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Performative Pedagogies: Religion and Ecology, Wilderness Spirituality - Fluid and Flexible Practices of Attention PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

Performative teaching and learning provides opportunities to bushwhack, not an extreme sport. It is possible in “Research I, Highly Productive” schools like Emory University and in smaller liberal arts colleges. Engaging practices of somatic attention and contemplative reflective analysis requires a teacher standpoint of flexibility via interdependence with students and ordinary life. Some of us effectively use these pedagogies in smaller doses; they need not drive a whole class. Performance and practice may seem to be very fluid pedagogical categories, but in fact they offer an evolutionary framework that help our students to recognize where they are, to slow down, to focus, and to think what they are doing, to quote Hannah Arendt. 

I have also experimented with these performative pedagogies in our “Religion Internship” course. Serving in social service organizations throughout Atlanta, students practiced challenging their quick cognitive assumptions by paying more attention to the embodied and emotional dynamics of the living systems they collaborated with. We used several of the pedagogical approaches named above, including the structured portfolio. One senior biology student interning then with a mobile health unit and now practicing as a physician, wrote the following analytic entry sharing what performative learning offered her:

In an Intro to Bio course, you learn that certain genes, proteins, cells, etc., in our body are “turned on” or “turned off” at different points. They are either functioning/producing members of our system or they take up space. Later you learn that science is not that simple or straightforward but works along a spectrum of possibilities. But the boxes are hard to forget. Sometimes in the liberal arts, we desperately want to operate through such categories so we simplify individuals, institutions, and situations in order to better interact with them. Ms. Betty is 55 years old. She is homeless, mentally ill, most likely substance addicted. In simple scientific terms, she is “turned off,” she is a cell within the living social network that is no longer life sustaining; it is life draining. There are 20,000 people in Atlanta in that box. They have stories written on their bodies and emotions. The categorizing of medicine and science and the liberal arts may alleviate the symptoms of disease, but they won’t understand her pain. This touches on much more fundamental issues, our refusing to realize our connection within this world, as “cells” of sorts within a functioning, greater body. By seeing areas of this world as “other,” or in the “off” position, we destroy ourselves.

Resources

Bell, Catherine. “Performance,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998: 205–224.

Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: A Handbook of Classroom Practices. Northampton, MA: The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, 2008.

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Csordas, Thomas J. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2 (28 October 2009).

Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender and Vernacular Islam in South India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Jackson, Michael. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

O’Reilley, Mary Rose. Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice. Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook, 1998.

Zajonc, Arthur. “Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning through Contemplation.” Teachers College Record 108, no. 9 (2006): 1742–1759.

Syllabus - Religion and Ecology: Emory as Place Sustainability and Spiritual Practices - Patterson



 

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