Stealth Pedagogies: The Radical Value of Thinking with Performance

Performance in the Marketplace

As a theatre and performance studies lecturer at an Australian university, I was recently invited to speak at a local state high school on the topic of skills-building for lifelong careers. The invitation was welcome, but largely unexpected. It is rare, although possibly becoming more commonplace, that theatre and performance studies pedagogues are recognized for the broader vocational value that their discipline can provide in the competitive marketplace of professionalization. The school had asked me to share with them approaches and perspectives that could support their Year 9 and 10 Elective “ACCORD” Program, which runs for Stage 5 high school students working in self-led research projects as a means to “develop students’ 21st Century skills in collaborative and critical thinking processes that promote creativity, communication, reflection and self-directed learning . . . [and to] develop student capacity . . . to become successful lifelong learners” (Sydney Secondary College Leichhardt). It was with genuine interest that I noted that the values and knowledges embedded in state curriculum for 15-year-olds are echoed in my (and most) Australian universities’ graduate capabilities.

At the local high school I found myself in a marketing mode, itself an organizational performance genre demanded by high-stakes tertiary sector competition for student enrollments and engagement with multiple levels of industry and community. I asked, “What is the value of the kind of embodied creativity that theatre and performance studies focalizes to the robot-centric futures that we are being told wait ahead?” To the audience of forty-odd teenagers, I drew on popular narratives that increasingly espouse the role of “creativity” and “soft skills” in twenty-first-century careers. I wanted to reclaim that discourse and position my discipline as central to its future. I cited the 2018 Linkedin’s “2018 Workplace Learning Report,” which found that “the rise of machine-led tasks makes it necessary for [workers] to do what machines can’t, which is to be adaptable, critical thinkers who can lead and communicate well” (Staples). I also drew on recent media commentaries that identify the rise of creativity in non-arts sectors and that see “value” in “how you can create experiences for clients . . . [which is] all about bringing artistry into the workplace so people can actually feel the data” (Eggleton).

While my approach might seem fickle, I was flush with evidence that had shifted my own perspective when it had arrived in my inbox a year earlier. Our Graduate Careers Survey had produced some startling information from excelling honors students within the discipline, who, five years on from graduation, were in a position to share their career successes.¹ In Australian universities, the pathway from an undergraduate degree to a graduate research degree is usually via an honors program, although this is slowly changing. Theatre and performance studies at UNSW Australia offers graduate pathways at the honors and doctorate levels that encompass “traditional” approaches to scholarly research as well as creative-practice-as-research projects. One honors alumnus, whose creative practice had initially set her on a pathway to becoming one of Sydney’s leading performance artists, had chosen instead to become a primary school teacher. She told us that “[t]heatre helped me understand the concept of ‘voice.’ . . . When I find the right voice I find the strength and power to make things happen.” She added: “My specialty is teaching maths—so related to performance— using objects, working with others, organizing things in time and space.” Another honors graduate, who finished honors to commence a PhD in non-communicative mathematics, similarly noted the application of theatre-based methodologies to contexts far beyond: “Maths allows me to approach theatre more clinically and theatre allows me to approach maths more creatively, which makes me better at both. The ability to assess the most valuable material and present it convincingly are skills that I pull from theatre into maths.” And another, who is now a high school teacher in English, drama, and society and culture, explained how theatre studies facilitated his pedagogical reflexivity: “Teaching allowed me to be the actor I always wanted to be. . . . I often think...