Embodied Critical Learning through Performance Teaching

A critical mode of being is not only written into the Swedish law of university education as a learning outcome for all students, but also vital for Media and Communication students approach to their studies and their future lives as media producers. Taking on this challenge, I created an experiment 15 years ago, which I term performance teaching. It was a way to force students out of their uncritical absorption of course-content only focusing on exams, into a critical mode of thinking and doing. At first this performance teaching entailed lecturing in totally different lifestyle outfits every day, with the aid of colleagues and the city theatre. The following 13 years, however, only the first day of term was used for the performance and the experiment turned into a permanent teaching method, tied in with theories of critique of sources and media critique. This is the case that will theoretically discuss in this article. I will argue for didactically designing learning processes that tackles the issues embodied critical thinking and doing. My main argument is that by acknowledging that we, as lecturers and students, are physical beings and that learning should take place through one’s entire body, learning processes can be didactically designed to better learning processes. The aim of the article is showing how performance teaching can create a positive base for critical learning, thinking, and doing media, and theoretically analysing and discussing this. Theoretically, the concepts I use are mainly based on bell hooks’ works on feminist critical pedagogy. I also lean on Bourdieu’s (2001) concept hexis and habitus, and Larsson and Fagrell’s (2010) The Conception of Performed Body. I’m furthermore inspired by Selander and Kress’ (2010) book on didactic design and Toke Gissel’s (2016) work on Media Didactics, which ties my research to my subject Media and Communication studies. Methodologically the case study is based on student questionnaires and interviews. The result shows that students yearn the familiar, they want what they believe a university education and a “proper university lecturer” should be. When taken out of their pre-understandings of this and when the course didactics are consciously designed to foster criticality, they start to think and do critically. The performance lecture is but a small starting point in achieving this, but its effects seem to last students’ entire bachelor program (and possibly beyond). The article does not argue for a performance lecture as such, as it could be a hard act hard to follow, but that university lectures should aim for what bell hooks terms practical wisdom. Furthermore, we need to bring embodied learning into the classroom, and we must acknowledge that fostering critical thinking and critical doing is key to any university education.