Summary: | Arguing for the positive disruptive nature of interruption, this paper concentrates on my current performative and pedagogic usage of interruption within my teaching as the means to achieve three aims: 1) develop aspects of practice discussed in my doctoral thesis ‘Tactics of Interruption: Provoking Participation in Performance Art’ (Campbell 2016) related to the focused usage of interruptive processes in contemporary art practice (Arlander 2009: 2) provide students with direct experience of how interruption may command immediate reaction and force collaborative means of working, i.e. collective survival tactics to deal with interruption; and 3) theorise, articulate and demonstrate how interruption relates to critical reflection (on the part of both student and teacher), extending the ideas of Maggi Savin-Baden (2007) to propose interruption as reflection. To achieve these aims, the paper discusses how I have implemented interruption into learning activity design and evidences how I have created activities that aim to help students understand collaborative learning in cross-disciplinary projects through an effective use of realia (interruption is part of real life). I discuss one first year teaching seminar at Loughborough University in March 2015 (and subsequent related iterations) combining performance, fine art and collaboration methodologies where students directly engaged in a range of activities not displaced from their own life experiences; there was heavy student engagement in digital technologies, and interruption. The main outcomes of the teaching session support and go beyond the aims by relating to: a) experiential learning related to the interplay between ‘collaboration’ and ‘interruption’; b) performative pedagogy and inclusion; c) the interplay between teaching, liveness and interruption; and d) performative pedagogy and the exchange of power relation.
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