‘Teaching As An Embodied Performance’
A talk about Pedagogy to Engineering Doctoral Students of the University of Sheffield
Antonios Ktenidis was invited by Eleni Routoula, a doctoral researcher from the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, to give a talk about inclusive pedagogy to doctoral researchers of the Faculty of Engineering, who work as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) for the Diamond facility and are involved in various forms of teaching, such as assisting or leading tutorials, lab demonstrations and lectures. This talk was organised by Claire Dempster, Graduate Training Contract (GTC) Administration Officer in the Central Services of Faculty of Engineering.
Antonios’ most important pedagogical principle, which he intended to share with and invite the tutors to reflect on, is well captured in the words of the Brazilian pedagogue, Freire (1970: 19): ‘All education is political; teaching is never a neutral act’. This principle applies to any form of teaching and pedagogical relationship, even to those that they might seem (politically) neutral, such as a lab demonstration. Moreover, Antonios provoked the GTAs to think of theirs (as teachers) and their students’ bodies as ‘the elephant in the room’, meaning that while we all ‘bring’ our material bodies and our different embodied identities (sex, gender, dis/ability, ethnicity, class) in the classroom, there is a form of tacit consent that we should remain silent about them, as if bodies must fade into the background for the ‘real’ learning to take place. However, critical pedagogues, such as hooks (1994) and McLaren (1988), and performance studies scholars, including Warren (1991) and Pineau (1994), -just to name a few of them- have discussed how those who embody the ‘normative’ teacher and student e.g. White, heterosexual, abled-bodied/minded, middle class, can ‘pass’ without being ‘interrogated’ and how those who are rendered ‘excessive’, such as, dis/abled bodies, queer bodies, racialised bodies, are ‘policed’ and seen as ‘lesser’. As hooks (1994: 136–137) argues,
‘Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalised space.’
At the end of the talk, Antonios asked the attendees to provide him with feedback, either in person or via email. Eleni shared that GTAs found the talk very interesting and useful, with direct application towards improvement of their teaching practice. She also shared her personal opinion on the talk, this being the raise of awareness of the importance of the body image, both teacher’s and student’s, during teaching. She also found quite interesting the inclusive approach of –not only the visible– disabilities during development of teaching material and teaching practice. It is worth mentioning that the attendees were all “in-house” trained GTAs, coming from different cultural and educational backgrounds, and some of them acknowledged that their teaching practice was influenced by their experiences, as Antonios pointed out during his talk.
Short Bio:
Antonios Ktenidis is an ESRC funded doctoral researcher at the School of Education, University of Sheffield, supervised by Prof Dan Goodley and Dr Kirsty Liddiard. He has a teaching background (BEd and MA in Sociology of Education, awarded with a Distinction) and has worked in various teaching roles in primary schools and in Higher Education. His thesis focuses on the stories of young people with Restricted Growth of their secondary education in the United Kingdom and draws on Critical Disability Studies in Education and Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies to make sense of them. He further looks into the biopolitics of growth and the biopedagogies of height(ism) and dis/ableism in schools.
You can follow Antonios on Twitter (@AntonisKtenidis) to keep up to date with his academic activities.
You can follow Eleni on Twitter (@ro_leni) or Instagram (@curleni) to keep up to date with her science communication and outreach activities.
