City Research Online

Abstract

This research is about what it feels like to do care as a teacher. Coming from the perspective of a teacher and artist, it proposes an intimately artistic way to examine the nuanced experience of performing care in teaching. It does so through the medium of a performance framework, through performance art and participatory performance. This framework allows a novel perspective of the experience of care as this is practised by the teacher towards her students, as performance that resembles artistic, aesthetic making. Starting from the personal, the project responds more broadly to the context of teachers’ burnout and stress epidemic and suggests performance as an effective, yet unacknowledged way towards understanding the importance of the teaching/caring experience.

The research uses a mixed methodology of performance practice and participatory, applied performance with autoethnography. It also draws on a period of ethnography doing observations and interviews with teachers at diverse school settings. This ethnographic strand of the project nurtured and developed a practice of designing participatory/applied performance workshops with teachers at the schools. In doing so, the research extends its perspective into identifying analogies between caring in teaching and the experience of designing caring participatory experiences as an artist-researcher. The methodology ultimately demonstrates what a caring ethos of doing research may look like, spanning all stages of conducting and writing about research, and what it feels like to be a caring researcher.

Care in this project speaks in the technical elements of performance, in time, space and body. The project suggests that care is a performance, an event and lived experience with temporal and spatial signification, which stretches however, the teaching subjectivity beyond the here and now. It argues for care as an experience nuanced and ambivalent in its temporality, between performing memory, becoming memory for students, and tenderly preserving the memory of past students, while envisioning and hoping for their future. Analogies and materialised metaphors of treating matter such as rock or paper with care explore the ambivalence of caring emotion in its embodiment, in its stillness or in its hardness. Considering therefore the psychoanalytic and political, feminised aspects of teaching, the project demonstrates how care in teaching is a complex experience which is often experienced by the teacher as a suspended form of care, a caring stillness, such as being a rock for their students. These textural and performative qualities propose a method of caring, poetic imagination for the understanding of the caring experience. They suggest that care provision is rooted in imaginative dreaming and should be interpreted and addressed as an embodied, artful practice with the demands of an artistic practice. The project ultimately argues that this aesthetic appreciation of care can nurture and support the caring experience of the teacher in the space of performance and participatory performance.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	N Fine Arts N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
Departments:	Doctoral Theses

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