Bespiel mal Bochum: Performative Pedagogy
A long-term engagement designed by Darren O’Donnell with Alice Fleming and directed by Darren O’Donnell with Jana Eiting for the Schauspielhaus Bochum that brings together a number of teachers, students in a collaborative relationship focused researching and developing approaches to deploying artistic methods to communicate the school curriculum.
This incompatibility between the activities of artists and formal schooling has been recognised by the Mercator Foundation. In UNESCO’s 2010 report Arts Education for All: What Experts in Germany Are Saying, Winfried Kneip, the director of the Centre for Education at the Mercator discusses the challenges of collaborating with schools, noting that what tends to be produced strays from the preferred outcomes of both artists and educators. Kneip observes, ëThe culture of artists has not been able to influence the core of education, as determined by the ‘major subjects’ such as language learning, mathematics and science. Kniep goes on to observe that artists tend to make more work for the teachers, even when they are leading the activities, and that when artists introduce uninvited transformative processes into the school, they are often kicked out.
Bespiel mal Bochum directly address these challenges by enlisting teachers and students to collaborate from the first moment to try develop a series of research phases in order to yield artistic activities that will have direct application to the classroom setting.
The project will last two years with each year culminating in a creative outcome that celebrates the streets of Bochum, the businesses, the schools and the people.
See photos from the 2019 three day festival here.
