Response-able pedagogy: teaching through Shakespeare in a Higher Education (HE) transnational partnership

ABSTRACT

What started as an idea of two subject disciplines collaborating to support students practicing their English outside the classroom, a theatrical production of Henry V by Shakespeare, became a case study from which to draw pedagogical principles on teaching and learning within a Higher Education Sino-British Transnational Educational (TNE) Partnership. Research into TNE activities focuses mainly on issues such as strategy, quality assurance and competitive advantage, and there is less on the lived experiences of students and lecturers, pedagogical clashes that occur within TNE partnerships and on the methodological discussions that should take place in interdisciplinary research. Through our story of facilitating a production of Henry V, we interrogate pedagogical issues we found in teaching, methodological challenges in interdisciplinary research and ultimately put forward a ‘response-able pedagogy’ that enables different voices to be heard and different knowledges to be recognised in coexistence.

KEYWORDS:

• Response-able pedagogy
• Shakespeare
• higher education transnational partnership
• art thinking
• interdisciplinary teaching

Introduction

This paper uses experiences and reflections from a student-led interdisciplinary (business studies and design) production of Henry V by Shakespeare (hereafter The Play). Through the development of a case study, we discuss pedagogical and curriculum challenges that arise from the cultural clashes within transnational education (TNE) settings. The context of this case study is a Sino-British TNE partnership, with the campus in Nanhai City, Shandong.

The aim of this paper is to utilise experiences from The Play to develop a Response-able pedagogy based on work by Donna Haraway (1997, 2018) and Karen Barad (2007), addressing two challenges within the Anglo-centric education model: decolonisation of the curriculum and the current instrumental view of education. Business studies and indeed design studies focus on the political specificities of the Anglo-centric perspective, dictated by individualistic demands of neoliberalism (Styhre 2005; Pullen 2016; Pio and Waddock 2021). Inequality arises when Anglo-centric knowledge and ways of learning are normalised and naturalised as being universal, rational and objective (Harvey and Russell-Mundine 2019), which devalue other ways of knowing, thus preventing an interrogation of knowledge through alternative cultural ideas (Bhabba 1989; Hooks 2013; Veldman and Guilfoyle 2013). Additionally, there is a recognition that education needs to move away from an instrumental view, where core knowledge absorbed throughout the curriculum becomes a toolbox of techniques. Landfester and Metelmann (2018) suggest that education needs to become a transformative experience, developing the human quality, enabling students to reflect and include their own everyday experiences into the new body of knowledge being presented.

The structure of the paper follows our reflective journey, initially positioning the reader within the lived environment in which this journey takes place. This context briefly describes the transnational partnership and the international aspect of the campus in which we work, the place where we live and the pedagogical tensions that we observed in the classroom. As white-ish, mid-age academics, the contextualisation of our personal experience of the ‘betwixt and between’ (Beech 2011) was important in stimulating our critical stance towards the One-World World, the idea in which the world is allegedly made of one single World (Law 2004), and our increasing understanding of Escobar’s (2016, 13) thoughts on ‘speaking about knowledges, is also speaking about worlds’.

The paper will then describe the experiences of collaboration in the development of The Play. The word collaborate is particularly relevant here as neither of us had any experience or knowledge of producing, directing or staging a play. It was originally intended to be a purely classroom activity from which to elucidate discussion, reflection and learning within topics taught in the classroom. Reflecting on those experiences, the paper will take the reader through the development of the three principles of Response-able pedagogy.

TNE partnerships

According to the British Council, there are more than 1000 active joint programmes or institutes at undergraduate level in China (British Council 2020). The nature of the model we follow is one of a flying faculty, bringing together three universities from China, UK and, the USA under the umbrella of expertise in transportation and mobility. The design of the partnerships requires all of us, students and academic staff to constantly move, physically and physiologically between different cultures. From an academic perspective, the USA programme is taught by flying faculty from the USA institution only. The UK degree programmes are taught by academics from the main Beijing campus and colleagues from the UK campus, all of whom ‘fly’ into Nanhai for up to 12 weeks, twice per academic year, to deliver UK curriculum modules. These programmes of study include UK degrees in Business Studies, Design, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering, Environmental and Computer Studies. For the students, the curriculum consists of both the UK modules and specific Chinese modules in order to be awarded a Chinese and UK degree. It is also a campus where international students from Russia and countries in Africa stay for a year, to learn Chinese before moving to the main campus in Beijing, to study their Chinese degrees. The international aspect of the University is mirrored in the local area, which eight years ago was re-designated by the Chinese government, from an agricultural and fishing area to an international hub.

Nanhai City: a place in transition

Nanhai, like similar places in China, and to some extent China itself, is a place of transition between its rural past and metropolitan future (Shepard 2015). It can be described as a new district (新区) or a ghost town (鬼城) depending on whether the focus is on its promises of the future or on its emptiness of the present (Pollastri, Escalante, and Meng 2018). As flying faculty, we are homed among the locals from Nanhai, who are also transitioning from their traditional setting into metropolitan structures, combining village culture and high-rise urban living. Brand-new empty buildings and deserted motorways serve as reminders of Chinese success and its promise of a better future. The still empty streets and motorways often filled with peanuts and corn drying ready for the winter speak of a rurality that persists within this brand-new urban setting. This juxtaposes with the traditional evening dancing of the community women to music from a ‘boombox’, whilst the men play mah-jong and Chinese chess in the community room. Within these images of contrasts and transitions, there is a deeply shared feeling between academics, local community and students of being positively ‘betwixt and between’ (Beech 2011) cultures and traditions.

The classroom

This sense of ‘betwixt and between’ in our daily life continues into the teaching and learning environment where two distinct pedagogies clash with students studying modules such as ‘Introduction to Business and Management’, ‘Accounting and Finance for Business Management’ juxtaposed with ‘Mao Zedong Thought and the Theoretical System of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, ‘The Thought of Socialism with Chinese Characteristic for the XiJingping New Era’ and ‘Ideological and Moral Cultivation and Legal Basis’. The Chinese pedagogy is based on ideas from Confucius, politized to shape a national approach to education. There are two main principles, ‘the Cultivation of Self’ and ‘Where is the Way’ (Li and Hayhoe 2012; Wu and Devine 2018). Wu and Devine (2018) define the ‘Cultivation of Self’ as dictated by educational needs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), for autonomous people who can adapt to competitive global environments, balanced against the need for people who are obedient and devoted to the CCP. This is achieved by situating the autonomous self within strict social relationships bound by obligations to state, family and individual hierarchical stratification. There is an emphasis on respect for authority and trust amongst friends. Lecturers become a model of learning, having expert knowledge and skills, exemplary moral behaviour and can answer all student’s questions (Jin and Cortazzi 2006).

Tweed and Lehman (2002) highlight that within this pedagogy, modelling is an important aspect of learning, creating a process of demonstration – mimesis – practice (where the student takes away the ‘copying’ and integrates the new knowledge into their existing body of knowledge) and then performance (where integrated knowledge is demonstrated). ‘Where is the Way’ is a process of personal growth that takes place alongside the ‘learning’ and is how students integrate new knowledge with previous knowledge within a moral framework (Zhao and Biesta 2011). The process takes place through interaction with the teacher and is linked to care and kindness (Hayhoe et al. 2012; Wu and Devine 2018). This pedagogy can be perceived as a top-down passive learning system with many contact hours, large number of compulsory subjects and a great deal of ‘modelling’ which primarily consists of repetition and imitation of the ‘Masters’. One first-year student commented:

We just simply copy the author’s ideas without our own thinking because we believe that given the authority of the information published this view, so they must be correct.

The pedagogical ‘clash’ occurs when faced with, what Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Stonebanks (2010) suggests is, a UK constructivist pedagogy focusing on active and independent learning, creative and critical thinking, finding the answers to questions for oneself and taking responsibility for choices being made. We argue that this pedagogical paradigm may have influenced the stereotype of Chinese students who appear to need a superior to act in their best interest (Saravanamuthu 2008; Tan 2017; Wu and Devine 2018), students used to teacher-centric and hierarchical teaching (You and Jia 2008), passive learners (Ryan 2016), weak in analytical skills, reflection, independent thinking and unable to organise ideas in a logical and linear way (Wang and Lin 2013). It is within this community, partnership, campus and classrooms that these different ontological, epistemological and pedagogical views encounter and often clash with the lecturers and students in the front line of these tensions. Our students at the end of the first year recognised this ‘clash’ commenting:

Critical Thinking is totally unfamiliar, what we used to do is to recite famous quote or leaning exactly as the teacher tell us. (First-year student)

Living with local people began the process of trying to understand the culture in which we were living. This knowledge came gradually through simply having to interact with the local population whether in the hairdressers, the local supermarket, the evening dancing or at the local hot pot restaurant. This added a depth of understanding to our pedagogical discussions and the realisation that the students had a vast amount of knowledge that we had not considered nor had we provided opportunity for that knowledge to be used to interrogate what was being taught. It occurred to us that in order to deal with the differences in pedagogical traditions and knowledges, the students compartmentalised their knowledges, leaving them with little foundation on which to draw when responding to questions in class. This was particularly clear in both subject areas when drawing upon Anglo-centric history to discuss things like philosophy or leadership. Through our discussions, we recognised the need for a creative project that would enable students to discover bridges between their own knowledges and what they were being taught, and so we gradually formulated the idea of the students collaborating on a play.

Co-designing Henry V: the process

Henry V was selected for two reasons. The first, because it is the story of a young person who faces challenges that many of our students will identify with when taking their first management or design positions. It portrays Henry V as a teenager who was a disappointment to his father due to his friendship with unsuitable people, frequenting drinking houses and being found drunk. Upon his father’s death, this young man unexpectedly becomes king. The play narrates his experiences, thoughts and feelings whilst negotiating changes in his personal and political life. Second, it was written during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, it opened opportunities to discuss diversity dealing with a male-dominated world (Andrews 2014). The 1944 film starring Laurence Olivier provided a moral boost to the country during the World War II (García-Periago 2019), and it was remade by Kenneth Branagh in 1987 against a backdrop of miners strikes and the Falkland-Malvinas crisis, providing opportunities to discuss the history of the UK.

Although The Play became a collaborative response to some of the challenges we identified in the classroom, we formulated specific learning objectives that we were aiming to achieve. Part of the design curriculum dealt with co-design (collaborative design). This refers to the creativity of designers and people not trained in design, working together in the design development process (Sanders and Stappers 2008, 7). It embraces a shift in the traditional designer–user relationship, for instance, it enables a wide range of people to make creative contributions towards problem solving, more importantly, co-design includes others in the formulation of the problem or design challenge (Tsekleves et al. 2020, 917). A key element of co-design considers users as ‘domain experts’ of their own needs and experiences (Sleeswijk et al. 2005), as central to the design process.

Through discussion we felt that the idea of collaborating across academic disciplines through a piece of creative work would enable the design students to experience this alternative way of functioning as a designer. As a consequence, all the students and us, as academics, became ‘users’ within this design context. There was no design brief, and the development of The Play was the design challenge. This is fundamentally different to the more common structure of staging a play, which would involve a production designer working closely with a director to establish a shared vision and then be responsible for every area of the design. We felt that The Play would enable the design students to experience what is co-designed to go in unexpected (many times even unwanted) directions rather than having individual control of the design process. This requires trust, not just between collaborators but more importantly in the co-design process as an interdependent process. The team-work, problem solving and project planning aspects fitted well with topics being covered in business studies and would provide a common experience to apply to those areas.

From these two perspectives, we identified shared objectives. The first was a vehicle that enabled students to have a transformative experience that disrupted student’s expectations, creating a space to build trust and reliance on each other (Hooks 2013; Landfester and Metelmann 2018; Pullen 2016), in short, to experience and learn the human side of business and co-design. We were hoping the students would either implicitly or explicitly recognise the Confucian elements of ‘Cultivation of Self’ (Zhao and Biesta 2011), through the focus on trust and the individual working as part of a collective. Second, to provide students with the opportunity to bring together their Chinese knowledge and interrogate Anglo-centric models taught in class and so creating a cohesive, holistic educational experience, involving imagination and creativity (O’Doherty 2020). The creative collaboration that entailed producing and performing (and appropriating) The Play was a good vehicle to expose and address challenges, through the creation of safe spaces to explore interactions, relationships and knowledge (Cornelissen 2004).

We all had 7 weeks to make this happen.

The pitch

The first challenge was how to generate enthusiasm amongst the two cohorts; it was a voluntary, curricular opportunity, but it was important that as many students as possible joined the activity. To sell the idea of producing and performing a play in English, the Business lecturer visited the design studio with a short presentation. This included a quick discussion about the staging of Henry V in Beijing and details about the story itself. A crucial inviting ingredient was a piece of music by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds ‘O Children’ (which the students recognised as being from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – a favourite film!), and with the music in the background a possible scene was described:

King Henry walking across a battlefield of the dead and dying carrying the Baggage Boy who was found dead.

We explained how designing the concept and the staging of the play would support design students meeting co-design learning objectives that in the studio would be hard to replicate.

For the business students, ideas around different ways of using English, experiencing team working and team leading, engagement in project planning and execution, as well as innovation and creativity were all put forward. Students who took part were also given the opportunity of using their experiences as part of the final assessments for their modules in each of the programmes. Most students in both cohorts chose to take part, with the student article published in the University magazine stating:

As soon as the words came out, the classroom was filled with whispers, ‘What activity is the teacher talking about?’ ‘What is Henry V?’ ‘Are you going? You go and I will go too.’  …  Finally, with curiosity and eagerness to try, Dozens of our 17-level business administration and accounting majors joined the ranks. (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

Auditions and teams

Most business students took acting roles, for which auditions were held. This was a stressful undertaking as they had to put themselves forward for the roles and read very unfamiliar text aloud whilst interpreting it. Parts were allocated and the surprising change was a female Henry V, already breaking traditions and unsettling normal expectations. As the student article recalled:

At that time, our English recitation expression still needed to be tempered. After reading the speeches of the addressers one by one, Sun Chuyi (Fiona), who performed well in general, was selected as the lead actor. ‘Hey! Girls pretend to be men, which is interesting.’ I was thinking of this, and suddenly I was called by Chris, ‘Version, we think you are suitable to play the King of France.’ What? Want to play against Henry V of Fiona? Now, it’s really interesting. (Translated from Chinese by Google Transcribe)

In the meantime, design students were forming teams. The design students identified the following areas of activity: props, costumes, hair and make-up, set, lighting, sound, music and publicity, then a team for photography, film and live streaming of the production. Finally, students had to select their own production manager. This role ensured that each ‘team’ communicated and that the overall concept was followed. For the design students, this created a learning opportunity to consider for the first time their own skills and individual ‘offers’ as designers and decide for themselves where their skills best fitted. Although the students were all used to team working, they were traditionally put into teams by the lecturer, this presented an opportunity to self-govern and curate their own assessment.

Ideation and autonomy

For actors the time arrived for the first read through of the script. Design teams attended to gain ideas for the concept and set design, and there was work for all. The students had watched the Laurence Olivier (1944) and Kenneth Branagh (1989) versions of Henry V. Reading through the play, many questions were asked about the history, culture and social contexts of the play and films.

All the students had to agree on The Play’s ‘concept’ as this would inform all design decisions from set to make-up, providing directions for backdrops, stage, editing and appropriation of scenes, costumes, music and lighting. Ideation process started and it was very important that students maintained full autonomy; however, when ideas started to emerge, we found ourselves in discussions about Mario Bros (Miyamoto and Yokoi 1983), Cold War dystopia or the Chinese/Japanese War that were testing our confidence in our ideas of student autonomy. It was this aspect that highlighted for us the balance required to nurture student leadership and autonomy whilst attempting to avoid failure, which would damage student confidence. To our relief, the final decision was to develop a cultural ‘mash-up’ where Shakespeare meets Beijing Opera in a Chinese game of chess. The student magazine article reflected on this process.

At the beginning of the planning stage, the performance of the performance became a stumbling block in front of the teachers and students. Both the Chinese and British teachers and students of the international campus participated in the performance. How to give the ancient British drama new connotations with Chinese traditional culture? That’s a question. (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

We thought the outcome of the ideation phase ratified our convictions in enabling the process of co-design to come to fruition, with all ‘users’ involved in the decision-making process.

Pushing the limits of co-design

The students had many time constraints so scenes were rehearsed separately. However, as academics we were unaware of the background dedication which was revealed in their magazine article:

I had an appointment with Fiona between classes in the stair aisle to speak our parts together. I also saw Zhang Yanbo, who was in charge of the conflict scene, repeatedly scrutinizing the roles in the background, and the way everyone invested in it was especially shining in my mind. (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

It was necessary that representatives from the design teams attend rehearsals, so decisions could be taken about props and all the elements that each scene required in discussion with the actors. In addition, with each rehearsal the script was reworked in order to reduce the play length, and take account of language constraints, omitting extra-long speeches and focusing on the fundamentals. From the student magazine article:

The rehearsal process was not all smooth sailing. Some characters have too many lines, and there are sometimes academic pressures, but everyone still works hard to rehearse and make time to memorize lines to ensure that everyone can shine when they take the stage. (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

Several challenges came to light including difficulties with complex names and speech changes to provide consistency with the concept of The Play. This sparked discussions about events, the war between France and England, the logistics of representing soldiers and supplies crossing the English Channel. These discussions shaped understandings about the core ideas in The Play and how these ideas could be taken forward in our own Nanhai version. The concept of Chinese chess helped to reduce complexities of representation, for example, creating a set for the English Channel would be difficult. The Chinese chess board provided the solution, as there is a river crossing the middle of the board. This then provided the concept for French and English armies as the red and blue Chinese chess pieces. Long English names of the Shakespearian characters and places were shortened and props including breastplates for the soldiers on which were painted the Chinese symbols for the different chess pieces. The student magazine article recalled:

After brainstorming, we decided to decorate the King of England with Peking Opera masks, use chess generals and soldiers as red and blue identity cards, use Chuhe and Han circles to symbolize the battlefield, and practice Tai Chi moves to symbolize conflict  …  What a good idea! (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

The business lecturer supported students re-writing the script and appropriating lines as the rehearsals progressed amongst discussions and consultation with the actors and design teams. As students were gaining confidence in the process, they brought up interesting proposals; the first being the English/French scenes where the princess was learning English. The students decided it would be a good idea to have this as Chinese/English and suggested one of the Chinese faculty members, who specialised in English Literature, to do the translation. The amusing part was that the actress found it really hard to speak in ‘bad English’, so one of our colleagues from the USA programme helped her rehearse. The second instance was the final scene where the modern-day chess player produced her own ending to the play, keeping the idea of the chess game in mind whilst incorporating Shakespeare’s hopeful but qualified ending:

However, for now, we leave this game in high hopes for a happy future and hope that you and the audience have enjoyed this one.

Gradually, the design teams brought together the different elements and presented their ideas to the actors. Agreement was reached regarding elements that were practical. This was an interesting part as the design teams were very enthusiastic about some of their ideas, particularly around make-up, Beijing opera style, while the actors, especially the male students, were not so sure. Eventually, through persuasion and often heated discussion, decisions were made, and interesting parcels fast-tracked via Taobao.com, started to arrive at the campus post-office. To maintain student autonomy, they were given a budget and it was up to the Production Manager to ensure that it was spent wisely. In rehearsals, student actors started to appear with various props and parts of costumes and common understanding of The Play, its direction and the student ownership all increased.

Slowly, the elements of The Play started to take shape. The Prologue took the form of two modern-day chess players, sitting at the chess board, starting a game. The chess board then stayed on stage throughout the play. The modern-day chess players would come on at the beginning of each scene to examine the previous move and take the next and provided the narration. The actors, in red and blue, would then take on the role of the chess pieces and enact the scenes. This key idea developed as the actors were under-confident in learning all the speeches by heart, and for that matter, under-confident in acting. Placing most of the action around the chess board enabled them to have props that contained their words, and very little acting to do. The same technique was used in the night scene at the Battle of Agincourt, where the soldiers sat around the campfires with the words printed on the playing cards. In some scenes, the actors would be reading a letter or a missive of some sort. The actors also approached the English teachers for help in speaking their lines.

For us the process was a frightening version of ‘organised chaos’ as we tried hard to ‘model’ co-design principles by facilitating and enabling student ideas to develop and flourish, whilst hoping that the result would be something the students were proud of.

It will be alright, nobody knows how because it is a mystery¹

As rehearsals proceeded, more colleagues within the campus started to take an interest in The Play. Colleagues from the USA institution wanted their liberal arts students to see The Play as they were working on the appropriation of literature and art. Through the input of the Chinese administrative staff, helping with goods ordering, the Student Support Staff helped promote the event and the English language teachers input, the word was spreading and everyone on campus became intrigued and anticipation was building. A week before the performance, the campus Senior Management Team decided that the venue should be moved from the classroom allocated to the onsite auditorium with a capacity of 300. This was due to the interest generated and a planned visit by the Beijing University Senior Management Team including the Communist Party Official, who expressed a wish to attend the performance.

These changes in circumstance required absolute flexibility on the part of the students. Interestingly, this would have caused chaos in the UK, in China it was just accepted, this is in part due to the hierarchal nature of the social culture, where if a superior makes a change that change is enacted immediately, and secondly, for the students this was an endorsement of their work. There were three major challenges and many minor ones. The first was how to represent the Battle of Agincourt, second the auditorium could only be rented for the day of the performance and third, the new location required professional lighting and sound systems, which had to be rented and operated.

In the rehearsal room, we held a large meeting to discuss how best to visualise the Battle of Agincourt, as the stage in the auditorium was more of a platform for giving presentations than an acting space. All the students had completed a Tai Chi course as part of their compulsory physical education module. The auditorium space had two aisles, and so gradually the idea of a Tai Chi battle scene emerged and included actors down each of the aisles performing Tai Chi moves as a choreographic representation of the battle.

The students approached the Chinese physical education teachers to prepare them. The business studies students, particularly our male students, were not so keen (there is a pattern here), but steadily, with the help of the Chinese coaches, the scene started to come together.

Two years later, I still remember the performance that night, which was so stunning to the audience: I remember that when the drums were beaten, the soldiers from both sides who lined up and practiced Tai Chi moves aroused the audience’s surprise.

The day had arrived, and the students were released from lessons to have a full-dress rehearsal in the auditorium before the one-off evening performance. This would be the first time that all the scenes, including the new battle scene, had been brought together into a whole. Over the afternoon, the dress rehearsal fell into total chaos, the words ‘it will be alright, nobody knows how because it is a mystery’ became a mantra. Stress levels were high and completing the Beijing Operatic make-up was taking far longer than anticipated. The design students were trying to grasp the lighting and sound systems, scene changes were slow, actors were all over the place and disaster was foreseen! Things were forgotten in the overall process, for example, Front of House staff, a gap quickly filled by some enterprising students as the audience started to arrive. We held the last-minute pep talk in the green room, with the immortal words, ‘it will be alright nobody knows how because it is a mystery’. It was at this point that the design student in the role of Production Manager stepped up and gave an inspirational speech, in true Henry V style, as the final call to arms. The speech was in Chinese and to this day, we have no idea what was said, but it seemed to have made all the difference.

The students took their places, and we sat in a full auditorium, 300 souls waiting for the first ever English language theatre performance within the Chinese University, and the first time Shakespeare had been performed in this province of China. Dignitaries were greeted in the formal fashion, the lights dimmed, the spotlight shone on the modern-day chess players sat around the chess board, and the action started. Each scene, perfectly executed, rolled by. There was much laughter during the Chinese/English language lesson, there were gasps of surprise and delight at the Tai Chi battle scene, and eventually the final scene arrived, the modern-day chess players on stage, the actors waiting at the back of the theatre, the final words spoken and the actors skipping and clapping down the aisles to ‘High Hopes’ (by Panic at the Disco) and standing ovations from the audience (not a common sight in China).

Formulating a response-able pedagogy: emerging principles

The process that we engaged in pushed co-design, team working, project planning and management to the limits. When we first started to reflect on the play, and what had been learnt from the process, we discovered multiple and entangled events based on actions and reactions between the collaborators (or users in co-design terminology) which included us, as academics. In terms of providing everyone with a shared ‘real’ experience to use when discussing topics such as change management, organisational structure, contextualising historical timeframes, leadership, project management or to understand a little more about what co-designing actually meant in practice, The Play achieved its learning objectives, however it also achieved something much more.

Feminist theories of knowledge critically explore how knowledge produces, reproduces and maintains power relations. This is mirrored in the current challenges of decolonising the curriculum, where the issue is not about the core curriculum, but how it is taught, devaluing other ways of knowing and preventing an interrogation of knowledge. The Play enabled students to practice building bridges between two very different knowledges, enabling them to use their own cultural foundations, integrate new knowledges and develop a response. At the end of the magazine article the students commented:

At the time, I didn't understand why the king Henry and King of France make-up was only half face. Now it is quite meaningful to want to come to this half-make-up King Henry. After reflecting, we are Chinese college students in the twenty-first century, Dai Ling, (in Chinese this means to lead or to guide, in English this would mean As leaders …) we are the kings of England and France in the fifteenth century, spanning thousands of kilometers and 400 years of Eurasian continent, the ancient drama is full of newness. Vitality. (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

One author, in particular, has been important to our practice. Barad (2007) debates what she calls the ‘triad of knowledge’, referring to the relationship between knowledge or what is to be learned, learner and the methods to learn. For Barad, these are artificially separated, and this separation is not coincidental, but rather political, supporting processes of perpetuating power relations. Barad interrogates the differentiating practices of this triad of knowledge that we could relate to intimately with our experiences of teaching and learning practices in Nanhai. The curriculum we teach by its nature is Anglo-centric, however, it is the way we teach the material that seems to leave no space for students to integrate their own knowledges, resulting in their UK and Chinese knowledge being compartmentalised, restricting their ability to engage and respond to the material being presented.

Barad calls for ways of engaging with knowledge construction, in which methods, learners and what is learned are understood not in a geometrical, neutral relation, but as interdependent, entangled co-productive encounters. The Play enabled us to see the power of these catalytic encounters and the richness that acknowledging and using the tensions produced, rather than concentrating on the challenges experienced in the classroom, with students finding it difficult to respond. What we found in the student reflections and reactions to The Play inspired our connections to Barad and others (Haraway 1997, 2018; Barrett and Bolt 2013; Ceder 2015) and is found in pushing the boundaries of the word ‘responsibility’. Traditionally it implies a position of authority, and a certain sense of duty. As teachers, we cannot be responsible for all that our students learn (or not). As a student, it is hard to be responsible for learning all the content provided and reaching the required learning objectives, particularly among the challenging tensions that emerge in such a context. By including opportunities, spaces, time, vocabulary and tools to respond to each other, to the content and to the context, we argue it is possible to develop more horizontal and co-productive relationships with the students and processes of knowledge co-construction.

Using Barad and Haraway in this way, we can untangle the many different forces that influence our actions and reactions to others. The Play then becomes a pedagogical strategy to help us as educators understand how to equip students with abilities to respond, and as Brookfield notes ‘illuminate power’ and ‘uncover hegemony’ (1995, 9). By defining response-ability as both a ‘figure of speech’ and as a method of ‘figuring-out’ how to respond to the complexities that we observed in the classroom, The Play has become our academic response and provided the foundation to draft an emerging pedagogical proposal of three core principles: The Principle of Art Thinking, The Principle of Engagement and finally the Principle of Anticipatory Ethics.

The principle of art thinking

This is the principle of using creative practices, including arts, performance, film, dance, play, poetry, painting, making, amongst others, to open and nurture spaces to respond within the learning environment and inspire deep learning (Floyd, Harrington, and Santiago 2009). Within business studies, the principle of art thinking is a method of bringing the human quality, innovation and creativity into the business curriculum (Turner 1979; Champoux 1999; March 2006; McManus and Perruci 2019; O’Doherty 2020).

Acaso and Megías (2017) relate the tale of the day that they brought a big watermelon to class, and without much explanation and to the surprise of all students, proceeded to cut it into a big cube on the desk. They describe how such an act restructures furniture, so students could move around and witness the cutting, but also shuffle relations; quiet students offered their opinions of what was happening, loud students became silent, the usually distracted students paid attention. To bring a watermelon to class was for the authors not a banal act, but a rather disruptive one and at the same time a catalyst to awaken what Mora (2013, 75) defined as ‘sacred curiosity’, usually anesthetised within traditional (both in China and in the UK) teaching and learning dynamics and environments.

The Play for us was that watermelon. The performance of Henry V went beyond the experience of co-designing a show, the skill set gained, the opportunity to practice English or apply personal understanding to business change models, ideas of stakeholders, organisational structure. By using creative practice within liminal spaces, The Play became ‘a vehicle to be honest with reality’ (Garcés 2013 [1973], 69). In this way within the response-able proposal, we present art practices and art thinking (Acaso and Megías 2017) as being beyond art education or extracurricular activities, but a vehicle to restructure spaces – physical and social – into educative milieu in which critical reflection emerges through the deliberate maintenance of horizontal relationships between us as lecturers and the students and between the students. The Production Manager articulated this from her perspective:

As the Production Manager, I was also moved by the moment when people who work with me could give me responses on time. It makes me feel I was not in the ‘One Man Army’ but that everyone is responsible to everyone else.

From the student magazine:

Before participating in the drama, my knowledge of college life was relatively plain, but after the curtain call, I recalled the bits and pieces in the process, whether it was the rehearsal of the actors, the organization of logistics, or the guidance of the teachers. Jobs and work together. I think that people of different languages, skin colors and ages are sweating for the same goal. This may be what I want. (Translated from Chinese by Googel Translate)

The students’ inclusion of the Tai Chi battle scene replicated this horizontal relationship with the audience, demonstrating how these horizontal relationships can work across usually segregated groups.

We were also treated to a fabulous finale, with a Tai Chi battle scene that took place with the opposing armies down aisle of the theatre, their traditional Tai Chi forms, separated by us, the audience. We all felt much immersed. (Member of the Audience)

The principle of engagement

Response-able pedagogy is driven by open and interdisciplinary collaboration including engaged learning and community projects to structure and inform teaching. This principle of engagement with the world, people and places in a co-productive way via team-work and challenge-based activities supports students experiencing collaboration across disciplines, subjects and in partnership with organisations (private or public) and/or communities (Floyd, Harrington, and Santiago 2009). One of the business studies students commented on the process of The Play:

Participating in the British-Chinese version of the Shakespeare play Henry the V might be the most unusual experience in which we learned to produce innovative ideas and cooperate with the students from other majors.

The ideas of engagement featured strongly in this student’s learning outcome. Engagement refers to being open to engage, but also and more importantly, to be equipped and prepared to engage. This involves rehearsing and practicing skills to voice arguments, perform positions, and manage agency, leadership and decision-making power for responses to be truly meaningful.

Bringing together aspects of Chinese pedagogy of ‘practice and performance’ (Tweed and Lehman 2002) and UK ideas around being responsible for your decisions and learning (Kincheloe, Steinberg, and Stonebanks 2010), The Play allowed students to do activities that went beyond remembering facts by participating in the creation of their own learning and evaluation, leading to Bloom’s (1956) higher forms of independent learning objectives. For the English Language teachers, the student’s participation in their own learning and evaluation was demonstrated in their increasing confidence in language acquisition:

However, for me, the most inspiring thing on show was the confidence and enthusiasm radiating from the students. I first met many of these students 18 months ago when they were just beginning their English language classes. To see those same students up on stage performing for an audience of hundreds was really inspiring. (English Language teacher)

The principle of anticipatory ethics

In agile and creative engagements such as The Play, particular worldviews, principles and positions are at play, these values otherwise hidden, ignored or assumed emerge palpably and in a safe space to be learned, discussed and reflected upon. Part of this principle is also engaged with the idea of bringing the ‘human quality’ back into education by building on ideas of contextual and participatory ethics (Escalante et al. 2019). Response-able teaching and learning requires more than theorising, and it needs to enable practicing ethics together, conscious and careful of the particularities of the context. We propose to encompass ethical conduct with building capacities for anticipating, noticing, unveiling and addressing ethical tensions to facilitate processes that go beyond the box-ticking exercise and administrative procedures and towards a response-able curricular golden thread. Students from both cohorts also started to recognise the ethical importance of the process:

It was the concerted effort from all of us that made it such a success. I did think the consultative communication style works, in which everyone felt to be part of the group, opened to contribute their idea and accepted the criticism from others.

In the process of developing the English-Chinese ‘mash-up’ concept of The Play, students recognised the underlying ethical positions involved. Particularly, that different perspectives and standpoints need not be separate but can brought together in creative and productive ways. The student below articulates the critical thinking aspect of The Play:

We took part in the play Henry V, it was really an extraordinary and innovative experience, because we tried to combine Chinese culture and British culture together, for example the British characters wore the make-up that appeared in Beijing Opera.

Response-able pedagogy

We are aligning response-ability with ideas of deep learning that inform teaching and learning strategies. It also includes ideas of engaged learning to inspire immersive teaching and learning environments via team projects and challenge-based creative activities (Edelson, Pea, and Gomez 1995; Kim et al. 2012), such as The Play. The idea of a response-able pedagogy also supports authentic assessment strategy with emphasis not just formative but also peer review and faculty feedback, in which students actively co-curate the aspects, skills and learning they wished to be assessed on, supporting leadership and independent learning (Thomas, Jones, and Ottaway 2015).

We are joining Haraway’s (1997) anticipated sortilege (foretelling) of the term response-ability to propose a pedagogical approach charged by ethics, driven by creative practice and, dependent upon the trust that emerges and is exercised, within the fragility of collaborative encounters with knowledge. When considering decolonisation of the curriculum, it is and has to be more than just adding country specific case studies. On the other hand, the core of the curriculum, the core of knowledge we draw on to teach, is what it is. Response-ability simultaneously enables us as academics to stay responsible with the teaching and learning processes, loyal to its subjects, students, context, environments, worldviews, needs and aspirations, whilst taking care of each other’s abilities to respond to it. To enable space, language, time, for students to discuss and add their own knowledges into the equation. It is about being radically careful and carefully radical (Latour 2008) to integrate in the teaching and learning dynamics, abilities, and spaces to respond. In other words, it is not just about a duty of equality, diversity, inclusion, but beyond that, the ability to respond to the tensions that the encounters of worlds and pedagogical models create for students and teachers, more importantly, it is the ability to nurture capacities and skills to deal with these tensions.

Additionally, The Play involved co-designing for deep interaction. It opened an opportunity to rehearse alternative, preferable worlds which multiply the possibilities of interactions for collaboration. Co-designing The Play was a vehicle for world-building: playing with a world within worlds in which to rehearse alternative presents and plausible futures (Bleecker 2009; Coulton 2015). The process raised tensions, conflicts and frictions, negotiating them in the economy of the constraints: time, deadlines, resources, duration, physical space, audience and customs. Creating and playing ‘worlds’ may result in creative artefacts or happenings that can appear subversive and irreverent in nature (Coulton, Lindley, and Akmal 2016), however they are effective tools to instigate conversations and critical thinking on complex issues otherwise too difficult to approach, especially in a context of conflicting perspectives. Enabling the students to co-design The Play supported students to access, capture, unpack and share responses to new knowledge, and with them the encounters and continuous negotiations that are in teaching and learning in the cross-cultural context.

Impact

One of the major impacts of The Play on our students was unexpected, and it concerns hierarchies and mobility within the classroom dynamics. When we developed the idea, we were expecting that only the top students (the natural leaders and the ones with better English) would join. However, we were happily surprised to verify that the students who joined the project were from a heterogeneous mix and the students who took the more prominent roles were none of the usual suspects. Students at the ‘bottom of the class’ found themselves leading teams at the same level as the ‘top’ students, demonstrating that The Play replicated what Acaso and Megías (2017) describe as environmental disruption by shuffling rigid hierarchies that students form in the classroom, which are often difficult to escape.

There were several examples of students who found engagement in the classroom difficult, often caused by lacking English language confidence and falling behind in their studies. A business studies student, very quiet in class, found his voice and his confidence having developed a very funny character within the play, which delighted us all. Another student led one of the design commissions. She demonstrated a deep and natural understanding of co-design, presenting ideas to her ‘actor’, and re-designing according to their feedback, she attended all rehearsals in order to understand the character development and the needs of the actor. She frequently communicated with the student costume director and production manager to ensure that her designs were aligned to the aesthetic concept of The Play. The close collaboration between Princess Katherine (Figure 1) and the design team resulted in outstanding costume, hair and make-up.

Figure 1. Princess Katherine.

These roles and opportunities positively influenced student engagement and confidence by providing the space to be response-able and accept responsibility in the co-design. The Play provided ways to consider education beyond lecturers, university or parents, but the wider collaboration that is possible. For all the students this exercise brought to life the ‘human quality’ that needs to be addressed in any educational endeavour (Landfester and Metelmann 2018).

We took this path almost intuitively by experimenting with learning activities, in part informed by one of the author’s research in responsible research innovation, and the other’s engagement with community leadership and, in part, building on the responses from peers and colleagues confronted with similar challenges. Through critical conversations with students and mentors, our reflections have taken us to very productive sites.

Positive results are becoming influential in the programme revisions in the TNE Campus at Nanhai and are still informing our practices in other institutions and home programmes. The Play manifested and solidified many of the ideas that were timidly developed. Ours was and is a journey of gradually constructing a pedagogy of response-ability. We have identified two primary contributions. The first is engaging with the necessary task of dismantling the myth of Chinese students as passive and disengaged, and second offering the opportunity to decolonise the curriculum by creating opportunities to bridge knowledges through the three principles of response-ability. The Play offers a good practice case and tangible principles to inform teaching and learning processes in Chinese environments and in British Higher Education context with international students. Above all, response-ability has become the backbone of our pedagogical practice development and is impacting directly on our current students, colleagues in other HE institutions and research endeavours.

Conclusions

We found that playful, creative, collaborative and anticipatory processes are very effective sites, not just to discover and practice response-able pedagogy but also to make sense, reflect on and rearticulate it. By using The Play to articulate our pedagogical proposal, we found that students learnt most effectively when they are able to make connections, have spaces, language and tools to respond to new knowledge within their existing frameworks of understanding.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is another key element of response-able pedagogy. It is easier to reflect on what it means to learn, to research, to design, to manage business and lead projects once distanced from discipline constraints. Our conversations pushed our own subject understandings to their limits, creating a site, a milieu of catalytic encounter. Without peer mirroring, review, and constant critical reflection, without the work of permanently comparing experiences of teaching and learning, and studying them within our newly developed disciplinary frameworks, The Play would be just one curious activity. Equally, the success of the experience for the students relied to a great degree upon the interaction across subjects.

Lastly, it is important for the reader to learn about our difficulties of writing this paper. Experiencing China and trying to articulate the experience is extremely complicated and even painful. We think it is important to surface our own struggle and how, what we have been calling cultural clashes, impacts not just modes of learning, but modes of living, ethical values and modes of being in the worlds (Escobar 2016). From the UK, some of the internal and external Chinese policies are perceived as outrageous: the Uyghurs persecution and genocide, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, environmental crimes, the state interference in civil liberties and human rights. However, from Nanhai, we are also seeing with horror some of the policies and aspects of our culture: social inequalities, individualism and abuse of liberties to justify destructive behaviours, the interference of multinational corporations on what it means to be human, consumerism and new and renewed colonial behaviours translating in social and planetarian crises. In addition, we also experience very intimately the benefits and kindliness of the two worlds, cultures and people.

In the middle of this, TNE partnerships arise and multiply with attention to tax systems, etiquettes, conventions, university strategy and quality assurance. Beyond these pragmatic issues, there is little discussion on how such encounters play out in the classroom arena. In this article, we were careful to situate ourselves outside narratives of West–East, Global North–Global South, hegemonic or the dominant-dominated discourses. This binary differentiation on one hand invisibilised the rest of the world, but on the other maintains a polarising relation that negates any possibility of creative encounter. Instead, and citing Arturo Escobar (2016, 13), we have constructed a way of visualising ‘speaking about knowledges, is also speaking about worlds’, through the development of a response-able pedagogy to make space for the coexistence of multiple worlds, more-than-human worlds, and knowledges. We are going to leave this paper with the final words from two studies student who graduated in 2020, 2 years after performing in Henry V.

I was also impressed by the Henry V, which brought us multicultural knowledge, made the business cohort closer and was one of our most meaningful experiences.

And from the student magazine;

If college life is the galaxy of the night sky, then the experience of participating in Henry V's play must be the most dazzling one of my many memories. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, or perhaps it’s a secret gaze, Henry V belongs to the Lancaster dynasty, and we are also students of Lancaster University, the half-makeup King Henry, are you also blessing the campus for a better tomorrow? (Translated from Chinese by Google Translate)

Ethical considerations

Due consideration has been given to the ethical considerations of this ‘case study’ of The Play as it was part of a curricula activity and not set up as a research project and has been used retrospectively by the two authors to reflect on pedagogical challenges and possible solutions. We have emailed permission from the students to use photos and the magazine article where specific students are mentioned or shown. Other data have been taken from public social media site ‘WeChat’ following the performance, the student magazine article and from curricular evaluations. Other comments have come from a variety of articles written for the two University websites about the performance.

Acknowledgements

We would first like to thank the two reviewers and the journal editors for assisting us in the development of this paper. We would like to acknowledge our co-designers, creative collaborators and students; the design cohort ‘2017’; and the business studies cohort ‘2018’, for learning and teaching with us. We will need to thank all the colleagues from the three institutions that collaborate with us in The Play and took part in lengthy lunch time and evening discussions about pedagogical and cultural clashes, and to the universities for the budgets and help in getting this project off the ground.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 From Shakespeare in Love by John Madden (1983).