Engaging in Performance Ethnography in Research Methods Courses

Methodological Perspective

A performative text, and performance ethnography more generally, is a staged re-telling and/or re-embodying of “ethnographically derived notes” and/or data (Alexander, 2005, p. 411). There has been an historical precedent of participatory performances serving to invite others to embody, voice, and imagine divergent experiences and perspectives (Conquergood, 1985). From community spaces (Gabriel & Lester, 2013b) to Broadway (Ensler, 2001) to prisons (Winn, 2010), performative texts have been used to examine issues of power and justice, and illustrate how to elicit political engagement from the populace. In many of these performances, research findings that have traditionally been bound to “live” forever in the confines of a paper-based journal, find their way in to classrooms, stages, and/or streets. What was once only shared with a small group of academics is potentially shared more broadly through performance.

In this way, performance can open up academic findings to a wider audience (Vannini, 2012), and also be used to engage particular audiences—including specific stakeholders who may themselves participate in the performance. For example, in our own work, we have engaged pre-service teachers and psychologists in performing a performance ethnography based on data from a qualitative study with individuals involved in special education meetings for children in U.S.-based schools (Lester & Gabriel, 2012). This performance offers a compliment or alternative to the traditional ways of introducing educators to the process of special education meetings, which often involve role-play and case studies (Lester & Gabriel, 2012). Rather than learning about special education meetings as a set of procedures and forms to be filled out, with role-playing used to reinscribe taken-for-granted assumptions about the positions and meanings created therein, the performative text invites students to revoice the words of participants and construct personal, critical responses about the routinized practices central to special education meetings. In this way, we use engagement with performative texts to point to alternative ways of imagining what is too often taken for granted or assumed to be immutable, while explicitly calling for cultural and social critique and a re-imagining of alternative possibilities (Denzin, 2003).

Denzin (2003) stated that “performance approaches to knowing insist on immediacy and involvement” (p. 8), and therefore performative texts serve to push against analytical distance and detachment from the research and the stories being told. More specifically, performance in research methods and education courses often surfaces several important questions, including (a) Who is research for and how might performance shape who engages with research findings?; (b) How might performance reshape who research is designed to serve?; (c) As researchers, how can we draw on art-based traditions to disseminate research findings in ways that engage society at large?; and, more generally; (d) What is the place of arts-based research in the academy? Inserting specific discussions of performance theory in qualitative research and arts-based methods, as well as performative opportunities, allows students to reflect on how arts-based approaches shape experience, enlarge understanding, provide a sense of particularity that abstractions (often) cannot render, and generate “productive ambiguity (since) the material presented is more evocative than denotative, and in its evocation, it generates insight and invite attention to complexity” (Eisner, 1997, p. 8). Eisner also noted that arts-based approaches “increase the variety of questions that we can ask . . . and allow us to exploit individual aptitudes” (p. 8).

Recognizing the value of introducing students to arts-based approaches to qualitative research, how might we go about doing this? How do we illustrate the ways in which a performative text in particular can enlarge understanding and potentially serve as a democratic, pedagogical tool? In the following section, we address these questions by sharing how we have gone about integrating performative texts into our classes. We discuss the “steps” we have taken, recognizing that this process should be conceived of flexibly and adapted for a particular context.

Introducing and Doing Performative Research in the Classroom

Including performative texts in courses related to qualitative research, and research methods generally, is a multifaceted process. In fact, we argue that learning about performance and performative texts involves engagement as a participant, observer, and creator. In keeping with the focus on participatory methods, the experience of performing (reading and reenacting), as well as observing performances of such texts, not only informs students’ understandings of the content within specific texts, but also the processes and potential of the medium for representing and disseminating research. Thus, when planning to include performative texts in our graduate research courses, we create space for four distinct components in the course plan, which typically take between 1 and 2 weeks of course time (i.e., 3-6 hr of class time).

First, we invite students to engage with a sample performative text as readers, often outside of class, to familiarize themselves with the content and structure of the text (see, for instance, Gabriel & Lester, 2013b). We have found based on observation and student feedback that this pre-performance read-through is preferred to a cold reading or re-performing in class both because it offers multiple exposures to the content and medium in different settings, and because it allows students to build an understanding of the text in layers. For instance, as with poetry, they may read the performative text once on their own to get the gist and then build on this layer of understanding later, thereby attending to different aspects of the text (structure, nuance, style, voice) when they engage with the text again in class. Previewing the text outside of class also assuages anxieties about cold reading aloud in class, while also giving students a preview of the character or persona they may take on when we ask students to embody and perform the text they have read. If students are still reticent to read aloud, we invite a single reader to read more than one part, or do so ourselves, as we have learned that for some students observing a performative reading is as meaningful as participating in the reading itself. Simultaneous to this activity, we ask students to engage in readings around performance theory, playbuilding as qualitative research, and performance ethnography (e.g., Alexander, 2005; Conquergood, 1985; Denzin, 2003; Gabriel & Lester, 2013b; Norris, 2009; Saldaña, 2005).

Second, we stage a performance of the text in class or in another context. This performance typically takes place in the research methods class itself, a community setting, and/or a graduate course other than one in research methods—including courses in teacher education, principal preparation, and within a variety of graduate-level seminars. In keeping with Denzin’s (2003) suggestion, we focus on (re)embodying the text, rather than on production elements (sets, props, costumes), as we believe the focus of performative texts and participatory performances is the data, not necessarily the pageantry associated with its display. Furthermore, the notion that anyone at anytime can take up these research findings, as represented in a performative text, and perform them underscores the potential to use performative texts across varied settings with diverse participants. It also demonstrates that such performances require minimal resources or materials for production: The main resources are the participants themselves and their willingness to engage in varied ways. As such, during the class meeting, we invite students to participate by reading for a role or character, with their participation positioned as voluntary. For instance, Excerpt 1 below, which comes from a text focused on the process of being labeled dis/abled, involves three speakers:

Others may play non-speaking parts or serve as observers, though we invite as many students to participate as possible. For some courses, this may involve rotating parts, splitting into groups, or re-performing scenes as needed. For instance, Excerpt 2 below involves five speaking parts, but more than five people may be involved, holding places for characters who speak in different scenes but are still present in this scene (a school psychologist, a director, a teacher educator, a teacher, a student, and two sign language interpreters).

In some class settings, we assign these parts (speaking and non-speaking) and position people in the space so that they can consider the perspectives of those who are not speaking in a given scene. In larger groups, we divide students into different casts, assigning just enough parts so that all lines are read and allowing people to play multiple parts.

Third, we reserve time for reflection and response to the performance though a range of modalities. Within the classroom or other spaces where the performance takes place, we provide art materials, ample space, and a forum for live discussion so that students can respond to the performance by drawing, dancing, speaking, writing, and/or through other modalities of their choice (see Gabriel & Lester, 2013a, for examples of some of these responses). The opportunity to respond in multiple modalities both reflects our commitment to varied, embodied ways of knowing and communicating, and serves (for some) as a conduit for ideas and feelings evoked by the performance that they may not yet be ready to verbalize in a public setting. At a later time, we have students reflect on the value of inviting others to respond through multiple modalities: in conversation, writing, video, or visual formats.

When facilitating the post-performance discussion, we focus on unpacking the implications of the text and the storied lives represented within it. We also encourage students to discuss their own experiences reading, performing, and/or observing the performance of the text. Thus, the initial focus is on the content or subject of the performative text—the research findings, research participants’ voices, and everyday lives re-embodied. Here, we aim to highlight “how people enact cultural meanings in their daily lives,” and recognize how these meanings, discourses, and “performances shape experiences of injustice, prejudice, and stereotyping” (Denzin, 2003, p. xi). Through this, we seek to highlight the potential of performative texts to spark discussion, paint alternatives, interrupt the taken-for-granted, point to more just practices, and/or evoke participants to reconsider previously unquestioned truths. Questions we often ask in relation to the performative text around the process of being labeled dis/abled, for instance, include (Lester & Gabriel, 2013, p. 92),

We then move to a metacognitive discussion of the experience itself, encouraging students to reflect and comment on the experience of being a reader and/or observer of the performative reading, as well as noting the methodological and theoretical implications of their experiences and subsequent questions. Questions we commonly ask include the following:

Beyond a single class meeting, we also invite students to continue to share any additional responses outside of class. We have found that many students need time to gather their thoughts, make sense of what continues to resonate with them, and respond with some distance from the performative experience. In the following meeting, we often work to connect their responses, in their various forms, to readings on the theories and methodologies of performative approaches, so that students can connect their lived experiences with performative texts to the theoretical underpinnings of the approach.

Last, in some of our classes and in workshops on methods, we invite students and other participants to engage with the process of constructing a performative text, drawing on data sources that they have already collected within the context of their own qualitative research studies. We then encourage them to work with their own data to represent findings as performative in one of several possible ways (e.g., spoken word, ethnopoetics, ethnodrama). We often practice moving from data to performance together, using a shared data set so that we can construct a text and try it out together, while noting how the live reading of a text informs our choices about its construction. For example, though large swaths of raw data may be interesting and important to the researcher, the performance of long monologues may or may not fit the researcher’s vision of the representation of these data. Students may thus decide to break up a longer speech, create a conversation within the data, and/or add something dynamic (music, visual display, staging) to the background.

The excerpts included above show the result of decisions related to the representation of data in the performance. First, data from the special educators we interviewed were combined and voiced by a composite character—in this case marked by a made-up name (Mrs. Care N. Paperwork). Similarly, the lines spoken by Katrina, were taken from a long quote from one of our interviews, and represented as being broken up by questions from the directors and input from other participants to place her longer remark in context and in conversation within the play. When it comes to decisions about representation, some students may chose to focus on playbuilding, drawing on the work of Norris (2009), or draw on the work of Conquergood (1985) as they craft the world of the play from the worlds presented in their data. Throughout this process, we have open discussions around the benefits and drawbacks of generating composite characters and narratives and the process of deciding when to move away from the actual words of participants.

Although for many students the process of writing extends far beyond the length of a few class meetings or a single workshop, we invite participants to hold informal readings of their performative texts as they develop them further. Throughout this process, we remind students that we too commit to learning participatory approaches to research by doing them—interacting with performative texts in multiple ways and in multiple settings to explicate and apply the theories and method(s) that support such work.

Conclusions

Across the spaces in which we engage in performative work, we have begun to notice patterns in student responses that fuel our continued work in this area. First, it continually strikes us how direct engagement with performative texts links to the emotional, with students moving to laughter, tears, and anger during and after their engagement in ways we do not typically associate with the reading of traditionally presented findings in journal articles or even the engagement with other forms of qualitative research. As students experience performance, they frequently talk about how only focusing on “addressing the gaps in the literature and contributing knowledge and information” risks ignoring or even fully missing “the emotional, the ethical, the moral, and the performative provocation that sharing narratives” offers (Chenail, 2010, p. 1288). Many times, then, this engagement with performance results in students orienting to the representation of participant voice in differing ways, questioning traditional methods of representation, and even influencing how they engage more generally with other qualitative methodologies.

The below quote from a student in a post-performance discussion illustrates how students often become sensitized to the ways that the lines in the script work to reframe taken-for-granted routines of schooling. After engaging with a performative text that centered on the assessment of reading proficiency in young children, a student remarked “ . . . it’s like taking that assembly line business model into schools and this line sort of sheds light on why that doesn’t work and how that’s wrong.” Beyond his own response to the text, the student demonstrated an awareness that a particular line in the text worked to “shed light” on what does not work, while doing so in accessible and familiar ways.

This direct connection and familiarity with data and storied lives may be related to the second pattern, in which students often use the performative—in part, or as a primary methodology—for their own analysis and dissemination of research. Although we expose students and other participants to a variety of qualitative methodologies, we are often struck by how often they take up and reproduce performative texts or arts-based approaches to qualitative research more generally. This includes use in small ways—such as the inclusion of dialogue or poetic representation in their writing—as well as in larger ways—such as seeking performance ethnographies to read/view as part of literature reviews, and engaging with performance ethnography as a methodology for their own work. We have come to view this and other participatory, performative methods as central to students’ development as researchers engaged in cultural and social critique, influencing their orientation and attention to data, emotion, audience, and format. Incorporating performance ethnography into our classrooms, therefore, is inextricably linked to our commitment to teaching qualitative research in a transgressive and potentially transformative way. We suggest that performance ethnography and arts-based approaches to qualitative research more generally provide an avenue for instructors of qualitative inquiry to engage in teaching that invites students to experience and interact with research practices that lead to grounded and meaningful cultural and social critiques.