Learning by Creating
An Educational Experience in Demarcation Hungary
We teach students a lot of subjects at school, but they learn very little themselves. And they certainly don’t learn how to take independent, performative action: you only have to listen to their exam answers to see that they are almost incapable of selling a topic independently in 5 minutes. Yet these performative acts would be needed in a futuristic Tomorrow: if you can’t instruct it properly, the AI won’t help it.
So the most serious problem is here: performative learning. Learning to speak, to perform, to express, to articulate. To give up precise search questions to intelligence. To extract the essence from a complex text, to look at a text from a particular point of view, from another point of view. To transpose, abstract, translate, persuade, argue, detect contradictions, override misinformation. This requires an active intellect, while school develops passive, reactive – repetitive skills.
It is understandable, of course, that they were not taught to perform performative action, since they were hardly ever given such a task. It is the teacher’s work that is performative throughout the school years, for hundreds and hundreds of lessons, and the student’s is not at all. And online tools only make this worse when we rely on closed-ended question sets to do away with the performative development of students altogether and instead send them clicking on answer choices A, B, C or D. We were not looking for a technique for our purposes, we could not use them for performative development, but what the technique can do (evaluating closed-ended tasks), we subordinated the processes to.
Learning by creating must therefore be reinforced in the school: the teacher must step off the stage and become a tutor instead of an actor, to send the student up to take his place.
The model of learning by creating does not come out of nowhere as an unknown paradigm, but is a close relative of constructivist pedagogy, which has always been about the learner constructing his or her own web of knowledge for him or herself. And it has long been present in language teaching as a variant of drama pedagogy, which asks the learner or a group of learners to represent situations in dialogue. It sends them on stage.
The term „performative learning” itself was coined by Manfred Schewe, professor at Cork University in Ireland, in his 2013 article Taking Stock and Looking Ahead. His pedagogical model can be read in the proceedings of a conference in Hannover in 2018, in publications based on it from 2019, and in Schewe’s more recent Visions of a Performative Teaching, 2023. The method has its roots in foreign language teaching, where its “performative” character ranges from very small dialogues and role-plays performed by students to the staging of a whole play, but the researchers who have joined the initiative also refer to the role of other arts and the potential applications in other subjects – all those acts in which students create, perform, produce something. Thus, performative learning can be linked to visual arts, to the creation of graphic representations, and also to the increasingly widespread storytelling, in which learners create their own narrative about a subject they have studied. And, of course, this includes not only project work, Oxford debates, cooperative activities, but also, by definition, classical answers and essays, because in these too the learner acts, he or she performs a performative act in writing or orally (etymologically speaking: performs, performs, executes, realises).
So the performative learning (or learning by creating) organisation model has its roots and its points of reference in our practice, but a radical shift of proportions has become necessary and – with the advent of the technical background – possible. Just as the technical possibility of the caravelle met the need to find new commercial routes, or the technical possibility of printing met the need to read the Bible, which was so important to the Reformation, so the possibility of educational technology, which is now capable of more than just closed-ended, Kahoot-type communication, meets the need for a school that is not teaching but learning-centred.
I can say, of course, that performative learning (or learning by creating) is already happening in my classroom, because they are always writing essays and answering questions. Especially if I even have them write an essay (which is quite rare in the school world these days). I can say even more if they occasionally work on a project, give a report on a cooperative task. In fact, I can say this as often as I work with them on a task, be it a textbook example or an online test. So why should this change? Why is it necessary to make learning a truer learning experience?
It is a long-standing principle of Ignazi pedagogy that learning really happens in a three-way spiral: experience, reflection, action. What the learner himself formulates, composes, narrates, writes down, performs, discusses – what he really experiences, he then takes action. It is no coincidence that the Jesuit school has, from the very beginning, focused on school drama and drama performances. It engaged its students in real performative learning.
The stronger presence of performative learning is also a means of listening to the individual, of caring for the individual. It therefore goes beyond didactic solutions: it is also something to do as educators.
