Performance and the Classroom: Part 2—Community of Learners

The following excerpts of David’s upcoming book, Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach: Reflections on Education as Transformation through Dialogue (Summer, 2014), are used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.

You never know where ideas might come from to enhance the teaching-learning experience—a choir concert, a kindergarten teacher sharing her philosophy of child development, a grade school instructor excited about a new way to teach math, a middle school tutor for special education, a CEO talking about new structures of management.

I have learned from conversations with each of these people—as a kind of pedagogical pack rat who loves to store away new ideas, adapt them to my situation, and try them out when the time is ripe. And what an adventure it has been!

Another Kind of Performance

Unfortunately, not all classes lend themselves to the type of performance for an outside group that I mentioned in my previous post. I was able to repeat this class several times with performances. But there came a time when I taught this class at night with a larger group, and it was just not workable to have students do scenes from daily life.

I did, however, come up with another idea that worked just about as well. I asked students to prepare their first century areas of expertise in written form based on their study of many library sources. These were due in the middle of the course. I quickly edited all the offerings, organized them, had them reproduced, and placed them in a spiral binder. The names of all the contributors were on the front of the book. Before the course was over, each student received a copy of the book. But the key is this: They knew from the start that this book they produced would be used as a textbook the next time I taught “Daily Life in the Time of Jesus.”

Collaborative Peer Review

This process turned out also to be highly motivating. Their audience was not present at the time, but the audience would show up in the next class and see the work and the names of the students who preceded them. And when the next class saw the book and realized that they would be revising and expanding it and that their names would be added to the front cover of the new version of a textbook for the next class, they too were highly motivated to do the research and to get it right! One summer school class put together a terrific book on the Temple in Jerusalem. And, in all these cases, I got just the right textbook I wanted for my next class.

Community of Learners

I have used what I learned about “performance before an outside group” in several other classes, especially at seminary where I have experimented with students doing performances of biblical texts. I have also learned from the idea of a performance that one can do presentations/ performances to the inside group of the class and the professor in such a way that they too had meaning and were not experienced as artificial.

The key is to make it clear that other students and the professor were counting on learning from them as part of the teaching and learning in the course. I have incorporated this kind of presentation into many more of my classes than the one that lent itself so well to an external performance. In this way, everyone in the class—students and faculty—become both teachers and learners. We became a “community of learners.”

Photo Credit:  “personal journals” by Ingo Bernhardt, CC by 2.0.

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