The Theatricality of Pedagogy : An Exploration of the Open and Hidden Connections between Theatre and Pedagogy

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Frimberger, Katja and Kenklies, Karsten, eds. (2026) The Theatricality of Pedagogy : An Exploration of the Open and Hidden Connections between Theatre and Pedagogy. Paedagogica . Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. (In Press)

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Abstract

‘Pedagogy’ is about schools and teaching techniques, isn’t it? This book dispels this mistaken myth! Liberating pedagogy from the stifling prison of the school institution, we show that the pedagogical is not only closer to the theatre than to the school – but perhaps best understood as a ritual and cultural performance. Transcending the four walls of the classrooms and taking the reader on a journey to the cinema, the theatre, the performance space for babies, the comedy club, the fashion catwalk and the theatre of everyday life – we show that pedagogy – like the theatre performance - is an aesthetic and temporal construction. What plays a student here is pedagogy’s temporal rhythms - set by its cultural form’s spatial elements: the movie’s images, the theatre’s embodiments, the curated modes of fashion or the presentation of self in everyday living. As the intentional, curative act of an educator, who can indeed be a film or theatre director, comedian or fashion designer (and of course a schoolteacher) – a pedagogical space (the film reception, the theatre performance, the comedy gig, the classroom) often only reveals its ethical and normative inscriptions in this relational and aesthetic play: between the pedagogue’s gesture of curation and the student’s engagement with what is presented to their intellect and senses. As such, pedagogical inquiry, as we present it in this book, is a practical philosophy of education - concerned with how and why certain cultural activities and artefacts relate their ‘students’ to certain ‘knowledge(s)’ in the way they do (e.g. through telling jokes, clothing, gestic acting or haptic performances).

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