Theatre as a Performative Pedagogical Device in Teacher Education: An Investigation into University Master’s Programs in Theatre, Pedagogy and Didactics and Performing Arts

Abstract

The pilot study aims to investigate best practices rooted in theatre and applied to pedagogy and didactics, exploring their potential within the context of initial teacher education for secondary schools. In particular, the study seeks to analyze how methodologies, techniques, and practices specific to dramatic arts and performing arts can contribute to the development of essential professional competences in teaching, such as bodily awareness, management of educational relationships, effective communication, and pedagogical reflexivity. From this perspective, the first-level Master’s programme Theatre, Pedagogy and Didactics: Methods, Techniques and Practices of the Dramatic Arts and the second-level Master’s programme Performing Arts: Methods, Techniques and Practices of the Performing Arts at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples can be considered models of good practice in teacher education. Drawing on the resonance between theatre and didactics (Carlomagno, 2020), the Master’s programmes, grounded in the principles of Embodied Cognition (Maturana & Varela, 1991), represent training pathways that promote laboratory-based pedagogical experiences centered on the body in action and in relation (Carlomagno, 2023; Sibilio, 2011), aimed at constructing learning environments characterized by the absence of judgment, where the student is at the center of their own educational journey. The research proposes a qualitative investigation based on the experimental and multimodal CReAP+T methodology (Carlomagno, 2022), applied within the framework of Art-Based Research (McNiff, 2008), with the aim of fostering, within teacher professionalism, self-awareness, authentic presence, and the importance of the bodily, creative, relational, emotional, and performative dimensions through training in educational contexts. The findings, derived from the analysis of reflective journals written by students at the end of each laboratory experience and from semi-structured interviews administered at the conclusion of the Master’s programmes, highlight the formative dimension and pedagogical potential of theatrical experience (Cappa, 2016) as an innovative tool for teacher education, and as an autopoietic and critically reflective device on reality. This training model, departing from the transmissive and traditional paradigm of knowledge, aims to promote teacher education oriented towards non-linear didactics (Carlomagno, 2023), understood as an experiential, relational, introspective, creative, and inclusive process, based on embodied education, capable of addressing and responding to the challenges of the contemporary world.