Paper short abstract:

This text discusses the performative dimension of educational practice. It departs from the supposition that teaching taken as performance can create a qualitatively distinct room for knowledge, creative, for the germination of meanings, since aesthetic.

Paper long abstract:

Is teaching a performance? What meanings of performance could be attributed to pedagogical and educational practices? Does teaching refer to a cultural or to an artistic performance? Does performance predict a form of pedagogy? These and other questions constitute the motto of an ethnographical and philosophical investigation on the potentialities of performance in education - specially in the pedagogical practice. Indeed, this research does not deal only with verifying the performative configurations of education, but rather with starting a discussion on the dimensions of the experience triggered by it. As we can see, performance irradiates reflectivity, its critical dimension asks for the consistence of experience itself, of particular experiences that are re-dimensioned and generalizable; performance certainly constitutes a territory for the magnetization and reflection of meanings, given (by sensation) and produced (by culture); it creatively reshapes spaces, times, and identities. It is decidedly in this chain of experience and thought that is established a realm in which experience takes shape. This realm is the aesthetic one. By taking shelter in experience, performance is directed to the materialization of its expression, of what can be understood that performance reintegrates to meaning (produced) its original sense (given). Furthermore, this study is oriented, on the one hand, by contributions from Performance Studies, specially by Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, and on the other hand, by speculations around the performative pedagogy of Charles Garoian, Elyse Pineau, and Bryant Alexander.