Confessions from the Performatively Confused

Abstract

“Confessions” begins with an auto-ethnographic account of my learning-through-movement in a relationship that was intimate, therapeutic, embodied and instructive—with a teacher called Annie. It seems sensible to start with a choreographic teacher of Feldenkrais therapies and theatre-movement to think about the meanings I import from my roles as learner, therapist and performer to my roles as educator and feminist—and back again. My work with Annie, as her student, brought choreography back into the social science class rooms in which I teach, along with an acute awareness of my embodied self as a condition/centre of my pedagogical strategies in teaching the social. Amplifying this experience, I present ways of storying and reading my teaching praxis in conventional academic classrooms, as informed by the ways in which I theorise my learning that has occurred outside of them.