Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight into these methods, the “teaching as performance” metaphor must be modified: Teaching is improvisational performance. Conceiving of teaching as improvisation highlights the collaborative and emergent nature of effective classroom practice, helps us to understand how curriculum materials relate to classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art.

Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation

How To Do Things With Words.

The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance@@@Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance

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The Arts and Australian education: Realising potential

In this paper we provide an overview of the characteristics of major educational research paradigms shaping contemporary educational research, ranging from the traditional positivist perspective to the latest multi-paradigmatic worldview. Our purpose is to orient students, faculty and beginning researchers to the newer paradigms that enable researchers to undertake uniquely powerful and insightful inquiries that contribute to transforming the landscape of education.

Educational research paradigms: From positivism to multiparadigmatic

Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences

This paper articulates the findings of a two-year Canadian federally-funded postdoctoral study — Poetic inquiry in qualitative research: A critical survey — on the use of poetry in social science q...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/irqr.2009.1.4.541

“Poem Is What?” Poetic Inquiry in Qualitative Social Science Research

Creating found poetry from theoretical literature offers an arts-based approach to literature review in inquiry. Found poetry has a long history of practice in poetry as the imaginative appropriation and reconstruction of already-existing texts. This article presents literature-voiced research found poems that express distillations and crystallizations of a wide range of writing in contemporary continental philosophy and performance theory. The suite of poems forms part of a current dissertation inquiry in the form of a curriculum theory of audience in performance and education.

Found Poetry as Literature Review: Research Poems on Audience and Performance

"Applied Theatre" is the first study to assist practitioners and students to develop critical frameworks for planning and implementing their own theatrical projects. This reader-friendly text considers an international range of case studies through discussion questions, practical activities and detailed analysis of theatre projects globally. Saxton and Prendergast provide a historical and theoretical overview of practical theatre and conclude each case study with useful suggestions for hands-on activities and additional readings. Case studies cover a wide range of disciplines from theatre studies to education, medicine and law. The book encourages students and practitioners to acquire a deeper, more concrete understanding of applied theatre.

Applied theatre : international case studies and challenges for practice

This study offers an arts-based a/r/tographic inquiry using poetic transcription and representation of interviews conducted with a co-educational group of 14 students in a West Vancouver, British Columbia secondary school rhythm and blues band class. The decision to translate and analyse the interview transcripts into the Japanese poetry form of haiku is rooted in research literature in education and other fields, primarily health and nursing studies. Those studies demonstrate the efficacy of the highly condensed haiku to transmit meaning in a synthesised and creative form. While music education has a body of scholarship on students’ attitudes towards music and their music education, this kind of research has generally been presented in more traditional ways. Our contention here is that arts-based topics are complemented and illuminated when investigated through arts-based methods. As well, arts-based methods such as a/r/tography, offer multiple and complex perspectives of what the data ‘means’, thereby o...

Monica Prendergast

Papers

Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences

“Poem Is What?” Poetic Inquiry in Qualitative Social Science Research

Found Poetry as Literature Review: Research Poems on Audience and Performance

Applied theatre : international case studies and challenges for practice

A haiku suite: the importance of music making in the lives of secondary school students