Teaching Is Performance: Reconceptualizing a Problematic Metaphor

Abstract

Analogies between teaching and performance have recently emerged in educational literature, but with a reductive, actor-centered perspective that diminishes the complexity of both performative and instructional phenomena. This article reconceptualizes performance as a generative metaphor for educational research based on theoretical and methodological points of contact between instructional communication and performance studies. It asks which aspects of educational experience open themselves up to performance-centered research and explores issues around which new research agendas can be developed in both disciplines.