Chapter 6: Critical Performative Pedagogy: A Feasible Praxis for Teacher Education

As multicultural educators committed to social justice, we believe that the collaborative and contextualized use of performance in teacher education courses can help students and teachers connect more deeply to issues of systemic and local oppression. In developing our praxis of a critical performative pedagogy (CPP), we have drawn from Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed (Boal, 1974) and from the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education (Greene, 2001). In an interdisciplinary way, the performance elements of CPP interweave with critical analyses of texts, works of art, and multimedia to deepen students’ understanding of the politics of representation, the social construction of race, class, and gender and the interconnections between micro- and macro-level power relations.