1. Yearning to Perform: Playwriting, Process, and Performance as Ways of Knowing by BETSY FERRER Betsy Ferrer is a fifth year PhD student in Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her previous degrees are in Anthropology and Sociology (B.A. University of Notre Dame), Social Science (M.A. University of Chicago), Education (M.Ed. University of Notre Dame), and Educational Administration (M.A. University of Notre Dame). Betsy taught middle and high school English for eight years and has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in English methods and supervised intern teachers at MSU. During her time at MSU Betsy has used drama with pre-service teachers at MSU and has taught playwriting and performance to young artists in a non-formal school in Kisumu, Kenya. Betsy’s research focuses on how youth in Western Kenya use visual and performing art to pursue economic, political, and social legitimacy.

Prologue: Yearning to Perform Setting: A darkened theatre. A full audience falls silent as the curtains open to students in period costume on a stage populated by cardboard castles and a Paper Mache forest. I sit in the audience as I’ve done for six years. Waiting. Watching. This time, however, I am not only a teacher. I have become a researcher, and I wonder how to represent what has happened here – not just the performance on this stage but the process of learning that led us here. My first attempt at representing student learning looked something like this:

(Quantitative) Because this study used a within subjects pre-and posttest design, I ran a t-test to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the two tests. The t-test showed a statistically significant difference between the test scores at Time 1 (M = 73.9, SD = 18.3) compared to Time 2 (M = 82.8, SD = 16.4), t(28) = 6.66, p < .01. Therefore, the data indicated that the performance of Twelfth Night did deepen student comprehension as measured by the teacher created assessment.

(Qualitative) The open responses further bolstered these findings. The entire array of coded themes included: future interest (in acting), comprehension, enjoyment, future interest (reading), difficulty, self-confidence, community, and new skills. To create codes, I counted a response of each item as one, even if the student referenced the same theme more than once on the survey responses. The etic code of comprehension (understanding) had a frequency of 23 out of 26 responses.

But this story, one based on a mixed method design, left me frustrated; I hoped the numbers would show academic gains and the student responses would show social and self-efficacy gains. These were, after all, some of the learning outcomes I hoped for as an English teacher who decided to have students perform Shakespeare’s plays as a required part of their English class. Indeed, the words and numbers told a story, but not the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell the story of how the frame of play allowed new opportunities for student engagement, how students who didn’t put much effort into a composition suddenly spent hours memorizing lines and designing sets, and how reluctant readers became actors. I wanted to find a way to represent not only the process of student learning but also the performance itself in a way that demonstrated the lived experience of the students and not just their test results and academic gains. And so I turned to performance ethnography, which makes use of performance as a tool for analysis and a representation of participants and their experiences. Here I argue that performance ethnography allowed me to rethink the conceptual tools I had for understanding student learning and to use new tools through playwriting in order to represent the process and product of student learning through drama. I chose to write this play because I was interested in whether this form of scholarship and representation would illuminate other kinds of learning outcomes, embodied and multi-vocal as they are, in ways that were more satisfying than my initial mixed methods design. As Robin Alexander (2001) notes, “Although the teaching-as-art claim is often made, it is less frequently pursued through to its implications for the analysis of teaching” (p. 275). What would it mean to use art as a tool to analyze teaching and learning? I hoped that performance

ethnography might be a scholarly venue for analyzing both my teaching and what my students learned and did in response.

As a teacher, I used three guiding principles with students: everybody plays, be evocative, and respect the word. Here, as researcher, I argue that the same three principles apply to the analysis of teaching and learning. In what follows, I use examples from the performance ethnography I wrote, Yearning To Let Slip the Yoke of Convention’s Keep, to demonstrate how these three principles work to create aesthetic scholarship and the potential of this scholarship to represent student engagement. I created the performance ethnography by coding the interview transcripts from two different groups of students: seniors in Tucson, Arizona and eighth graders in Bellevue, Washington and turning the interviews into lines of dialogue. Although I have altered the order to create the notion that students from both groups are speaking to each other, I have not altered their words. Each section includes an excerpt from my initial draft and from the revised final. The moves made from the initial draft to the final demonstrate the process of my own learning as I shifted from telling what my students learned to showing what they learned through performance.

Act One: Every Body Plays Initial Draft: STUDENT CHORUS:

There are some who dream in the waking hours

Of wishes born for want of better sport

Others must succumb to nighttime’s powers

Anxieties of the day soon distort

From their originals into shadows

Which all at once entice and terrify

Form just beyond reason suddenly goes

Light as air before one can quantify

For in the space betwixt wakefulness and sleep

Stands possibility on tiptoe yearning

To let slip the yoke of convention’s keep

And run unchecked with untold imaginings

Rude waking forces our true place to recall

And so wishing makes dreamers of us all

Lights fade to black

Act One Scene One: The Yoke

Lights come up on the stage. Betsy enters from stage right and moves to centerstage. Projected on the screen is an image of students in a classroom seated at desks reading. Some students have their heads down sleeping, others have a book in front of their face, others are engaged.

BETSY: When I ask my students to perform Shakespeare’s work, I ask them to incur significant risk: to risk their relative safe position as students who can hide behind the book, who can rely on others to answer the questions, who can sit quietly in the back of the room hoping their hesitant, halting reading will save them from having to read out loud.

Image shifts to students on stage

BETSY: I ask them to risk opening themselves up to the judgment of others publicly on a stage. To lay their emotions bare. To use their voices, their bodies, their expressions to breathe life into a character.

Revised Final:

The curtains open to a teacher standing in the front of the room with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in hand. Students are seated in neat, single rows. Some have their heads down, some slouch in their seats, some look up attentively. Students speak the words sluggishly without enthusiasm.

JENNIFER: Work

ALAN: Foreign

SALLY: No interest

GARY: Very foreign

TERESA: Overwhelming

KRISSY: So old

ROB: Forced

ANDREW: Timid

SAMANTHA: Incredibly long ago

BETSY: Today we are going to begin our unit on Shakespeare. Can someone tell me what you already know about Shakespeare?

Painful silence and blank stares

ROB: (tentatively, as if asking a question rather than answering) Shakespeare did a lot more than write plays?

BETSY: Have you read any of his plays before?

Several students shake their heads no

ROB: I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare.

ANDREW: I really have no interest in finding out what it's really all about.

ALAN: It seems so foreign to us.

KRISSY: It’s so old! It was written more than a hundred years ago.

BETSY: (pleadingly) But the plays were written to be performed! What if we acted out some scenes?

KATHY: Acting has never been something that comes naturally to me and it probably never will.

ANDREW: (nodding) I’m not the most confident person when it comes to standing up in front of a crowd of people.

SALLY: I have no interest in Shakespeare whatsoever.

BETSY: (to audience) There has to be a better way. I wonder what they think about when they stare at me dead eyed and apathetic…

Students move some of their desks to the side. Some students remain seated.

STUDENT CHORUS:1

SAMANTHA stands behind ALAN who is daydreaming

There are some who dream in the waking hours

Of wishes born for want of better sport

KRISSY stands behind KATHY working furiously on an assignment and looking stressed

Others must succumb to nighttime’s powers

KATHY drops her head in exhaustion

Anxieties of the day soon distort

From their originals into shadows

SAMANTA, KRISSY, and ANDREW surround KATHY with pencils and assessments

Which all at once entice and terrify

KATHY jerks awake, startled

Form just beyond reason suddenly goes

Students slink back

Light as air before one can quantify

For in that space betwixt wakefulness and sleep

Stands possibility on tiptoe yearning

Students get up from their desks and move together in excitement

To let slip the yoke of convention’s keep

And run unchecked with untold imaginings

Students start laughing and pull out books they are reading to share. Bell rings for the start of the next class. Students lose their smiles and enthusiasm and sink back into their desks.

Rude waking forces our true place to recall

And so wishing makes dreamers of us all

Students go back to daydreaming. Lights fade to black

Body These two scenes illustrate the first principle: every body plays.

In the first draft, I was still telling, not showing. Simply using the format of a play did not transform my data, just as performing a play with students does not automatically transform teaching. Instead of telling the audience what happened in my classroom, I needed to show them, moving from omniscient narrator to one-of-several actors. I took advantage of the conventions of the genre to convey the meaning behind the words. Showing also allowed me to go beyond the interview transcripts and to use my field notes to reenact events. In the first draft, the students collectively gave voice to the chorus, but they were disembodied voices with no action. I narrated their lack of interest from my perspective. In the final, I showed how students first responded (disinterested, seated, and passive) through their own words and hint at what might be possible through performance (interested, standing, and active). Although this was an important shift, the final still suffers from telling, and because the student lines were given as responses to interview questions more than a year after the actual event, they lack some of the naturalness of student speech.

Characters (and the students they represent) have a physical presence. Language is “inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily dispositions: it is the whole body which responds by its posture, but also by its inner reactions…Language is a body technique…a bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 86). Performance allows the audience to understand how students create meaning through language and action. Throughout the process of creating the performance, students did not only respond in writing to the words on the page but also engaged the text and demonstrated their

understanding through gestures, glances, and expressions. Analyzing these nonverbal responses in addition to students’ written and spoken reflections allowed me to have a sense of how students respond using their bodies as well as their minds.

Along with hexis, habitus represents dispositions that speakers acquire over a long period of time through formal experiences (i.e. school), as well as through social interaction (i.e. looks and gestures). Part of the power of these unconscious and socially determined dispositions lies in their ability to act on the speaker below the level of consciousness. As Bourdieu notes, “the factors which are most influential in the formation of the habitus are transmitted without passing through language and consciousness, but through suggestions inscribed in the most apparently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices of everyday life” (p. 51). Through these cues, people do not just learn what to say and do, but who they are and their place in the social world. Again, performance has the potential to make these cues explicit. In the first draft, I used the poem as a prologue. However, without stage direction and the physical motion of students, it did not convey habitus or hexis. In the revised version, I wanted to show how the simple ringing of a school bell to start class could cause students to shift from imaginary play to their “true place” as students. Students have internalized this role as sitting in a desk and providing the right answer.

Because performance requires both language and movement of bodies, writing this play heightened my awareness of hexis and habitus, both of which operate at an unconscious level. As the playwright/researcher, I attempted to bring what is typically unconscious into the conscious domain. This one of the central ways that drama heightens self-knowledge and collective consciousness.

Play The other vital aspect of every body plays is play itself. As

Mark Twain famously illustrated in the whitewashing scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” This literary witticism echoes my own experience with requiring students to perform Shakespeare plays as a part of English class. Just as Tom tricked his friends into viewing the work of whitewashing a fence as play, I used the element of play to convince my students to engage in the incredibly difficult work of performing and producing a play. In the final, the students note this tension between work and “fun,” which I highlight here as play. Rather than treating Shakespeare’s text as static, we played with it on stage and arrived at new interpretations as we tried out student generated ideas about blocking, accents, interpretations, and costumes. This element of play can be seen in this excerpt from the final:

KRISSY: I loved how we could take something that was written more than a hundred years ago

ALAN: that initially seemed foreign to us

KRISSY: and still perform it and understand it.

SAMANTHA: Everyone was able to visualize the scene so clearly because we had read the play and knew the integral portions of the script.

JENNIFER: Theater and literature go hand in hand

GARY: (looking around at the various scenes going on and props) I quickly learned that this whirlwind relates to real life.

KATHY: Performing got me to understand the deeper meanings and ideas.

KRISSY: What did I get out of doing the play? Well, first and foremost, it was

KRISSY, TERESA, and ALAN: (laughing) really fun!

SAMANTHA: (yells out excitedly) the fight scene between the four Athenians!!! (SAMANTHA, KATHY, ALAN, and ANDREW play fight on the stage)

JENNIFER: Granted it was a lot of work,

SAMANTHA: a single scene could often take hours to block,

JENNIFER: because the best way to learn about a certain time period, scene, mood is to see it

SAMANTHA: (nodding in agreement) thus, the depictions of the text were fresh and always entertaining.

TERESA: What I would say about Shakespeare is that doing the play was

KRISSY, TERESA, and ALAN: really fun!

TERESA: It gave people a chance to open up

ROB: to see people that wouldn’t normally be on stage (hands JENNIFER a hat)

TERESA: and do something

JENNIFER: (putting her hair up in the hat to play Sebastian) out of character

ALAN: (putting on a wig to play Starveling playing Thisby’s mother and speaking in a woman’s voice) in a voice that is far too high pitched to be mine

TERESA: they never thought to try before

JENNIFER: It was exciting and out of the ordinary

Although the students were obliged to participate, they had the freedom to play with their roles and this play led not only to new understandings of the text, but new understandings of themselves as they acted in ways that were “out of character” and “out of the ordinary.” The students’ recognition of this aligns with observations of social scientists such as Victor Turner who recognized the power of play to create a break in the normal social order opening space to consider new possibilities.

Thus Turner provides a framework for viewing all social life as performance. Turner (1982) posits that people in communities experience “social dramas” that have four phases: “breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism” (p. 69). These social dramas create a break that leads to reflection: “Since social dramas suspend normal everyday role playing, they interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its own behavior in relation to its own values, even to question at times the value of those values” (p. 92). In this context, drama disturbs the flow of school life. Performing caused some of the students to question the roles they typically played in school and in their social groups and to consider new roles through play. For an audience watching this unfold on stage, the performance heightens awareness of what they might otherwise take for granted, such as their own assumptions about middle and high school students, what should happen in school, and the roles students should or do occupy in a classroom.

Act Two: Be Evocative Initial Draft: DOUBT enters stage left and lingers slightly behind BETSY. Lights dim.

DOUBT: What if the students do not understand the play? What if you’re setting them up to fail? What if you’re further marginalizing students? What if this is more about you than them?

FEAR enters stage right and lingers slightly behind BETSY.

FEAR: What if you’re asking too much of the students? They have other difficult classes, jobs, family responsibilities, emotional scars, reading struggles. What if this project ends up merely creating stress and anxiety?

ANXIETY enters stage left and stands next to DOUBT.

ANXIETY: What if you end up undermining their confidence? What if they do trust you and believe that they can go out on stage but they freeze and forget their lines? What if they are embarrassed in front of their families and friends?

CONCERN enters stage right and stands next to FEAR.

CONCERN: What if no one shows up? What if we have done all of this work and perform to a nearly empty theater? What if we do have an audience, but they do not understand what we tried to do?

DOUBT, ANXIETY, BETSY, FEAR, AND CONCERN: (in unison, forcefully) What if?

(Pause.)

BETSY: But I am not left to combat these emotions alone. There are those who have gone before me whose stories lead me on.

INSPIRATION enters stage left holding the book Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire by Rafe Esquith.

INSPIRATION: What if you end up inspiring students to see the world and themselves in a new light? (Reads from text) “The students produce and perform an unabridged play by Shakespeare. This requires the kids to work harder than they have ever worked in their lives as well as a teacher who is willing to sacrifice thousands of hours of personal time…I have found no other project that allows me to teach the students everything I want them to learn in a single activity…They will analyze, dissect, tear down, and then build a play that will change their view of themselves and the world…The real reward is in the work itself” (Esquith, 2007, pp. 208-209).

ASSURANCE enters stage right holding a copy of the manifesto Stand Up for Shakespeare by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

ASSURANCE: What if students develop greater empathy and respect for each other’s talents? (Reads from the manifesto) “Many teachers were surprised and delighted at how using theatre-based approaches helped students to develop empathy for the characters in the plays and by extension for other people experiencing similar situations in the past and today…The teachers were similarly pleased to find the theatre-based approaches increased levels of cooperation amongst their students as they developed empathy for one another as well as the characters” (Irish, 2008).

BETSY: These emotions are my constant companions on this journey with my students. They keep me awake at night, and they give me the courage to show up the next day. I have made many mistakes. I have lost my temper with students who didn’t learn their lines. I have on occasion pushed too hard. I have neglected

some while focusing on others. But my task isn’t to be perfect. It is to be willing.

Image shifts to students in full costume in the midst of a scene

BETSY: The lights of the theater dim. I take my seat and my students take the stage. I sit with expectation lurking in the shadows, crouching under my seat, rising up from the aisles and escaping with my breath when I whisper each line as they perfectly deliver them on stage. All of the doubt, fear, anxiety, and concern still linger – they have formed a yoke that both binds us together and at times constrains our action – but in that first moment when the play begins, we give them the slip. And for those glorious moments on stage the students experience what I most desire for them – they are able to run unchecked with untold imaginings no longer constrained by circumstance, reality, or their own demons. We transform. We act. But don’t just take my word for it.

Revised Final: BETSY: And so, I cannot ask my students to risk without risking myself, without revealing Doubt, Fear, and Anxiety haunt my own waking hours.

Lights dim and focus just on BETSY. DOUBT dressed all in black peeks out of stage left, creeps on to the stage, and lingers slightly behind BETSY.

DOUBT: (whispering) The students don’t really understand the play. They’re just kids. Are you so sure that they can do this? Wouldn’t it just be easier to read it and move on? Show the movie. I know you’re tired…

BETSY tries to ignore DOUBT and work with the students. DOUBT motions to ANXIETY

ANXIETY dressed in gray steps out from stage right, looks around him nervously and then rushes out and tugs on BETSY’s sleeve.

ANXIETY: (jittery and mutters in rapid succession) Have you noticed the time? This is taking too long. You need to give a test. You need to cover the material. You aren’t preparing students for the future. Performance isn’t a standard. I’ll be waiting when you try to sleep…

FEAR dressed entirely in red storms in from stage right and directly addresses

BETSY demanding attention.

FEAR: (boldly) Look at these students!

BETSY looks around nervously

FEAR: See that one over there? (FEAR points to ANDREW) He is clearly terrified about getting on stage. That one? (FEAR points to TERESA) definitely overwhelmed. (hissing) You don’t have the experience or the training to pull this off, and they will be the ones who suffer for it. Do you really want to publicly embarrass them?

BETSY: (takes a step forward to address the audience) But I am not left to combat these demons alone. Those who have traversed this path before lead me on.

INSPIRATION dressed in white glides onstage from stage left

INSPIRATION: (hands BETSY the book Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire and puts his hand on her shoulder and reads soothingly) “The students produce and perform an unabridged play by Shakespeare. This requires the kids to work harder than they have ever worked in their lives as well as a teacher who is willing to sacrifice thousands of hours of personal time…(ANXIETY creeps closer, BETSY looks at ANXIETY, INSPIRATION turns her attention back to the book) I

have found no other project that allows me to teach the students everything I want them to learn in a single activity…They will analyze, dissect, tear down, and then build a play that will change their view of themselves and the world…The real reward is in the work itself” (Esquith, 2007, pp. 208-209).

ASSURANCE dressed in blue enters from stage right and upstages FEAR and ANXIETY

ASSURANCE: (reads comfortingly) “It was plain to their gifted teacher/director (FEAR scoffs, ASSURANCE smiles) that they were not in the least intimidated by the DWEM (Dead white European Male) who had written the play…there is something special about ‘talking’ to authors, now dead but still alive in their ancient texts – so long as the objective of the encounter is not worship but discourse and interpretation” (Bruner, 1996, pg. 62).

BETSY: These are my constant companions on this journey with my students. They (gestures to DOUBT, ANXIETY, and FEAR who look back menacingly) keep me awake at night, and they (gestures toward INSPIRATION and ASSURANCE who take BETSY’s hand) give me the courage to show up the next day. I have made many mistakes. I have lost my temper.

Pushed too hard.

Asked too much.

Slept too little.

But my task isn’t to be perfect. It is to be willing.

Full lights come up. INSPIRATION and ASSURANCE, DOUBT, FEAR, and ANXIETY move to the side of the stage and surround BETSY in a semi-circle as she takes a seat. Students act out Act I, Scene II of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

BETSY: The lights of the theater dim. I take my seat and my students take the stage.

ALAN: “Is all our company here?” (I.ii.1)

BETSY: I sit with my new companion, Expectation, lurking in the shadows, crouching under my seat, rising up from the aisles and escaping with my breath.

I whisper each line as they deliver them on stage. DOUBT, ANXIETY, and FEAR still linger – they have formed a yoke that both binds us together and at times constrains our action – but in that first moment when the play begins, we give them the slip

INSPIRATION and ASSURANCE lead DOUBT, ANXIETY, and FEAR offstage.

BETSY: And for those glorious moments the students experience what I most desire for them – they run unchecked with untold imaginings temporarily escaping their own fears.

We transform.

We act.

But don’t just take my word for it.

The most significant change from the first draft to the final revision is the ability to evoke. In the first draft, I described my own thoughts in words more appropriate for prose than conversation. The voices of doubt, fear, and anxiety all belonged to me. They all sounded like me. As Denzin (2003) notes, “A performance authorizes itself not through the citation of scholarly texts, but through its ability to evoke and invoke shared emotional experience and understanding between performer and audience” (p. 13). Because I was writing a play, I had to think about what

doubt, fear, and anxiety sound and look like as well as how they differ. I could write about feeling anxious, but creating a character required me to analyze those emotions more deeply in order to understand what was at work in my experience. This playwriting work impacts the analysis as well. In order to understand how to write doubt as a character, I had to analyze the elements of doubt that constrained my action. This process gives me insight as a researcher into how other teachers may feel constrained by doubt, fear, and anxiety as well as how these constraints might be overcome. Just as writing the performance ethnography allowed me to go deeper into my data, performing the ethnography allowed me to dialogue with scholars as well as classroom teachers, something that Tom Barone (2002) calls “audience blending” (p. 255). For Barone, performance ethnography represents an opportunity to broaden the audience from academics to practitioners in order to advance change in contrast to an isolationist view that “has diminished our own influence on public policy and classroom practice” (p. 264). Performing and dialoguing with audience members and scholars provide opportunities for external validity. In post performance discussions, teachers have recognized the familiar situation of facing apathetic students and the fear of engaging in risky and time consuming work. Scholars have connected with the tension between creating rigorous social science research and compelling drama. These conversations have further pushed my work and thinking.

Act Three: Respect the Word Initial Draft: The students are still seated in a semi-circle but BETSY and THE SCHOLARS have joined in.

BETSY: When I first decided to do a Shakespeare play with my students, I was not aware of critical pedagogy. I simply felt that it would be pointless to study Shakespeare without performing the plays, since they were written to be performed. I had no experience directing a play. I had no formal theatre training. Central to what I wanted to do though was to deeply engage and involve the students. I wanted it to be their play. I recognized that they possessed many skills that I lacked.

KINCHELOE: “Critical teachers come to know what and how students make meaning. This enables teachers to construct pedagogies that engage the impassioned spirit of students in ways that moves them to learn what they don’t know and to identify what they want to know” (2008, p. 20).

TERESA: What I remember most about the play is how it gave our class a great way to come together and all contribute to a project. We were the ones who basically produced the play, doing all of the advertising and photography and programs. I think this was a great way for everyone to feel like they had a part of the final product, even if they didn't get to or want to be onstage the whole time.

GARY: For me the performance that we did was unique due to the fact that I was an actor and a behind the scenes contributor.

SAMANTHA: Acting Shakespeare and acting in general is a valued gift many take for granted. It was a gift to share the knowledge we had gathered with others. Not only did we share a story with our parents, friends, siblings and teachers, but we also shared a passion.

TERESA: I know it sounds corny, but doing the play brought Shakespeare to life for me and has helped me to be more open to reading Shakespeare and other works that may seem very overwhelming.

FREIRE: “The students – no longer docile listeners” (1970, p. 81)

BETSY: are involved. Engaged. In charge and

FREIRE: “are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher…The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [or herself] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become

ALL: jointly responsible

FREIRE: for a process in which all grow” (pp. 80-81).

Revised Final: The students are seated in a semi-circle with BETSY.

JENNIFER: Impacted

ALAN: Confidence

SALLY: Closer

GARY: Contribute

TERESA: Laughs

JOHN: Appreciation

KRISSY: Involved

ROB: Challenge

KATHY: Powerful

ANDREW: Confidence

SAMANTHA: Passion

BETSY: (to the students) Through this play, I sought to deeply engage and involve you, not only in the text, but also in the process of the performance.

JOHN: My experience with the production of the play Twelfth Night allowed me to understand the significance of the production process while taking my understanding of the meaning of and purpose of William Shakespeare to the next level by being actively engaged in what I was learning.

ANDREW: Reading the play and then acting it out really helped my understanding of the work grow.

ALAN: I can honestly say that my vocabulary improved tremendously

JENNIFER: After performing I was able to grasp the concept of what Shakespeare was trying to write about better.

KATHY: Reading Shakespeare's plays and stories has prepared me for my academic career ahead and given me a better sense of writing and the English language.

SALLY: After learning about Shakespearean conventions, the history of Shakespeare, and the basics of theater, I began to appreciate his work and went on to read The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice. If we had not done the play, I probably wouldn't have gone on to read those plays.

ALAN: I understand references to Shakespeare and other forms of old writing that my peers do not.

TERESA: I know it sounds corny, but doing the play brought Shakespeare to life for me and has helped me to be more open to reading Shakespeare and other works that may seem very

overwhelming.

While writing the performance ethnography, I struggled to represent the theory and scholarship that informed the work without losing the aesthetic quality of a play. Initially, I decided to use scholars as characters not only to reference scholarship, but also to allow the students to dialogue with scholars. However, upon reflection, I realized that this move was more about my own hesitation to step beyond my expected role as a researcher who can marshal theory and scholarship than an attempt to represent student experience, which was my goal.

As Bakhtin (1981) notes, “all languages…are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (pp. 291-292). In this particular performance, I wanted to foreground the students’ voices. In this scene in particular, I wanted to capture how students reflect on the process and product of the performance well after the initial event. The way they describe what the play meant to them reveals what they each valued and common features of improved literacy skills, self-confidence, and an openness to challenging work.

Epilogue: Yearning to Change As a teacher, performance allowed me to explore the potential of theater pedagogy as a means for students to understand and more deeply engage the text. Rather than seeing performance as a reward for making it through the text or as a “fun” activity, I used performance to challenge students to create their own meaning from the text and to demonstrate that meaning through their portrayal of a character, the set design, costume choices, etc. As a researcher, performance ethnography allows me to explore student learning through bodies, play, evocative

experience, and a deep engagement with the words of the students as I code interviews and re-present them on stage. In both instances, using performance by itself may change little. What matters is the process and not just the product. Asking students to perform literature often results in students standing in the front of the classroom holding the book or creating a funny “skit” that modernizes the text. However, providing the opportunity for students to perform in a theater in front of an audience beyond their teacher and peers, challenges them to deeply engage the text to create scenes that demonstrate their perspective and understanding. Similarly, as the first drafts of this performance ethnography show, deciding to write a play with data may result in participants standing on a stage reciting interview transcripts. However, visualizing a performance while writing and analyzing challenged me to represent student learning through bodies and words. In doing so, I recognized that a crucial part of the process of student learning and representing that learning was play itself.

As Turner suggests, play creates a break that may lead to new understandings and an opportunity “to question at times the value of those values.” During a time when “performance” in education generally means student performance on a standardized test, writing a performance ethnography made space for me to question the value of performance in school. Performing an ethnography with and about students may hold the possibility of redefining theatrical performance as a legitimate way of learning for students and as a legitimate tool for analyzing that learning for educational researchers.

Recall Bourdieu’s reminder that not everything that matters is “transmitted…through language and consciousness.” As the play excerpts show, capturing human experience in all its complexity is a difficult task and might require expanding the media that we use to show how participants make meaning from

experience. Artists have long known this, for it is through their novels and paintings, plays and sonatas that they hope to move, to connect, to illuminate. Here, and in my future work as a teacher and researcher, I engage with performance because I am interested in analyzing bodies at play, evocative experience, and the words participants use to capture their experience in order to more deeply understand student engagement and the process of learning.

Notes 1. I wrote this opening sonnet as the prologue to the student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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