Performance pedagogies for African American literature: Teaching Shange at Ole Miss

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2002 by Ethel Young-Minor

Second, performance opens a space for students who are shy to share. Many of our more popular student athletes are wary of speaking in class because they are afraid of how negative comments may hinder them professionally. They do not want their comments about race or racism to appear in school newspapers or to circulate within the student body. While this fear may seem unfounded, athletes are not alone in their concerns. Many other students have diverse thoughts, but are afraid to speak in front of others while they are still formulating ideas. They are afraid of being labeled racist, naive, or uninformed by peers. Allowing these cautious students to speak in performance and assume another's position helps them become comfortable participating in class conversations. When students know that audiences cannot ascribe the ideas they express to them as individuals, the cost of speech is not as high and they speak with more ease.

CONCLUSIONS

What began as an exercise to overcome a specific problem in a specific context turned into a pedagogical tool that I believe can be useful in interdisciplinary courses and in multiple contexts. As student demographics and curricula become more diverse, many teachers will wrestle with new teaching strategies to meet student needs. Regardless of our areas of expertise, all educators are responsible for taking control of classroom environments. We all attempt to teach students how they can use the knowledge claims of our fields beyond the walls of our classrooms. Laura Bates captures our interdisciplinary similarities in her assertion that, a good teacher... is by turns a playwright, actor, director, and audience--continually shifting 31 roles in response to a continuously shifting class dynamic" (122). When we as teachers begin sharing our own performances, we prepare a way for more effective student performances in our areas of expertise.

Performing alternate ideas helps students to develop clearer understandings of how ideology operates; they learn to suspend their own ideas long enough to speak to--and listen to--diverse knowledge claims. When students are able to speak from both real and imaginary identities they are better prepared to put opposing thoughts into conversation with one another. I strongly believe that educators in the twenty-first century must confront increasingly diverse classrooms not only by shifting what we discuss in the classroom, but by also shifting how we approach teaching and classroom practices. By consciously performing our own knowledges, and encouraging student performances of their knowledges, teachers equip students to get the cultural narratives at work in classroom texts and in communal contexts.

WORKS CITED

Bates, Laura. "Commentary: Theatre as Teaching Metaphor." College Teaching 46 (1998): 122.

Gaines, Ernest. A Gathering of Old Men. 1983. New York Vintage, 1984.

Hill-Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 1990.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York Routledge, 1994.