Introducing the performing arts into our academic teaching allowed us to explore the potential of bringing the body back into Higher Education. Collaborating with artists in theatre or dance improvisation, we offered our students the atypical experience of moving barefoot in the context of their university studies. They could then express their feelings about the usual experience of studying at university: they told us that they often felt like “brains on a stick” in the classroom. However, our experiences with the performing arts as powerful pedagogical tools for teaching non-artistic disciplines shows that they can transform the relations of students to themselves, to their peers, to their teachers and to the topic. These pedagogical experiences led us to run a 4-year research project on the use of the performing arts in Higher Education, a collaboration of the University of Neuchâtel with the EPFL (Prof. Simon Henein, the ASCOPET research project, leading to the publication in 2024 of the book Barefoot Academic Teaching (see below).
I have been co-organising multiple training events on the use of Performing Arts in Higher Education, including:
- 2026. The performative conference series Poussons les tables sur le côté ! Corps, voix et espace dans la formation (co-organized with Prof. Roxane Gagnon, HEP Vaud). Two guests: Prof. George Belliveau (UBC, Canada): Nos histoires: théâtre, pédagogie et identité (March 18 2026); Sukhesh Arora (independant artist, Berlin): Entangled Worlds – Rehearsal scripts for speculative pedagogies (March 26 2026).
- 2025. the Scenario Summer School in Berlin: Transformation in scenarios of performative practice, 4-8 August 2025 (co-organized with the Scenario team at Cork University and the Freie Universität Berlin).
Introduction of the book Barefoot Academic Teaching
Tau, R., Kloetzer, L., & Henein, S. (2024). Barefoot Academic Teaching: Performing arts as a pedagogical tools in higher education. Scenario Book Series (No. 7), Schibri-Verlag.
A brain on a stick: half-bodies in higher education
Let us start with an anecdote. A few years ago, in 2014, a team of social scientists at the University of Neuchâtel created an event called Théâtre de la Connaissance, or Theatre of Knowledge[1], using the evocative and catalytic power of theatre to share and discuss scientific findings with a large audience inside and outside the university. For the 2017 edition of this event, called Territoire, the creative process included co-creation workshops with scientists and comedians, in which the comedians asked the researchers to demonstrate for them some typical teaching sessions, so that they could grasp something of our activity in order to interpret us on stage. Looking at the scientists’ body and movements in this simulated teaching situation, the comedians joked that we were “half-bodies”, “talking busts”, sitting or standing, using our face, mouth, and hands, but making the rest of our bodies invisible. It gave us a lot to think about.
Introducing the performing arts into our academic teaching opened up a real opportunity to explore these feelings and reflections further. The atypical experience of moving barefoot in the context of their university studies allowed our students to express their feelings about the usual experience of studying at university: they told us that they often felt like “brains on a stick” in the classroom. They began to reflect on the absence or even silencing of the body in higher education.
Indeed, all too often higher education sidelines the body in the teaching-learning process. Institutionally, academic teaching has been and often still is reduced to the “banking model” (to follow Freire, 1968) of transmitting abstract, decontextualised knowledge in a purely cognitive process, ignoring critical aspects of learning—especially its sensitive, affective, social, material, historical and political dimensions, all of which are present in the bodies of students and teachers.
This banking model, combined with the neoliberal pressures that make productivity requirements, constant assessment and endless competition part of the usual academic experience, can lead to a sense of alienation in the learning process. Students can feel dissociated both from their own selves (including their bodies) and from the personal meaning of studying, as they are taking exams in a rather automatic way. Indeed, student mental health is a growing concern in universities, with alarming statistics showing that a large number of students suffer from a range of symptoms, such as anxiety and depression.
The frequent avoidance of physical action in the university teaching and learning processes is regularly mentioned in our students’ reports, and seems to be the result of reinforcing and exacerbating a verbal system of argumentative communication. Teaching and assessment as predominantly verbal practices reinforce two fictions. The first is the assumption that the body is absent or minimally present in these interactions, as a kind of obstacle or nuisance to be minimised. The second fiction is that communication consists of a controlled flow of transmission and reception of discursive information. However, as systemic theorists showed more than half a century ago, “you cannot not communicate” (Keller, 2007; Watzlawick, Beavin-Bavelas & Jackson, 1967), even when interactions between people do not involve oral language. Even in the process of verbal or language-mediated interaction, gestures, use of space, prosody and many other dimensions involved in the argumentative process are often invisible to the subjects. This book, therefore, stems from our desire as teachers to bring the body back to the centre of the academic teaching-learning experiences. This is a small step towards promoting the university as an inclusive space of freedom of thought, joy of learning and sharing, collective knowledge creation and engagement for the future of our societies for all its participants.
Performing arts in Higher Education: structure of the book
With this in mind, the aim of this book is to share and explore two teaching-learning experiences involving the performing arts as a way of re-situating learning within the bodies of our university students. The performing arts have a long tradition of physical engagement and collective creation that we are transferring to the academic context. Our endeavours continue a diverse, multifaceted and active tradition that is well represented, for example, in the Scenario network.
Section 1, Mapping the Field, introduces our research project and its context. Chapter 1 doesn’t provide a full literature review of the flourishing field of performing arts in education, but it does sketch the landscape and offer some pointers for navigating these exciting waters. Chapter 2 introduces the research project called ASCOPET (les Arts de la Scène comme Outils Pédagogiques dans l’Enseignement Supérieur): it stems from the authors’ pedagogical commitment and their successful experiences using performing arts in their teaching, which we wanted to study and compare. Chapters 3 and 4 present our two pedagogical experiences, their contexts, objectives and concrete modalities.
Section 2, Discoveries, gives a taste of our findings regarding the place of the body in teaching-learning processes (Chapter 5), the transformation of relationships between peers and between learners and teachers (Chapter 6), the process of collective creation (Chapter 7), and the scope and uses of improvisation in the classroom (Chapter 8). Finally, we explore and discuss our experiences of delivering performing arts-based courses digitally, following our experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 9).
Section 3, Towards open water, aims to generalise our experiences and support the reflections of our colleagues who wish to use the performing arts in their academic teaching. Chapter 10 is a paradoxical text, highlighting the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of recipes for implementing university courses that use the performing arts at their core. Chapter 11 offers beacons for open navigation; it is a discussion of the implications of our analyses for the present and future of teaching and learning in the university.
This book is a collective effort based on interdisciplinary contributions from academic researchers working in two different institutions (University of Neuchâtel, UniNe, and École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) and artists, bringing together different disciplines (education, engineering, psychology, theatre studies) and arts (contemporary dance, theatre). The structure of the book reflects our multiple perspectives and ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues. The reader will notice that in Section 2 each of our main themes is presented in two parts. We have adopted a structure for this book in which the main scholarly findings presented in one chapter are echoed, revised or complemented by an artistic, subjective or reflective approach in the following pages. We hope that this structure in echo opens up possibilities for readers to appropriate and critically examine our findings in order to develop their own practice.
References
Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogía del oprimido. Paz e Terra.
Keller, J. C. (2007). Le Paradoxe dans la communication. Harmattan.
Lipson, S. K., Zhou, S., Abelson, S., Heinze, J., Jirsa, M., Morigney, J., Patterson, A., Singh, M., & Eisenberg, D. (2022). Trends in college student mental health and help-seeking by race/ethnicity: Findings from the national healthy minds study, 2013–2021. Journal of Affective Disorders, 306, 138-147.
Watzlawick, P., Beavin-Bavelas, J., & Jackson, D. (1967). Some Tentative Axioms of Communication. In Pragmatics of Human Communication. A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes. W. W. Norton.