A pedagogy of democracy - teaching, learning and performance

The Professions and Democracy

 A pedagogy of democracy - teaching, learning and performance

Chrissie Harrington. National Teaching Fellow. University Campus Suffolk

This paper seeks to consider the relationship between democracy, education and the arts through the role of teacher and learner in higher education. In particular, the analogy of education as performance, or as performative, and the educational context as a theatre in which knowledge or meaning is constructed, owned and experienced, will inform how we might think about the profession of teaching and its potential contribution to democratic society.

The power relationships between the institution, the teacher and the learner in the construction and ownership of knowledge demonstrate the potential to both facilitate and subvert democratic thinking and practices. As a consequence, this paper will propose ways of developing a pedagogy that prioritises the unknown over the known, and the discovered over the prescribed as a participatory process. It will extend this concept further by privileging experience as a means of knowing and re-inscribing meaning (Winter, 1987) as a key phenomenon of personal freedom and empowerment.

The concept of a pedagogy of democracy will be further explored through and as performance where the interactions between the director, the performer/actor, and the audience draws attention to the role of the participant. Barthes (1977), like Winter, places ownership in the hands of the viewer/reader and destabilises any fixed ideologies or positioning - highlighting our powers as individuals and as educators to perceive, choose and interpret, and to re-affirm the meaning of democracy.