The Theatricality of Pedagogy : An Exploration of the Open and Hidden Connections between Theatre and Pedagogy

‘Pedagogy’ is about schools and teaching techniques, isn’t it? Our book dispels this mistaken myth! Liberating pedagogy from the stifling prison of the school institution, we show that the pedagogical is not only closer to the theatre than to the school – but perhaps best understood as a ritual and cultural performance. Transcending the four walls of the classrooms and taking the reader on a journey to the cinema, the theatre, the comedy club, the fashion catwalk and the theatre of everyday life, we show that pedagogy – like the theatre performance – is an aesthetic and temporal construction. Pedagogy is what plays a student in the temporal rhythms set by its cultural form’s spatial elements between the pedagogue’s gesture of curation and the student’s engagement with what is presented to their intellect and senses. As such, pedagogical inquiry, as we present it in this book, is a practical philosophy of education - concerned with how and why certain cultural activities and artefacts relate their ‘students’ to certain ‘knowledge(s)’ in the way they do (e.g. through telling jokes, clothing, gestic acting or haptic performances).