men and women. I wanted to make performances about torture in Chile. But it made no sense to me to lecture my audience. I found the most interesting facet of any subject to be the part I wasn’t clear about. Like, “Yeah racism is terrible, so how come at night I cross the street when a black guy is walking toward me?”

It was definitely more interesting to explore my personal biases and the questions deep in my gut. No matter how repulsive. (p. 15) Both Bogosian and Dewey are interested in the ways in which confronting existing experience can lead to personal discovery, which may then be transmitted to an audience, whether they are students or regular theater patrons. This is an example of how a play can be used to turn research that can be sometimes stuffy, elitist and ignored into a living, breathing, powerful experience.

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There is a point of caution however: It is then the business of the educator to see what direction an experience is heading. There is no point in his being mature if, instead of using his greater insight to help organize the conditions of the experience of the immature, he throws away his insight (Dewey, 1938, p. 38).

This is why some of rules involved with writing a traditional research paper such as in-depth research of the topic, clarity of message, and strong point of view on subject matter, must be used when creating a play that is intended to have a specific message and/or learner outcome. As Dewey stated, the educator (researcherplaywright) sees “what direction an experience is heading” (1938 p.

38), and in order to accomplish this, he must have an understanding of that experience. Only through research and personal perspective will the researcher-playwright be able to create a text which will cause discussion, perspective, experience, and ultimately learning in the reader and/or audience member. In the end, the result of this process should create a piece of work that, while theatrical, is an educative experience rather than a theatrical production that is beautiful…but meaningless.

The Research-Play as Dialogism “Ethnodramas can help enact politics of resistance and possibility by giving voice to the previously silenced…” (Denzin & Lincoln, cited in Saldana, 1999) Earlier in this paper I stated that one of the major benefits of a researchplay was its ability to give a voice to the subjects of the research. But the idea of giving a voice to people who are the subjects of research is not unique to a research-play. Many forms of narrative research are used for this purpose including, among others, short stories, novels, and poetry.

What is unique about the research-play is that it brings the voice of the participants to physical life. Before we can address this issue, it is important to understand the idea of “voice” in the research-play.

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Coulter (1999) examines the idea of bringing a voice to marginalized peoples through the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin the act of living was “dialogic”. As humans we ask questions, respond to one another, and we participate in dialog. Coulter refers to this as dialogic research. According to Coulter, one of the concerns of the dialogical researcher is to understand the “range of languages and experiences represented”. (p. 8) This is important if the researcher is to avoid giving a voice to only one group or person. Rather than participating in dialogic research the researcher would then be using monological practice which is “not the product of interchange between speakers, but the expression of one person or groups ordering of experience.” (p. 6) Instead of a dialogue between all participants, the monologue is onesided, and most often controlled by the dominant group.

To avoid sliding into monological practice, Coulter (1999) recommends using Bakhtin’s idea of “Carnival”. (p. 9) The idea of Carnival comes from Bakhtin’s ideas that “popular festivals and rituals depicted an alternative life for people within official culture. Through these festivals, people were able to reverse social situations, power structures, and cultural canons and norms. This resulted in the participants turning their world upside down, and allowed them to analyze and possibly change the aforementioned power structures. Applying the idea of Carnival to dialogical research involves “finding the voices silenced or marginalized by monologic practices” as well as “discovering the silenced and marginalized within research itself.” (p. 9) Like the participants in the “popular festival” the dialogic researcher breaks existing power structures. This is accomplished by adding “new speakers and new languages” to the research. The researcher must now combine his voice (through interpretation of data) to the voices of the people involved in the research to breath life into the data.

Research-Play as Research How is a Research-Play any different from a play that has been researched?

This question is important because it addresses the legitimacy of artsbased research in a field often dominated by more scientifically based approaches.

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I recall sitting in the audience of a university production of William Finn’s “Falsettos”. The play is centered on the journey of Marvin, a gay father, friend, ex-husband, and lover. In the audience behind me were six students (three men and three women) who were at the production as a requirement for a course. As the play began I could tell by the comments being made that the students were very homophobic, but as the play progressed an amazing thing took place; the students began to have an understanding of the difficulties that the homosexual characters faced. I know this by their comments made during the performance. They were no longer seeing stereotypes but people, even if they were fictional. After the play I asked them their thoughts on the play and its subject matter.

All were touched and moved. I realized that while they may still be homophobic, they would no longer be so in quite the same way. Now if an anti-gay joke were told they would no longer laugh quite so hard (if at all); they had had an emotional educative experience which I believe was probably more profound than if they had spent a semester in a class on diversity (the type of which I have taught for the past several years). Yet the theatrical production is often seen as fluff and fun, while an article or book may be seen as important and educative. I am not implying that one is necessarily better that the other; however, the fact that one must be labeled as entertainment and the other as academic only leads to positions of dominance and ideology that do little to further the goals of conducting research.

In the spirit of academic rationalism I will now answer the question asked at the beginning of this section. Playwrights who heavily research their subject matter often look at the research as a way to increase the verisimilitude of the play. The playwright is interested in creating the world of the play as it was, often to satisfy her own interest or to use her findings to increase the complexities of the play (characters, setting, dialogue, etc.). However, even though she may do extensive research, she is still able to blur the lines of fact and fiction with the use of artistic license. If the research does not fit with what the author wants the audience to experience or learn, the playwright has the liberty to change the facts to suit her needs. The research-playwright does not have such a liberty; he must take care to avoid changing the research findings in the research-play. For the researcher-playwright there is very little artistic license when dealing with the presentation of the research;

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however, they do have (like traditional researchers) editorial license. By editorial license I mean the ultimate editorial decision on the way in which the research will be presented, and what will be left in or out. The researcher-playwright must also cite any and all references that were used in the conducting of the research. When the play is performed, a list of references must be included in the program as he would do with a traditional paper, article, or book.

The Research-Production In a research-play, the playwright breathes metaphorical life into the data and actors breathe physical life into the findings. While a research-play could be performed by the participants of the study or the researcher-playwright, oftentimes the play will be performed by actors not affiliated with the original research. How can the actors capture the intentions, vocal inflections, subtle meanings, sarcasm, and personalities of the real-life individuals they are portraying on stage? My answer: they can’t. But this is no different from what takes place with any other form of research. Once the participants give their stories they are passed onto the researcher to interpret. Once the researcher releases her “findings” they are passed onto the reader to interpret. Unless the report includes a DVD of their interviews, the reader has no way of knowing the original intentions, vocal inflections, subtle meanings, sarcasm, and personalities of the real-life individuals who participated in the study. The major difference between other forms of qualitative research and a researchplay is that the “findings” are passed onto the actors to interpret before the information is seen by the audience. The director and actors can have a large impact on how the research will be interpreted by an audience.

In order for the “findings” to have the most impact (whatever that may be), it is imperative that the best possible acting company, possibly one trained in ethnotheatre, perform the research-play.

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Epilogue Think of the script as a tool. Before you pick it up to use, know which end is the handle and which is the blade – or you might cut your throat.

(Ball, 1983, p. 96) Through the use of the research-play, it is hoped that the reader/audience will have an experience on levels other than simply intellectual thinking.

While the preferred method is for the student to experience the “lesson” through attending an actual production, there is still the opportunity for learning and experience if the reader participates in the play using the eyes of an artist, as well as a student and scholar.

All knowledge has value, but I believe we only remember the knowledge that we value. This does not mean that all of our knowledge is of equal value to us; on the contrary, we assign levels of importance to what we value. This can be used in many ways; if you are a strong supporter of equal rights for all, then you must have knowledge of both your position as well as that of your opposition in order to fully understand and defend your opinion.

Knowledge is neutral; only through our experiences and perceptions are we able to create a system of value. According to Joan Wink, “all of us need to reflect critically on our own experiences and those of others – then, we need to connect these new thoughts to our own life in new ways”. (1997, p. 6) Ultimately, it is our own knowledge which is most valuable. There are others who may have a greater understanding of a given subject or an additional set of information, and we may learn from them. As humans, we may defer to someone who knows more about a given subject (such as a teacher, lawyer, elected official), because we also have the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge. Awareness of what we don’t know is simply another form of knowledge. In understanding and admitting our personal limits of knowledge, we are able to continue to learn and expand knowledge. Dewey (1933) writes, “The great reward of exercising the power of thinking is that there are no limits to the possibility of carrying over into the objects and events of life, meanings originally acquired by thoughtful examination, and hence no limit to the continual growth of meaning in human life”. (p. 21) In addition, Eisner (1998) writes “The arts, however, teach the child that the grass is not simply green; it is lavender, grey gold. And when it is green, its varieties are endless”. (p. 82)

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Through research, the scholar is able to make discoveries that lead to new pieces of knowledge. Through a play, the playwright is able to allow the audience to experience. In combining research with the play, the researcherplaywright has a powerful outlet for bringing knowledge with experience to her intended audience, and this experience-based knowledge has the potential to cause learning which is intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.

References Ball, D. (1983) Backwards and forwards. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bogosian, E. (1986). Drinking in America. New York: Ararat Productions.

Bryson, K.M. (2005, Winter). Certain expectations: Using Ethnodrama as transformational theatre. Seaons: Quarterly Newsletter of the International Centre for Women Playwrights. Retrieved on [date not supplied by author, Ed.], 2006 from http://www.netspace.org/~icwp/ seasonsMar05.html#top Coulter, D. (1999). The Epic and the Novel: Dialogism and Teacher Research. Educational Researcher, 28(3), 4-13.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think. Minneola, NY: New York: Dover Publications.

Eisner, E. W. (1998). The kind of schools we need. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann Gardner, H., (1993) Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books -Fontana Press.

Polkinghorne, D.E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 12-28.

Reprinted in J. A. Hatch, & R. Wisniewski, (Eds.) (1995,pp. 5-23), Life history and narrative. London: Falmer.

Saldana, J. (1999). Ethnodrama: An anthology of reality theatre. New York: Altamira Press.

Wink, J. (1997). Critical pedagogy: Notes from the real world. New York: Longman.

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Julie White La Trobe University Dr Julie White works in the Faculty of Education at La Trobe University where she lectures in postgraduate education programs on pedagogy, curriculum and research methodology and supervises PhD students. She is a member of the editorial boards of Creative Approaches to Research and Journal of Qualitative Research and was recently guest co-editor for Transnational Curriculum Inquiry. She has particular interests in pedagogy, identity, narrative and creativity and is a researcher on two Australian Research Council funded projects investigating the identities and social connection of young people with chronic illness, and the pedagogy of teachers in relation to young people at the edges of schooling.

Lynda Smerdon The Arts Centre, Victoria Lynda Smerdon works at the interface of arts and education at The Arts Centre, Melbourne. Her background includes fine arts, music, drama, opera and arts management and she has spent the past nine years engaging teachers and artists to develop their understandings of each other. She has managed the Education Workshops program that has developed many projects such as: ‘Artists in Schools,’ ‘Small Bites!’

‘SPIN’, ‘Engaging the Arts’, ‘Dramatically Digital’, ‘Going Deeper’ and ‘Arts Partners.’ During 2006 and 2007 she initiated an international collaboration between the Arts Centre and the Lincoln Centre Institute.

Her research interests focus on creativity, imagination and educational engagement through the arts

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PERFORMING EDUCATION

Abstract Essentially conceptual rather than empirical, this article explores the complex field of creativity using two theoretical conceptions of performativity in relation to the work of teachers. While some ideas are tentatively forwarded and the story of a continuing teacher project is introduced, the intention of the article is twofold: Firstly, to offer a provocation on the topic of creativity and teacher pedagogy, and secondly, through using writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson, 2000) further the understandings we have developed through collaboration with colleagues from arts-education and the artsi. As this discussion is located in general education, it is focused on pedagogy and curriculum rather than being aligned to the arts or arts-education. As such it is hoped that we have not overreached ourselves or stepped on any toes in the development of this argument. volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 Š University of Melbourne

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Introduction Creativity in classrooms is identified as the answer to the nation’s future, but how this might be achieved is highly problematic. The central interest of this article is the context for the work of teachers, and how they might be supported to explore creativity and become more courageous and collaborative themselves, which in turn, might foster and enhance creativity in their own classrooms. The article firstly considers understandings of creativity for teachers in general which is followed by two theoretical conceptions of performativity. It then touches on governmentality before turning to creative partnerships and implications of this for teacher pedagogy. This is followed by a preliminary discussion of an unfinished teacher-learning project about pedagogy and creativity that offers some hope and promise for the future of the teaching profession.

Creativity and Teaching When Australian politicians make the call for higher levels of creativity, it is more often than not linked with the future, with innovation and with the economy (PMSEIC, 2005; Commonwealth of Australia, 2008a).

Education is usually offered as a panacea and the promise of increased profits and innovation in business seems to satisfy most. Ironically however, the work of teachers in schools continues to be stifled and overwhelmed by a constant barrage of accountability demands by government. Teachers are expected to ‘perform’ in specific and restricted ways and the debate about ‘performance’ pay for the ‘best and brightest’ —whatever that might mean—continues to be threatened in the Australian media.

In contrast, creativity requires freedom in order to look anew and to take risks in thinking to develop ideas and consider things differently.

Pürto (2004) argues that creativity ‘implies a kind of human freedom’ (p.

32) that can be enhanced or stifled and is more often than not ‘repressed, suppressed, and stymied through the process…of being educated’ (p. 37).

What is it that schools, and therefore teachers do to creativity? And what can be done to change this?

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Creativity theory offers a range of definitions about what creativity might mean and who might be creative, but it is usually an American or western perspective that is presented (Kaufman and Sternberg, 2006).

Creativity is a neglected field of research—particularly in education.

While some consider that psychology has too much influence, others argue that creativity is psychology’s ‘orphan’ (Sternberg, 2003, p. 89).

Much discussion about creativity has focused on intelligence and the gifted as well as products and divergent thinking, but this is of little help to the classroom teacher. While publications about creativity in the classroom have increasingly emerged from the UK since the Robinson Report (NACCCE, 1999), generalist teachers continue to be positioned as boring and lacking creativity (see Galton, 2008).

Sternberg (2003) points to the propensity for ‘successful’ students to aim for high scores and grades and, in doing so, many lose the courage to take risks. He suggests that “…teachers may inadvertently advocate that children ‘play it safe’ when they give assignments without choices and allow only particular answers to questions” (p. 115). In a similar way, is it this tendency to ‘play it safe’ on the part of teachers trying to meet the performative demands made upon them, that ultimately works against creativity in classrooms? By deciding in advance how teachers should perform – in the measurement of their own work (through competency standards) and that of their students (through curriculum standards and standardised testing programs), the effect is one of stunting any growth towards creativity. Predetermined outcomes are akin to the ‘assignments without choices’ that ‘allow only particular answers to questions’ that Sternberg (2003) referred to.

May (1975, cited in Pürto, 2004, p. 47) differentiated between different forms of courage: physical courage, moral courage, social courage and creative courage. And this idea of courage – especially creative courage is particularly interesting in relation to education. It has been suggested elsewhere (Burnard and White, in press) that “by encouraging teachers to take risks, to be adventurous and to explore creativity themselves, the resulting confidence will herald a willingness to develop pedagogy and classroom creativity.” Further, we suggest that while teachers are kept on such a tight rein by performativity (in the Lyotard and Butler senses discussed below), they are less likely to take any risks or foster creativity in their own classrooms. In short, they need courage. So, performativity volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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is the antithesis of creativity and leads to what we have called ‘right answer’ pedagogy.

Performativity and Teaching While performativity is a term used in drama, science, technology studies, as well as economic sociology, there are two major theoretical strands of performativity that are of particular relevance here. We refer to the use of the term by both Françios Lyotard and Judith Butler in this discussion about performativity and teaching.

Butler (1997; 2000) uses performativity to represent the analysis of gender development and political speech. Butler drew on speech act theory and the linguistic work of J. L. Austin (1962) to develop her conception of this term. As Redman (2000) explains, for Butler, “…performativity refers to the process by which discourse produces that which it names.” He illustrates this further: “Thus, for Butler, the midwife’s cry, ‘It’s a girl!’ is not a description for a state inscribed in nature but a ‘performative act’, a practice of ‘girling’ that ascribes gendered meaning to particular bodies” (p. 13). So performativity in this sense is both the performance and creation of gendered behaviour. Transgressions in the performance of gender have severe consequences as gender is, Butler argues, a system of regulated performances.

Are teachers created as well as performed in a similar sense? We are interested in how teachers are shaped, moulded and scrutinised, and wonder about the consequences for not performing ‘teaching’ in sanctioned ways. Can teaching also be construed as a regulated system of performances? Who decides what constitutes successful performance?

Aspects of this argument has been developed (Burnard and White, in press) where it has been suggested that while the ‘performance’ of pedagogy is socially constructed, increasingly through competence standards, governments have developed a narrow and reductionist version of what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher.

Increasingly governments in Australia have become involved in determining the ‘goodness’ criteria of teachers. What governments count as appropriate knowledge for teachers can be seen in several forms. Firstly, education programs in universities have been critiqued

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and inquired into to an extraordinary extent in Australia. The result of continually examining teacher education programs is to cast doubt on their competence and worth. Government inquiries have also served the purpose of embedding both doubt about the competence of university staff, as well as the need for ‘standards’ into the discourse.

Each successive inquiry features the need for ‘standards’ and ‘quality’ in their terms of reference, so the discourse is self-perpetuating. As a result, universities appear to have been positioned by government into the role of hapless scapegoat. Does this mean that government is increasingly taking control of the teaching profession?

The desire for reform of teacher education so that it conforms to the reductive ‘training’ and ‘standards’ version seen in the Australian context, echoes difficulties experienced in Britain during the 1990s (See Sachs, 2003a; 2003b; Tickle, 2000). Similarly, Tom (1997) argues that in the United States reform of teacher education “…has political and institutional roots, not just intellectual and conceptual ones” (cited in Sachs, 2003a, p. 62), and this has informed the argument in this article.

During the past five years state governments have required that Australian universities subject their pre-service education courses for approval to standards-focused accreditation bodies like the Victorian Institute of Teachers (VIT) and the NSW Institute of Teachers (NSWIT), bodies that are essentially arms of government. A development of this process was recently reported in the Melbourne Age newspaper under the headline ‘Teachers Face Tough New Tests at Uni,’ (Tomazin, 2008, p. 5). In order to accredit teachers to be able to work in any state or territory in Australia, the government has announced that “…all Australian university teacher training courses, will, for the first time, be forced to meet a set of national benchmarks in order to be accredited.”

Rather like the railway gauge issue, Australian states and territories each run on different systems for historical reasons. Unlike the railways, however, the teaching profession is being compelled to comply with government edicts. The language is especially revealing, particularly in relation to the notion of forcing universities into this arrangement in order to boost the quality of teachers in schools. Government also has considerable power over practicing teachers and determines what ‘knowledge’ is of value and how a teacher’s performance measures up. volume 2 • number 1 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne

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Performativity, Governmentality and Education The second use of performativity refers to the work by Lyotard (1984) and is very much about governmental efficiencies — minimum input resulting in maximum output. It is also about the tension between knowledge and power, and raises the central issue of legitimation.

Who decides what is important and how does this manifest? In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard pointed to the question of knowledge as being more than ever a question of government (p. 9). As Peters and Barbules (2004) observe, anything that is not deemed by the government to be ‘useful’ is removed. The depressing example they forward is the Bush administration’s erasure of all educational research studies from the government ERIC archives that do not reflect that government’s view of “…credible, useful knowledge” (p. 49). An example from closer to home is the change to the content of the Victorian Institute of Teaching’s (VIT) website. During 2004 the website archived much valuable and useful information (see White, 2004) about the formation of the VIT together with the principles and intended focus of its work according to the Ministerial Advisory Committee (MACVIT) who worked towards its establishment. Shortly after some publications using this material appeared, and after it became apparent that a policy change had occurred concerning the function of the VIT (a shift from teacher voice and advocacy, to registration and policing), the archived material was excised from the website.

Lyotard’s (1984) illumination about the transformation of knowledge by government is a particularly helpful one in relation to education.

Successive governments in Australia (as elsewhere) have decided what knowledge is important for students to learn and this is manifested in the form of curriculum standards. If one considers, for example, the place of creativity in the curriculum and levels of funding and the timetable share that the arts typically enjoy in schools, Lyotard’s notion of performativity is further elucidated. At its worst, Lyotard referred to the terrors of performativity, which is at the extreme – where government measurement and accountability negates all else. Perhaps literacy and numeracy might be considered more important than the arts, for example.

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Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ involves both government of self as well as the government of others. This self-regulation is an important point in education, and the practices and strategies that individuals (in their freedom) use in controlling or governing themselves or others (see Peters and Burbules, 2004, Chapter 3). In education, where teachers are increasingly told what to teach, how to teach and when to teach it (see Burnard and White, in press), how complicit are teachers in controlling themselves? How well do they perform teaching?

In universities, when applying for promotion, individuals are required to undertake courses in equal opportunity and the like. Applicants selfgovern, and conform in order to gain promotion. In schools, teachers police their own work as well as the work of their colleagues and two examples from Victoria serve to illustrate this. They show what Marshall (1996, 1998), who draws upon Foucault, describes as questions of personal autonomy and freedom, and where teachers are manipulated and dominated until they turn into ‘docile bodies’ (cited in Peters and Burbules, 2004, p. 67).

Firstly, during the late 1990s the Australian state of Victoria instituted their Early Years Literacy Program, which required teachers of 5-8 year old children to implement a highly structured and performative program that education academics in the literacy field summarily dismissed. The education theory underpinning that program belonged to a paradigm advocating the need for teachers to be directed and monitored. Schoolbased coordinators (often in recent positions of promotion) were positioned into this surveillance role and subjected teachers to ‘training’ about literacy that was more reminiscent of ‘re-education’ than learning.

Teachers who did not comply were usually discounted as ‘difficult’ or ‘old fashioned’ and their concerns about teacher professional judgment were ignored. The performance pay bonuses of school principals were related to levels of compliance with the implementation of this program.

Another example (sadly also from my state, Victoria) is the Principles of Learning and Teaching (PoLT) program (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, 2008) that dictated a state-sanctioned view of pedagogy and was ‘implemented’ by teachers who were given time release or promotion. While, somewhat chillingly, this program appears to have not been based on any research it did involve academics

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who ‘trained’ teachers for the state in return for funding. While the PoLT documents continue to be available via the official government website, the training program was offered only 3 times in 2008 at the cost of $650 per teacher. (see also White, Scholtz and Williams, 2006, and White, 2008b, for further discussion of this program).

Indeed performativity in both the Butler and Lyotard senses and governmentality in the Foucault sense seem to have taken hold in Australian education, and the professional voice of teachers is gradually being diminished while “…bureaucrats have clearly been written into the contemporary tale of teaching to the extent that they have, arguably, taken over authorship and are in complete control of the teacher’s tale” (White, 2004, p. 192).

The ‘2020 Summit’: Australia’s Best and Brightest?

With the election of a federal Labor government in Australia in 2007, a unique national summit of national leaders was organised, which included representatives from business, social welfare, the arts, education, governance, and many other fields of the Australian community. The word ‘education’ appears 524 times in the subsequent 2020 Report (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008a), and all groups reported on the crucial role of education for the future. Even though it was purported that the ‘best and brightest’ participated in the Australian 2020 Summit, and even though education was the answer to most issues it seems, the voice of teachers was strangely absent. Apart from everyone pointing to education as the way forward, education was not afforded a strand of its own, but was included as one minor aspect of the productivity agenda.

Nor was education included as a topic in the eighth strand on creativity, but was relegated to the functional ‘skills and training’ arena. While all of the participants at the 2020 Summit seem to have identified education as the panacea – at least in rhetorical terms – the dominant view of teaching that clearly emerges from the report is consistent with a bureaucratic preoccupation that teachers need to be told what to do and to be controlled and measured.

In the Thinking Big (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008b) paper, which was prepared for participants in the 2020 Summit, creativity in

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education seems to be coupled with the arts. Prior to the Summit, one of the important questions asked in relation to creativity was ‘What can Australia do to encourage experimentation, innovation and creative thinking in a changing environment?’ but this doesn’t appear to have been considered within general areas of school education. While clearly the core business of the arts and arts education is creativity, and we know these areas don’t lay exclusive claim to it, the way in which creativity seems to have been cordoned off in order to allocate it to the arts seems pointless. By way of illustration, consider that in primary schools in Australia it is usual for the children to have access to the arts — taught usually by a specialist teacher — for an hour or two a week. In the first few years of secondary education, time for students to engage with the arts is carefully rationed – and by mid secondary schooling many young people have opted out of the arts altogether. Students still spend a significant amount of time at school not specifically focused on the arts where creativity might still apply.

The Bureaucratic Intention Analysis of the discourse about education of the 2020 Summit Report (2008a) reveals that the prevailing bureaucratic view of education in Australia has not changed with the change of government. Education continues to be positioned as a site for the ‘training’ of ‘skills’, and where teachers need to be directed, measured and kept continually accountable, leading — through some magical process — to greater national productivity and economic outcomes. The bureaucratic intention regarding education in the near future in Australia has also been revealed and supports the 21st century version of Australia’s cultural cringe. Firstly, there is an unfortunate and obvious reference to the harshly criticized American ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ (United States Congress, 2001) in the 2020 Summit Report with “We need to have high aspirations and expectations that all students will achieve to their potential and that no child will be allowed to fall behind” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008a, p. 19, authors’ emphasis). A pattern in Australian education is, it would seem, is to take initiatives from the United States and the United Kingdom — particularly failed or ineffective ones — and import them wholesale into Australia.

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The second issue of concern emerging from the 2020 Summit Report, is the echoing of the Bush Administration’s resolve to only fund research in education that conforms in method to use randomized scientific trials (For detailed comment, see Lather, 2004). In the Summit report it says: “We need to have high aspirations for all children. Of crucial importance to this is the need for a stronger evidence base and for trialling and assessing what works” (Commonwealth of Australia, 2008a, p. 20). The voice of the career bureaucrat is recognisable here with the persuasive blend of motherhood rhetoric and policy intention.

The work of Joe Lo Bianco (1999, 2004) about the development of particular discourses in the US, helps to make sense of the pervasive bureaucratic discourse in Australian education. Lo Bianco explains how conservative American politician, Newt Gingrich, “…made a specific aim of changing public discourse” about bilingual education by repeating his key terminology again and again in speeches and written materials.

In our context, the discourse about education and teacher knowledge has been usurped from the profession. Teachers and others in education have been bludgeoned into accepting that the performative agenda is somehow normal. This seeping and deliberate discourse has continued to influence education policy and is thriving despite changes of government, which seems to indicate that it is the public servants or ‘educrats’ who are leading it. During the past five years this discourse has gone from strength to strength through a favoured way of communicating with the profession – via media release. For example, see the recent announcement that education courses in universities “…will be required to meet tough new standards…to boost the quality of teachers in schools” (Tomazin, 2008, p. 5) and the persuasive and pervasive bureaucratic writing exemplified in the 2020 Summit Report (2008a).

Creative Partnerships and Teacher Pedagogy Instead of ‘Arts’ partnerships, Galton (2008) from the UK uses the term ‘Creative Partnerships’ and argues that the term “…recognizes that the word artist is often associated with a narrow range of creative activities, whereas in the various CP projects [of his study] there are environmentalist, horticulturalists, media specialist and other partners

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who are not usually regarded as ‘artistic’ among the population at large” (p. 6). In an intriguing research exercise, Galton (2008) asked children to imagine creative practitioners and teachers speaking. The children depicted the language of teachers and creative practitioners quite differently: Where pupils imagined a teacher or creative practitioner to be speaking most of the comments were neutral in tone to do mainly with giving task or routine directions. Whereas creative practitioners were frequently depicted as offering advice about specific aspects of work actually undertaken (such as carrying out a mime in drama, taking a photograph, loading the video camera etc.) teachers’ comments were of a general nature and more often concerned procedures (have you finished?).

One third of teachers’ comments were negative in tone and had to do with classroom control. Pupils were admonished to ‘stop talking,’ ‘sit up straight’ and to ‘pay attention.’ Overall, the classroom climate was viewed more positively when creative practitioners were present (p. x).

While we are reluctant to read too much into this, it nevertheless provides a useful entry point into a discussion of pedagogy, while illuminating the unfortunate and prevalent binary of teachers getting it ‘wrong’ while artists get it ‘right.’ As Pringle (2008) points out: Artist practitioners can adopt creative and experimental pedagogic modes because generally they are free from curriculum constraints whereas teachers are not always at liberty to do so. The artist thus becomes a creative ‘other’ whereas the teacher can be cast in the role of didact or policeman (cited in Galton, 2008, p. 67).

And this of course leads us back to performativity. But is there a conservative and timid tendency amongst teachers? What might be the cause of this? And what can be done about it? Artists and other creative practitioners in partnership with schools are credited with pedagogies that support and enhance creativity, but generalist teachers are often characterised as not being equipped for this task. Some of the leading Arts Education organizations in the United States and the UK have grappled with this issue and address it through teacher support programs, professional learning programs and the implementation of pre-project planning between all partners engaged in the development of artist-

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teacher partnerships. For example the Lincoln Centre in New York, the Kennedy Centre in Washington, the Chicago Arts Partnership (CAPE) and in the UK, the Creative Partnerships model systematically brings artists and teachers together. Often the divide between ‘the arts’ and ‘education’ remains. The artists continue to view the artistic processes as being their responsibility, and continue to require the classroom teacher to take care of the ‘learning.’ If our aim is to foster creativity in schools, then it seems logical that the construction of a creative classroom requires the blurring of these boundaries rather than the maintenance of them. For the purposes of this discussion, we propose that the teacher at the centre of this process (not at the centre of the learning, but at the heart of the construction of the learning) needs to see themselves as creative individuals in order to understand the creative encounters of their students (Sinclair, 2008).

Leading arts educator, John O’Toole goes some way to offering an explanation for the timidity and reluctance to embrace the arts: Most teachers only receive a brief introduction to the arts in their preservice training, sometimes not even that. This is compounded by those gaps in the pre-service students’ own education, so that when they graduate, many teachers are still basically ignorant of the importance or relevance of the arts to their students. Even many of the lucky ones who are aware of their importance, or are excited by their potential, feel they do not have the necessary basic skills themselves, let alone the pedagogy, and so they are too fearful to take the risk. And some of those who do come out with confidence and skills to do the job find themselves in schools where there is little understanding, support or resources, and it is much easier not to teach the arts (2008 forthcoming).

Indeed, there is much that works against teachers being free and confident to enhance creativity in their own classrooms. Distilling the work of Bond, Smith, Baker and Hattie (2000) and Brophy (2004) about exemplary teachers, Galton (2008) identified ten practices that may prove helpful in this context:

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1.

Pupil exploration will usually precede formal presentations.

2.

Pupils’ questions and comments often determine the focus of classroom discourse.

3.

There is a high proportion of pupil talk, much of it occurring between pupils….

4.

The lesson requires pupils to reflect critically on the procedures and the methods they used.

5.

Whenever possible what is learned is related to the pupils’ lives outside school.

6.

Pupils are encouraged to use a variety of means and media to communicate their ideas.

7.

Content to be taught is organized around a limited set of powerful ideas.

8.

Teachers structure tasks in ways which limit the complexity involved.

9.

Higher order thinking is developed within the context of the curriculum and not taught as a discrete set of skills within a separate course unit.

10.

The classroom ethos encourages pupils to offer speculative answers to challenging questions without fearing failure (p. 70).

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The flexible thinking, risk-taking, looking anew and inherent freedoms that we suggest characterise the democratic and inclusive form of creativity to be encouraged in classrooms might be enhanced if these general pedagogical practices were more commonplace. Instead of berating teachers or describing them as boring, or by attempting to ‘train’ them, professionally ‘develop’ them, or continue to measure their performance (in relation to standards and sanctioned knowledge), We wonder if there might be another way forward?

Returning briefly to the 2020 Summit and the absence of the teacher’s voice in the discussion, we raise the question: What might happen if we invite teachers to be creative, not just in the classroom, but in the staffroom as well? How might engagement with artistic practice (for example) generate a shift in teacher identity? What will teachers gain?

And what might it equip them for? Will they become more confident, and be more willing to engage in the kind of risk-taking and disruption that sits at the heart of profound learning? (Sinclair, 2008).

The Principal and the Performance By way of contrast with the bleak and powerless education landscape depicted so far in this article, a small project emerging from one Melbourne school brings a sense of hope and promise. While the project is not yet complete, the ‘Creativity and Pedagogy Project’ at North Fitzroy Primary School, might provide a way forward for teacher learning, for creativity in classrooms and for teacher professionalism.

The school is in a middle class inner Melbourne suburb, which has continued to gentrify over the past thirty years. Many parents live alternative and artistic lifestyles, but an equal number represent the traditional professions and the corporate sector. The principal, Connie Watson, is a diminutive woman who wears her hair up and laughs easily. She wears eye-catching clothing and earrings – which suggests something about her approach to leadership. She had a hard time of it at first, with a dominant group of parents resenting her. These days she is very much an independent thinker, which seems a desirable quality in a principal. She protects her staff, wherever possible, from performative demands, but has particularly high expectations of them:

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What I am trying to create is an intelligent culture in a primary school…I felt that often there was a lack of intellectual rigour, I suppose, in primary schools, and a dependency on a formulaic way of operating.

And what I was looking for was people who were thinking about why they were doing things … and having a vision of children who also question why they are doing things … and who are creative, innovative, able to be flexible in any situation because that’s what the future requires. But not just the future, it’s what the world requires (Interview 21/12/07, p. 1).

While she has worked for several years to support a creative and professional culture, it has been challenging at times. The teachers seemed to appreciate the intellectual rigour that Connie brought with her, but it was not straightforward, and it was not immediate.

Nevertheless, Connie observed that ‘Many of them just were relieved that they were no longer being treated as ten-year-olds themselves, and that there was respect for them as professionals (Interview 21/12/07, p. 6). An email from one of the Leading Teachers sent to all staff in a Christmas message, signalled that her approach was bearing fruit: But then I got an email from one of the leaders, saying how…how wonderful it was to work at a school where we actually thought about what we were doing, and that people could have intellectual conversations and disagreements, without taking it personally. And that’s very much what I wanted for the staff.

That we don’t have to agree with each other, and in fact intellectual debate is absolutely essential to what we do (Interview 21/12/07, p. 4).

The project (White and Watson, 2006; White, 2008a) grew out of a professional learning program that began with a focus on pedagogy and curriculum and grew into an action research project (McNiff and Whitehead, 2006) undertaken by the teachers in order to explore creativity and pedagogy. While it is usual for action research to be reported through written accounts, in this project the teachers decided to perform their learning and understandings. This was familiar territory for us as we drew on earlier work with pre-service teachers (White, 2006).

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The project is premised on the idea that to foster creativity in their own classrooms, the teachers needed to play and explore creatively themselves. The principal wanted the teachers to investigate pedagogy as well as creativity, but was not enamoured by the PoLT program, which was the official approach to pedagogy in Victoria at the beginning of the project. Towards the end of July this year the project will culminate in a performance by teachers for an audience of pre-service teachers. Through the development of performance the teachers have expressed significant ideas through song, dance and symbolii. They have stepped outside the bureaucratic discourse of education and instead have explored what it means to be a teacher for the future. They have explored key professional issues with a particular focus on pedagogy and collaborative collegiality.

Above all, they have explored creativity, by playing and taking risks even though they were often nervous about this. The key question guiding the development of the performance has been: What have we learned about ourselves, and our own creativity from our action research project? And what does this mean for our pedagogy and practice?

While this introduction to the North Fitzroy Primary School Creativity and Pedagogy Project is tentative and preliminary, it will be reported on in greater depth and clarity shortly. It has been included here to indicate a glimpse of an alternative vision to performativity and a possible way forward to supporting the inclusion of creativity in the mainstream curriculum of schools. As the former Federal Minister for Education said at the beginning of the National Education and The Arts Statement: Schools that value creativity lead the way in cultivating the wellinformed and active citizens our future demands: where individuals are able to generate fresh ideas, communicate effectively, take calculated risks and imaginative leaps, adapt easily to change and work cooperatively (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs and Cultural Ministers Council, 2007, p. 3).

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Conclusion The work of teachers is performative, in the Lyotard sense because it is increasingly devised, controlled and measured by bureaucratic and political processes. And it is also performative in the Butler sense because the discourse about education and the work of teachers promulgated by bureaucrats (as exemplified in the 2020 Summit Report) “…produces that which it names” (Redman, 2000, p. 13). We are in danger of witnessing the demise of teaching into a compliant workforce of program implementers rather than professional teachers capable of fostering and enhancing creativity in the nation’s classrooms. In the pedagogy stakes, it is evident that the artist, the teacher of the arts and the general teacher might work together to enhance creativity in many aspects of school education—starting with general teachers—and engender hope about the future of teaching and learning.

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Galton, M (2008). The pedagogy of artists working in schools: Report to Creative Partnerships, Arts Council of Great Britain, Cambridge: Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

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rdonlyres/B1EF82EF-08D5-427E-B7E4•69D41C61D495/8625/ finalPMSEICReport_WEBversion.pdf Peters, M. A. & Burbules, N. C. (2004). Poststructuralism and educational research. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Tomazin, F. (2008, June 12). Teachers face tough new tests at Uni. The Age, p. 5.

United States Congress. (2001). No child left behind (Public law number 107–110). Washington, DC: United States Congress.

White, J. (2008a, January 25). Performativity and hopeful pedagogy: North Fitzroy Primary School’s Creativity Performance Project. Paper presented at the Holistic Eduction Research Group Colloquium ‘Imagining Education: Educating Imagination’, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

White, J. (2008b). The researcher’s quest for identity: A narrative approach to ‘playing it safe’ in research and teaching. Creative Approaches to Research, 1,(1), 38-53.

White, J. (2006). Arias of learning: Creativity and performativity in Australian teacher education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36(3), 435-453.

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White, J. & Watson, C. (2006, December 1). Articulating pedagogy: A whole school action research project and the place of performance. Paper presented at the Australian Association of Research in Education, Annual Conference ‘Engaging Pedagogies,’ The University of Adelaide, Australia.

White, J. (2004). Questions of identity: The researcher’s quest for the beginning teacher. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.

White, J., Williams, R. & Scholtz, J. (2006, December 1). The Victorian ‘Principles of Learning and Teaching’ Program: Accountability process or innovation? Paper presented at the Australian Association of Research in Education Annual Conference, ‘Engaging Pedagogies,’ The University of Adelaide, Australia. i We would like to acknowledge Dr Christine Sinclair from Swinburne University who made a significant contribution to the conception of this article. ii We are indebted to Hannes Berger from the Arts Centre who supported the project.

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Editorial: ARTISTRY AND EDUCATION: FOUR PERSPECTIVES

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Wesley Imms “DELIBERATELY”, “EXPLICITLY”: REDISTRIBUTING POWER. AN ARGUMENT FOR USING VISUAL RESEARCH METHODS IN AN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH PROJECT.

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Helen Toon TEACHING STORIES: A REFLECTION ON TEACHING RESIDENCIES

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Kathryn Ricketts RESEARCHER-PLAYWRIGHT AND THE RESEARCH-PLAY

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Thomas Turner PERFORMING EDUCATION Julie White & Lynda Smerton

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