Performative education inside and outside the ethics of care:  Three provocations

Anna Costantino

doi:10.33178/scenario.15.2.2

Authors

Anna Costantino University of Greenwich

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33178/scenario.15.2.2

Keywords:

data, entanglement, ethic of care, performative teaching and learning, socially engaged practices

Abstract

Inspired by the provocations raised in Cañas’s RISE Manifesto (2015), this essay argues that language learning, language teaching, and performative activities are caring acts. They are qualitative offerings that manifest themselves as embodied, relational, and artful events concerned with fostering fairer and caring societies. I refer to them as qualitative acts of care. The essay also voices concerns regarding the structural constraints faced by language educators and educational practitioner-researchers when they seek to enact language learning, arts practice, or practice-based research as caring and ethical work. Qualitative care is an ever-changing process that is often difficult to capture (both conceptually and experientially) in the flow of practice, which raises epistemological questions about the way qualitative care is measured and deemed to be self-sufficient and self-contained. Paradoxically, measurement and evaluation turn qualitative care into practices that are referred to here as quantitative acts of care. The essay does not provide readers with answers to the problems raised by Cañas (2015). Rather, from the reflexive standpoint of a language teacher and practitioner-researcher, it suggests the need to leverage the qualities of performative learning and teaching by making any work of care a continual endeavour.

Author Biography

Anna Costantino, University of Greenwich

Anna Costantino is a lecturer in Italian and the Italian Programme Co-ordinator at the University of Greenwich (UK). She also leads the module in Materials Development and Testing within the MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL. As a practitioner researcher, Anna has been involved with Exploratory Practice in CPD projects at both the University of Greenwich and Regent’s University London. She is a member of CREL (Centre for Research and Enterprise in Language) at the University of Greenwich. She is also member of the AILA (International Association of Applied Linguistics) Fully Inclusive Practitioner Research in Applied Linguistics research network.

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