agoldberg’s blog

I have been studying the Creative Attributes Framework developed UAL. Despite its rather off-putting name, and form, technocratic structure and graphic design, I am surprised how resonant the content is in relation to the work I am doing with students in my classroom, and how it speaks to my own strengths as a teacher and areas where I can become more effective.

As an acting and theatre-making course, we are naturally centered on the second category of “Showcasing Abilities” with oral communication, collaboration, and storytelling the content we are studying and the modes by which the students are assessed. I am actively teaching these skills and providing regular feedback and new skills to develop these attributes.

When I turn to the other categories, they inadvertently help me to reveal where I could be more explicit about values that I feel the students are lacking but will be important for them to succeed in the professional world. I am often shocked at how non-proactive my students are in relation to realizing their own performances.  As a small example, despite being told to make a list of tech equipment needed for their piece or to arrive at a technical rehearsal with a list of cues, it is only when they reach the space and it is time to perform that many of these students begin to consider their material needs. Likewise, I find UAL acting students get flustered at small changes, such as changing the orientation of the room, paralyzing them to a surprising degree. 

I think a number of these issues are more acute because of the time spent in isolation with COVID. As a teacher, this framework will help me to be more explicit in naming these values that need to be cultivated, and helping the students understand why they are necessary on a professional level.  In summer term I will be using this document for my annual individual tutorial sessions for students to self-identify areas of strength and weakness.

In “What Decolonising the Curriculum Really Means,” author Sofia Akel defines decolonising education as “the process in which we rethink, reframe and reconstruct the curricula and research that preserve the Europe-centred, colonial lens.” 

In the Acting and Performance Programme, we have spent a lot of time debating what this means for our course and our discipline. What does it mean to “decolonize” approaches to actor training?

One area we have discussed is the centrality of certain practitioners such as Stanislavski and Brecht (and Meyerhold, Grotowski, etc.) We have also discussed the status of text and whether embodied and/or devised methods advance this goal. We have also considered these issues in relation to the texts we choose to perform—our students use their own (racialized) bodies to represent characters, making this process far more fraught, than, say, a literature class which is only reading a text privately. 

The imperative to decolonize and de-center many of these classic texts from the theatrical canon (most of whom are cishet, white males), however, quickly becomes quite complicated. Naturalistic acting derived from Stanislavski continues to dominate the world stages and even more so in film, and our students quite rightly demand this knowledge in the hopes of having a professional career. It would be impossible to understand much of contemporary Asian, African, or Latin American theatre without a deep knowledge of Brechtian theory whose legacy thrives most fully in these areas of the world. And last spring, in order for white students to work on a script by Winsome Pinnock, all cultural references were stripped from the Caribbean-British characters. These examples are point up the fact that the process of rethinking (decolonizing) higher education cannot be solely a matter tweaking syllabi to include more diverse voices (although they should do that do), but must re-think more complexly about the deeper purpose of education. 

Reference:

Baby with the Bathwater: Reflections on “The reflection game: enacting the penitent self”

This 2009 article by Bruce Macfarlane and Lesley Gourlay in Teaching in Higher Education spoke directly to one of my ongoing and longstanding questions about my teaching whenever I am preparing assessment assignments and doing the actual grading myself. Macfarlane and Gourlay look at PgCert programs (how meta!) comparing the expected journey self-reflexive pedagogues are expected to undergo through the course to the transformational journeys found on reality TV: from insecurity covered with arrogance, breakdown, epiphany, grateful and groping towards the new light of a better day, changed for the better from the experience. 

Macfarlane and Gourlay are correct that we must alert to this narrative on all fronts: as teachers and as institutions and as students, for numerous reasons. One danger of course, is that smart students understand this narrative and therefore consciously but perhaps more insidiously unconsciously perform this narrative for teachers. I think the conscious and strategic playing of this part is less of a danger—for those wanting to game the system there will always be a way (hello, ChatGTP!).

Subconsciously, there are more dangers to be alert to. Emotionally, a narrative of growth and transformation is extremely gratifying for all parties involved. Students need to feel that they have “grown” through all of this expenditure of effort. Teachers need to feel that they have been rewarded for all of their labor. Institutions need students to feel “satisfied” and that they have received good “value” for their money. So it is a narrative that can leave everyone feelings positive. 

But there are problems here. How can we be sure that there is genuine and long-lasting enquiry? Must all learning and growth be “transformative”? Can’t it just be, well, work? Practical? Mundane? Must it form to a Judeo-Christian paradigm of guilt, sin, and redemption? Also, most problematically, does it not re-inscribe the teacher as the figure of authority, knowledge, and power? The judge, the scholar, and the priest-function? Does this not cycle of ego-gratification, of “transforming students” not become a form of addiction, the emotional measure of assessment for success? Of having another conform to your priorities, your values, your vision?

AND YET. Education needs to be emotional. To be inspiring. To be challenging. To have triumphs and setbacks. Is this not the content of what we teach in the arts, the very content of our pedagogy? So how could our content not inform our methods?

I think the best we can hope for as teachers is a self-reflexivity, a self-monitoring, and self-questioning to our own behaviors and patterns and preferences. To make sure we are not just rewarding those who espouse our values, but instead insist that we see self-criticality in other narratives than “overcoming challenges” or “seeing the light”; that sometimes learning can be practical, slow and steady and banal, maybe even easy. While still allowing that for some students, it can also be transformative.