Action is a highly theorised aspect of social life. Nonetheless, it remains a relatively neglected source of data within educational research. This article attempts to highlight the signi cance of the analysis of organised action within educational research. It describes and demonstrates an analytical approach to action applicable to the classroom developed from approaches to the analysis of bodily communication and action in drama education and from new approaches to rhetoric. These approaches draw on social semiotic theories of making meaning in order to describe the complex relationship between the semiotics of social action and the situated experience of learning in the classroom. This article describes how action realises meanings and shapes classroom interaction through the application of the schema to video data from a science lesson on energy with Year 9 pupils (14 years old). Finally, it draws attention to the research and pedagogical implications of a focus on action in the science classroom and in education more generally.
What are possible overlaps between arts practice and school pedagogy? How is teacher subjectivity and pedagogy affected when teachers are inducted and engage with arts practice, in particular, theatre practices? We draw on research conducted into the Learning Performance Network (LPN), a project that involved school teachers working with The Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Warwick. The aim of the commissioned research was to look at the effects on teacher development, particularly focusing on the active rehearsal room pedagogic techniques and ensemble methods of exploring Shakespearean text and performance teachers were introduced. The practices of working as an ensemble through rehearsal room pedagogy were central to the LPN. Our interest is in looking for possible shifts in teachers' subjectivity, their self-perception, through the process of the project. What affordances, limitations, accommodations and tensions are experienced by the teachers in transposing work from the rehearsal room to the classroom? To explain and understand the facilitations or limitations in teachers' practice, we draw on a range of cultural theories that provide different but complementary perspectives on aspects of subjectivity that include Vygotskian approaches to the psychology of art and acting, Raymond Williams's work on the dramatized society and Jacques Rancière's work on spectatorship and pedagogy. Data in the form of excerpts from field notes, taken in an introductory workshop in which teachers worked with theatre practitioners, and from transcribed interviews with participants in the project are used to provide evidence for a theoretical exploration of shifts in perspective, self-perception and pedagogic practice.
The three authors have, between them, extensive experience of teaching English, Drama and Media, as well as teaching teachers in these fields. The article explores the implications of the apparently straightforward proposition that these three related domains, whose histories are so closely entangled, should enjoy parity. The proposition is explored with reference to the historical constitution of these elements of what we currently know as ‘English’; and to three vignettes illustrating work in schools which productively confuses the three domains.
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