Abstract:

The concept of Performance defines a multidisciplinary and intercultural field of study, whose subject includes theatre, dance, music, rituals and games, political action and electoral campaigns, demonstrations, sports and entertainment. Therefore, performative refers to practices which uses voice and body as primary means of expression and implicate a modification in time and space. The discipline borrows concepts and procedures from different and interrelated academic fields: sociology (symbolic interactionism and social constructivism), linguistics (speech acts theory), anthropology (ritual processes), theatrology (the workings of performance) and literary studies (semiotics and reception theory).

Some of the above mentioned theories, and the corresponding analytical tools, can provide new insights on teaching and learning in specific educational contexts, such as study abroad. Precisely, the learning experience of a study abroad student is (or should be) quite different from the learning experience the same student could have access in a regular educational context. When introduced to a new culture and to different teaching styles, the study abroad student is involved in a series of processes, which could be perfectly defined as performative: «The classroom, with teachers and students engaged in the process of education, establishes culture. It becomes a practiced place, a site in which diverse beings come together in order to engage and negotiate knowledge, systems of understanding and ways of being, seeing, knowing, and doing. This negotiation occurs through social performance, engaged practices of relations and interrelations» (BRYANT Alexander – ANDERSON Gary – GALLEGO Bernardo (Eds.), Performance Theories in Education. Power, Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005, 3.)
During a study abroad term (usually one semester), the sites for this particular form of social performance are the specific environment where negotiations and relations take place: the city and, consequently, the teaching styles and methodologies required by the precise and established learning outcomes. Experiencing the city, negotiating with its urban shape, history, organization and cultural sceneries, codifying its rituals and social textures, imply a performative component.

Students’ bodies, voices and senses are displaced from their original stage and performed on a foreign (mostly unknown) stage. Actors (of their own staging) and spectators (of the city’s life) at the same time, without a previously assigned script, students are expected to improvise, negotiate, represent. Educators must be aware of the complexity of this particular learning process, determined by both the context and the students’ expectations.

Keywords:

International Education, Performance Practice, Teaching and Learning Methodology.