Jonathan Heron

Open-space learning : a study in transdisciplinary pedagogy

Open-space Learning offers a unique resource to educators wishing to develop a workshop model of teaching and learning. The authors propose an embodied, performative mode of learning that challenges the primacy of the lecture and seminar model in higher education. Drawing on the expertise of the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning) at the University of Warwick, they show how pedagogic techniques developed from the theatrical rehearsal room may be applied effectively across a wide range of disciplines. The book offers rich case-study materials, supplemented by video and documentary resources, available to readers electronically. These practical elements are supplemented by a discursive strand, which draws on the methods of thinkers such as Freire, Vygotsky and Kolb, to develop a formal theory around the notion of Open-space Learning. CAPITAL was a collaboration between the University of Warwicks Department of English and the Royal Shakespeare Company. CAPITAL was succeeded by the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL) in 2010.

‘There’s the record, closed and final’: Rough for Theatre II as Psychiatric Encounter

A co-authored collaboration between a theatre practitioner and a clinical psychiatrist, this paper will examine Rough for Theatre II (RFTII) and Beckett’s demonstration of the way records are used to understand the human subject. Using Beckett’s play to explore interdisciplinary issues of embodiment and diagnosis, the authors will present a dialogue that makes use of the ‘best sources’ in precisely the same manner as the play’s protagonists. One of those sources will be Beckett himself, as Heron will locate the play in its theatrical context through reflections upon his own practice (with Fail Better Productions, UK) as well as recent studies such as Beckett, Technology and the Body (Maude 2009) and Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (McMullan 2010); another source will be the philosopher Wilhelm Windleband, whose 1901 History of Philosophy was read and noted upon by Beckett in the 1930s, as Broome will introduce a philosophical and psychiatric context to the exchange. Windelband is now a neglected figure in philosophy; but as one of the key figures of Neo-Kantianism in the late 19th century, his work was an important impetus to that of Rickert, Weber and Heidegger. Specifically, Windelband gives us the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic understanding of individuals, an approach that is of relevance to the psychiatric encounter. This academic dialogue will consider tensions between subjectivity and objectivity in clinical and performance practice, while examining Beckett’s analysis of the use of case notes and relating them back to Windelband’s ideas on the understanding of others. The dialogue took place in 2011 at the University of Warwick, and has since been edited by the authors.

Critical pedagogies and the theatre laboratory

ABSTRACT This dialogue contributes reflections on the ‘theatre laboratory’ to the scholarly debate surrounding methodologies of drama education and applied performance. The co-authors suggest that the experimental and ensemble-led approach of the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, founded at Trinity College Dublin in 2013 as a space for research into Beckett in performance, may offer one response to a question that Kathleen Gallagher proposes in the twentieth Anniversary issue of RiDE (20.3), concerning ‘how drama educators might incorporate such practices of hope into their pedagogy’ [2015. “Beckoning Hope and Care.” RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Drama Education 20 (3): 423]. This work suggests that the hopeful practice of laboratory exploration de-hierarchises a scholarly endeavour and recasts the student as co-creator of knowledge, rather than consumer of cultural capital. The values and practices of such a laboratory may open one avenue of participatory pedagogy that scaffolds risk and re-values failure. In the dialogue that follows, we draw on Gallagher’s ‘practices of hope’ to develop our own interests in the subjunctivity of performance pedagogies in Beckettian contexts [cf. Heron, J., N. Johnson, B. Dinçel, G. Quinn, S. J. Scaife, and Á. Tyrrell, 2014. “The Samuel Beckett Laboratory 2013.” Journal of Beckett Studies 23 (1): 73–94].

‘Beckett on the Wards’: medical humanities pedagogy and ‘compassionate care’

To be ‘compassionate’ is to share the passion—etymologically, to suffer together. For some clinicians, there is an understandable tension between this compassion (to feel pity) and the imperative of diagnosis (to know thoroughly). This tension became an explicit concern of the 2013 ‘Beckett on the Wards’ medical humanities project (commissioned by Health Education Kent, Surrey and Sussex, hereafter HEKSS), and the 2012 ‘Beckett and Brain Science’ interdisciplinary research project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, hereafter AHRC). This educational case study exemplifies the medical humanities in a number of ways, but primarily through the direct collaboration between theatre practitioners and consultant psychiatrists. It will proceed in three parts: (1) the academic context, (2) the clinical context and (3) the pedagogic practice, before a final reflection on the use of Samuel Becketts theatre within clinical settings. This work has now been expanded as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind’ research project at the Universities of Bristol, Exeter and Warwick. Elizabeth Barry, Ulrika Maude and Laura Salisbury, scholars of Beckett and medicine, collaborated with performance practitioner Jonathan Heron and consultant psychiatrist Matthew Broome to investigate Becketts interests in the sciences of the brain, the influence of these interests on his work and the value of his writing to those studying and treating disorders of the brain and nervous system today. Herons transdisciplinary workshops, involving scholars and practitioners in the arts and sciences, gave shape to the intuition of many clinicians that literature and theatre offer a means to understand challenging mental conditions. Through this work, Becketts depiction of disordered experience offered a stimulating challenge to the categories and narratives used in medicine. These …