Towards a Critical Performative Pedagogy: Living Museums – The Empires Project

Abstract

What follows, is conceptual and theoretical and emerged through my ongoing conversations and collaborations with the co-author Dr. Aly Elfriech. This an extension of our work on how a Critical Performative Pedagogical (CPP) lens focused on the ways the emergence of the ‘self’ informed pedagogical positions in a graduate multicultural education foundations and general secondary methods of teaching course. In this piece I apply a CPP to my work with the Living Museum: The Empires Project, a five-year inquiry with a local STEM high school in the Midwest. Drawing from the work of Garion, Pineau, and Gaztembide-Fernandez, I imagine how a CPP lens may function as a conceptual and theoretical space for wonder into how and why I did what I did and struggle with the idea of just what do the arts do.