The Performing Knowledge Project, where performance and education meet, seeks to advance our understanding of the relationship between what we do and what we know, between what we learn and how we use it. It seeks to address the art of performance and its relationship with the learning process by shaping unique theatrical experiences that have both performative value and educational relevance.
Education is much discussed in today’s media and culture. The standardized test has become the barometer upon which we base our understanding of the pedagogies we use. Performing Knowledge asserts the falacy of that regime. In fact, an educational regime that emphasizes the standardized bubble-test will do nothing to advance educational culture in this country, nor in the mind and spirit of young and old alike.
Why? Because the bubble-test does not evaluate a person’s mind, a person’s creativity, a person’s skills, or a person’s understanding of the world. It evaluates a person’s ability to memorize a set of discrete facts and figures and then to select the correct fact and figure from an abstract list.
True education deals, however, directly with the world. It relates our humanity to the world in which we live. It provides people with the tools necessary to perform in that world in the widest, most diverse ways possible. Bringing that notion of performance into the educational sphere is what The Performing Knowledge Project is all about.
The Performing Knowledge Project operates in diverse ways and on a number of levels.
- It offers workshops to educational institutions on the art of teaching as a performing art. The concept of a performing art covers everything from the creation of the script, as in both the course taught and the lesson plans delivered, to the presentation of that script to an audience, i.e., the students.
- It offers workshops to students on the art of performing or exhibiting knowledge to others. These workshops cover everything from the organization of knowledge into a meaningful and effective presentation to the techniques of synthesizing visual-support materials with logical and emotional arguments.
- It offers workshop on the art of poetry, using the concept of performance as a guiding tool to both the creation of a poem and to its revision.
- It offers the public performances that synthesize the art of theatre with the art of exhibition, challenging those audiences with a different kind of performance, a performance that is both stimulative and intellectual.
Tags: education, essential, exhibition, gardner, knowledge, Performances, performing, reform, skills
The Comment: Michael Oliver