Guided Practices in Facing Danger: Experiences of Teaching Risk
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Hartley, J. R. 2013 Guided Practices in Facing Danger: Experiences of Teaching Risk Jessica Ruth Hartley PhD in Pedagogy Central School of Speech & Drama University of London Embassy Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3 3HY October 2013 1 Hartley, J. R. 2013 I understand the School’s definition of plagiarism and declare that all sources drawn on have been formally acknowledged. Signed: Jessica Ruth Hartley Date: 18th October 2013 2 Hartley, J. R. 2013 Abstract Guided Practices in Facing Danger: Experiences of Teaching Risk The central problem of this thesis is how a teacher may engage with risk. I offer a reconsideration of the term and suggest that risk is individual, perceptual and experientially driven. I use a Heideggerian (1962) frame when I suggest that, when taking a risk, a person is potentially encountering existential death. Using my own practice as a trapeze artist, I reveal how risk is manifested for the students I teach - how it can profoundly challenge and unsettle them- and how I as a teacher am charged with ensuring that they are empowered rather than stultified or domesticated by the risk. I call this enacted skill ‘pedagogic tact’. By combining Jacques Rancière’s notion of Universal Education (1991) with Martin Heidegger’s ontological appreciation of being-towards-death (1962), I propose that what teachers awaken within students is knowledge of the possibility of death and of not-death within certain pedagogic encounters. I cannot know, measure or prove whether this knowledge has been achieved. However, I can document and describe the students’ relationship with the teacher within these moments. This document therefore becomes a description of student-teacher encounters when the teacher attends towards the emancipation of the student. The combination of reflective research methods from David Tripp (1993), Max Van Manen (1990), Della Pollock (Pollock in Phelan and Lane, 1998) and Jonathan Smith et al (2009) provides a means for phenomenological hermeneutic analysis. I have reflected upon my work with five students over the course of five days of trapeze training, extracted what Tripp would call ‘critical incidents’ between teacher and student and considered their meaning (1993:3). This research is a documentation of engaged pedagogy. It is a performative thesis that ruminates upon how I teach aerial work. There are many findings that seem apparent at the time of writing up. I repetitively circulate around the notion of death, failure, rupture, domestication, entrapment, sacrifice, vulnerability, sobriety and pain as significant elements that describe my work with risk. These concepts are balanced with words such as poetry, liberation, love, strength, glory, resolution and joy. There appears to be a second paradox of teaching that sits alongside and dialogues with the Kantian ‘freedom through coercion’ (1960:699); it is summed up by aerialist and teacher Matilda Leyser in her 3 Hartley, J. R. 2013 description of aerial work as ‘strength through vulnerability’ (2007). In order to enable the students’ strength to be challenged, witnessed and supported, there needs to be vulnerability from them, from their carers, from the teacher and from the institution. This vulnerability is not imposed, or bestowed, but is ‘owned’ by the student and teacher in their anxiety and in their choice to, in a Heideggerian sense, comport themselves to that which matters most (Heidegger, 1962). In these moments, anxiety reminds the student that they might die; it also reminds them that they can be strong in the face of possible death. This paradox of vulnerability and strength is synthesised or ‘held’ by the teacher’s tact. The new knowledge that I assert, therefore, is a description and mapping of pedagogic tact. Through this new knowledge, I explore the possibility of becoming a better teacher. 4 Hartley, J. R. 2013 Acknowledgments Joseph Payne, Titilope Sogbesan, Sebastian True, Jordan Bukhari and Yetunde Agruwari. Adam Cohen, John-Paul Zaccarini, Matilda Leyser and Lorraine Moynehan. Thanks to: Central School of Speech and Drama: Dr Catherine McNamara, Dr Tony Fisher, Ayse Tashkiran, Dr Experience Bryon, Dr Ana Sanchez-Colberg, Professor Andrew Lavender, Dr Nando Messias, Adam Parker, Peter Bingham, Phil Rowe, Nick Paddy, Ken Mitzutani, Roberto Puzone, Alex Stone, David Hockham, Jill Donker- Curtius, Tanya Zybutz, Sheila Blankfield, Dr Angela Stokes, David Petherbridge, Deirdre McLaughlin, Anna Terry and the PhD cohort. For my family and friends: Jane and John Hartley, Brendan Sparks, Ben Melchiors, Anna Brownsted, Alex Murphy, Hetty Wooding, Jean Hartley, for Daniel Lechner who first put me on a trapeze and in particular for James Palm and Florence Hartley- Palm, with love. 5 Hartley, J. R. 2013 Table of Contents Abstract 3 List of Photographs 8 List of Critical Incidents 8 Foreword 9 0.0 Introduction 12 0.1 Chapter Summaries 15 0.2 Contributions to New Knowledge 17 0.3 Critical Context 2o 0.3.1 Paul Slovic 20 0.3.1 Martin Heidegger 21 0.3.2 Paulo Freire 23 0.3.2 Jacques Rancière 25 0.3.2 Inherant Tensions between Heidegger and Rancière 27 0.4 Terminology 28 0.4.1 Tact 28 0.4.2 Curiosity 31 0.4.3 Trust 33 0.4.4 Mapping 34 1.0 Research Methods 36 1.1 The Practice: Hello Fatty 38 1.2 Critical Reflections 41 1.3 Interviews 43 1.4 Thesis Structure 45 1.5 Ethics 48 1.5.1 Surety 54 1.5.2 Dialogue 59 2.0 Risk, Fear and Death 68 Critical Incident 1: The Slap 68 2.1 A Definition of Risk 70 2.1.1 Risk perception 74 2.1.2 Heuristics and judgment 78 2.1.3 Risk-taking 81 2.1.4 Being ‘at risk’ 82 2.2 Risk and Risk Aversion in Contemporary Britain 86 6 Hartley, J. R. 2013 1.2.1 Risk-aversion and the adolescent 87 1.2.2 Cultural context or Police Order 90 2.3 Risk in Education 94 1.3.1 Risk and death 99 3.0 Violent Care: Towards a Dialectical Appreciation of Risk 105 3.1. Territories of Risk 109 Critical Incident 2: The Gazelle 110 3.1.1 Failure 113 3.1.2 Touch 115 3.1.3 Gender 117 3.1.4 Role and authority 119 3.1.5 Violence and care 121 3.1.6 Physical pain 123 3.2. Critical Pedagogy 125 3.2.1 Authenticity and the struggle to become critically autonomous, ‘masterful’ and intimate. 137 4.0 Know Yourself: Mapping the Risk Encounter 142 4.1. Mapping: The Complexity of ‘Being’ 145 4.2. Interpretation. How Do I Talk About This Thing That I Do? 153 4.2.1 Interpretation as an act of challenge 157 4.3 Leaps of Faith. 159 4.4 Failure and Pain 167 5.0 Taking a Leap: Action, Moment, Glory and Fragmentation 174 Critical Incident 3: The Eagle 176 5.1 Action 177 5.1.1 Trust, temporality and space 179 5.1.2 The fall or drop 181 5.1.3 The catch 186 5.1.4 The wound 188 5.2 Moment 192 5.3 Glory 200 5.3.1 Circus and meaning 200 5.3.2 Phenomenological glorification 205 5.4 Fragmentation 208 7 Hartley, J. R. 2013 6.0 Hello Fatty: Experiences of Teaching Risk 210 6.1 Critical Incident 4: Fear of Flying 211 6.2 Critical Incident 5: The Game 216 6.3 Critical Incident 6: The Chalk 222 6.4 Critical Incident 7: The Planche 230 6.5 Critical Incident 8: My Body 235 7.0 Conclusions: Guided Practices in Facing Danger 238 7.1 Limitations of the Study 242 7.2 Into the Future 244 7.3 On Courage and Guidance 246 Appendix A: Informed Consent form 248 Appendix B: Structure of the Practice 251 Appendix C: Circus Terminology 258 Appendix D: CSSD Generic Risk Assessment form 261 Appendix E: IRATA Levels 264 Bibliography 265 List of photographs Figure. 1 The Eagle 176 Figure. 2 Chalk Fight 226 Figure. 3 Planche Attempt 235 Figure. 4 Planche Fail 235 8 Hartley, J. R. 2013 Foreword In 1996 I began my training as a secondary school teacher of English and Drama. The choice to become a teacher was a deeply conflicted one for me. I passionately believed in the ability of art to transform young people and I struggled to reconcile the often contradictory ways that my schooling impacted on my understanding of myself: as a failure and as a success; as weak and strong; as ‘feminine’ and clumsy; as clever and low achieving; as a naughty girl, constantly in trouble who always intended to do the right thing. Teaching antagonised the pre-existing concerns I had about pedagogy because I was able to witness these tensions accreting and dissolving in the students that I taught. In a secondary school environment I uncovered the first research questions that inspired this PhD. I began by noticing the way that young people were expected to be ‘risky’ with their ideas and yet were not allowed to cross the road without consent forms from parents. It was similar thinking that disabled me from hugging a child in distress, which ran counter to my instinct. I noticed the way that children who had been labelled as ‘naughty’ by certain teachers were able to flourish in drama and in sport whereas students who were considered ‘brainy’ were discouraged from taking the same subjects because they were a waste of time. I wanted to understand how some teachers were able to work against the tensions of the environment to focus on and enable the equality of each student. It was an encounter with circus training in 2000 that began to reconcile the warring factions within my own identity.