Effects Beyond Effectiveness: Teaching as a Performative Act

Abstract

This article develops the familiar metaphor of teaching as performance towards a definition of teaching as performative act, where words and actions aim to effect cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes in learners. To what extent, however, are the consequences of pedagogical actions commensurate with their intended effects? Can a science of “effective teaching” effectively delineate, ascertain, and predict the effects of teachers’ pedagogical practices? Through the lens of speech act theory, I argue that teaching consists of pedagogical perlocutions—speech acts whose observed and unobserved effects on learners exceed authorial intention and scientific prediction. Attempts to subdue this excess of effects lend themselves to definitions of teacher effectiveness scripted by the instruments and institutions of scientifically based research. I conclude by considering the ways in which these definitions of effects and effectiveness are themselves the performative effects of performance‐based teacher assessment regimes.

Notes

Notes

1. Born of the marriage between theater studies and cultural anthropology in the 1950s, Performance Studies has since grown into a mature field of inquiry spanning the length and breadth of literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, gender studies, queer theory, political theory, linguistics, philosophy, business, engineering, and even cognitive neuroscience (Carlson, ; McKenzie, ; Schechner, ). Despite its wide interdisciplinary reach, Performance Studies scholarship remains marginalized in the field of educational studies. A thorough theoretical exposition of performance theories in relation to the study of teaching waits to be written.

2. Numerous critics have since expounded on the problems and ambiguities in Austin’s account of the illocution/perlocution distinction, a fuller account of which is beyond the scope of this article. See, for example, Akhimien (), Campbell (), Cohen (), Davis (), Gaines (), Gu (), Hornsby (), Kurzon (), Marcu (), Searle (), and Strawson ().

3. In appreciation of the sheer complexity and variety of pedagogical actions, one need only be reminded of the considerable individual and cultural variance in the gestural accompaniments of speech. That which Shoshana Felman () refers to as “the scandal of the speaking body” gestures towards the communicative mischief that embodied nonverbal signifiers can potentially discharge alongside the visible effects of pedagogical speech acts. To this complex scene one might add the observation that meanings and intentions can also be communicated wordlessly. For a review of theory and research on nonverbal communication, see Andersen ().

4. Over the last 3 decades, “complexity thinking” has emerged at the frontiers of scientific efforts to understand the seeming irregularities of complex natural and human phenomena. Also known as dynamical systems theory, complexity science seeks to understand the uncertain processes of pattern formation in complex, self‐organizing, adaptive systems, while challenging standard depictions of linear causality and correlations in traditional positivist science (e.g., Davis & Sumara, ; Eidelson, ; Juarrero, ; Prigogine & Stengers, ). This scientific view of human social activity is one that resonates with the extraordinary complexity of pedagogical phenomena. To date, complexity science has made modest inroads into the mainstream of scientifically based research on teaching and learning.

5. Philosophical skepticism, broadly construed, challenges the epistemologies of rationalism and empiricism, twin features of scientific positivism. Rationalists hold reason as the principal vehicle of true knowledge, the final objects of which are assumed to be immutable and eternal. Empiricists emphasize experience and perception as the principal means of acquiring genuine knowledge of the world. Skeptical considerations, which I consider to be necessary for a reflexive and rigorous educational science, argue that all knowledge arises from the contingent nature of perception, and are therefore susceptible to human error, delusion, and solipsism. A further examination of skepticism as it relates to questions of scientific uncertainty and indeterminacy is worth pursuing, although this gloss must suffice for now.

6. For collections of scholarly debates on the National Research Council’s recommendations regarding scientifically based research in education, see the special theme issues of Educational Researcher (, vol. 31, no. 8), Educational Theory (2005, vol. 55, no. 3), Qualitative Inquiry (2004, vol. 10, no. 5), and Teachers College Record (2005, vol. 107, no.1).

7. Correspondence theories of truth belong to a long philosophical tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle. Its central tenets were discussed in the writings of medieval thinkers like Aquinas and Ockham, developed through the modern period by the likes of Hume, Mill, Russell, Moore, and the later Wittgenstein, and formally elaborated by contemporary thinkers such as Gottlob Frege, Alfred Tarski, and Donald Davidson. Broadly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth posits that truth consists in a relation to reality: that truth is a relational property inhering in the “correspondence” between a specified set of properties and a specified set of observed characteristics or facts. Without entering into the intricacies of this philosophical trope, I have offered a rendition of “correspondence” that bears affinities with Austinian speech act theory so as to facilitate, without oversimplifying, the terms of my argument.

8. Elsewhere, I have argued that the performative effects of these performance appraisal systems extend to teachers’ own performative “fabrications” of their professional achievements in the Work Review documents (Liew, ). What seems disturbing, if ironic, is that the linguistic performativity of performance appraisals furnishes a generative script by which teachers can perform excellently on paper under the pressure to perform.

9. This attack on traditional correspondence theories of truth is a familiar argument from a particular strand of pragmatist philosophy. In contrast with James, Dewey, Peirce, Putnam, and Habermas, Rorty maintains that to elucidate the “truth” of a belief or theory is not to ascribe any verifiable property to it; rather, it is to perform an illocutionary or perlocutionary speech act (e.g., to inform, to recommend, to advise, to examine).