Reflective Practice and Performance Art in the Training of Support Teachers ^†

Abstract

This contribution explores the role of reflective practice and performative methodologies in the professional development of support teachers, framing reflectivity as a complex and articulated form of thinking that goes beyond intuitive reflection. Drawing on theories of transformative learning and practice-based research, the paper argues that performative approaches—grounded in embodied, emotional, and narrative experience—can effectively foster teachers’ critical awareness, professional identity construction, and capacity for inclusive educational action. The study presents a teacher training experience implemented within the Specialization Course for Support Teaching Activities at Link Campus University, involving a 20-h workshop attended by 200 lower secondary school teachers. Centered on performance art practices, the workshop aimed to promote reflective processes related to themes of exclusion and inclusion through bodily engagement, collective meaning-making, and non-verbal communication. Participants were actively involved in designing and performing activities, thus positioning themselves as protagonists of their own learning trajectories. Data collected through pre- and post-intervention questionnaires highlight participants’ positive perceptions of the experience and its transferability to school contexts. Findings suggest that performative methodologies support emotional sharing, enhance group cohesion, and contribute to the creation of a supportive classroom climate, while also strengthening teachers’ reflective and transformative capacities. The paper concludes by emphasizing the pedagogical value of performative practices as tools for fostering inclusive, reflective, and experience-based teacher education.

1. Introduction

Teacher education has long been a central focus of the scholarly literature. Defining the profile of a highly qualified and professional teacher entails identifying the knowledge and competencies that characterize the profession, with the aim of counteracting educational poverty and fostering the development of new languages and forms of expression.

In particular, several key elements are widely recognized as fundamental: mastery of academic disciplines; the ability to design and organize effective individualized learning pathways for each student; competence in selecting appropriate materials and tools and in using effective languages; the capacity to work and communicate collaboratively; and active participation in school management, relationships with families, and the organization of one’s own personal and professional development [1]. Within this framework, the issue of reflectivity assumes particular importance. Reflectivity can be conceptualized as something more complex than reflection alone, which, although intrinsic to the teaching role, is often more intuitive and immediate. Reflectivity instead represents thinking in its most articulated form.

Engaging in reflective practice enables teachers to analyze, discuss, evaluate, and modify their organizational, educational, and instructional practices in relation to their social and political contexts. It also fosters critical awareness of personal beliefs, supports consciousness of one’s own formative and developmental trajectory, and contributes to the construction of a personal teaching philosophy.

One effective means of fostering reflectivity can be identified in performative methodologies, which encompass expressive, narrative, artistic, dramatic, and theatrical techniques grounded in the construct of performance. Through these approaches, meaning is constructed via embodied experience, either in simulated contexts or through guided structuring [2]. Through performance, teachers actively engage themselves, exercise reflectivity, and work on the construction of their professional identity by reconnecting with values, motivations, and beliefs rooted in their personal histories and linking them to professional goals and experiences, thus reconstructing their own narrative [3].

Consequently, teachers in training who experience themselves as protagonists of their own learning processes are more likely to reproduce this same model with their students, thereby laying the foundations for educational success. Teachers’ professional development cannot therefore be linked to linear processes or delegated to traditional, transmissive, and asymmetrical training models [4]. Rather, methodologies that align training, learning, research, and action should be promoted [5,6].

From this perspective, the present contribution outlines a teacher training proposal implemented within the Specialization Course for Support Teaching Activities at Link Campus University, centered on performative methodologies. It also presents initial data derived from the administration of pre- and post-intervention grids aimed at collecting teachers’ experiences and perceptions regarding the classroom activities and their transferability to school contexts.

2. Performative Methodologies

Performative methodologies foster the exercise of action–thought, enabling teachers to move from acquired patterns of thinking, behavior, and action toward more conscious and intentionally oriented strategies [7,8]. They stimulate communicative action and narrative processes, allowing individuals to relate to the external world, to others, and to their own intentions, feelings, and desires [9], while also reactivating experiences, dilemmas, and real-life situations.

These methodologies promote experience-based learning, as they rely minimally on symbolic and linguistic tools in favor of embodied and affective knowledge [2,10,11]. The performative nature of learning implies that new or distant experiences acquire new meanings and perspectives through the practices and relationships in which they are embedded [12].

Learning undoubtedly involves cognitive processes; however, current research highlights that learning becomes more meaningful when it also involves bodily and emotional experience [13]. This allows for the reinterpretation of experience within new contexts, applying knowledge derived from prior elaborations and implicit acquisitions to attribute meaning to new interactions [9].

Accordingly, performative methodologies are not limited to aspects of representational spontaneity, but also encompass the capacity to process and respond to challenging situations, to understand, reflect, and engage in dialogue in order to generate new meanings [9].

3. Performance Art

Performance art enables a shift from reality to imagination, much like children’s symbolic play. Performance is the artistic medium through which the artwork undergoes immediate dematerialization, with the creative process assuming central importance over the final outcome.

Strategies of engagement consistent with these aims are shaped through chance, improvisation, and non-repetition. Unlike theatrical or choreographic works, performance is not structured as a sequence of actions conveying meaning through predetermined form. Although it depends on prior planning, it does not rely on a script in the theatrical sense.

Its meaning lies in being an action originating from a specific sender, whose execution and reception contain its very raison d’être. Were it merely a rehearsed and learned gesture, its meaning would reside in its stylistic form; however, as it derives from everyday actions, its significance emerges precisely because it appears in a distinct time and space and will not be repeated. Consequently, the gesture is always different, as it is subject to chance, spatial conditions, and the audience’s response.

In most cases, performance engages with archetypes located in the collective unconscious, with the aim of eliciting deep reflection in the audience. To perform, in its most fundamental sense, is to act in order to produce a change in reality—to generate movement from one state to another.

Performance thus provokes an aesthetic and artistic experience in both the spectator and the performer, producing transformation in both. What matters is not the comprehension of the artist’s actions, but the experiences they evoke in spectators during the performance; in other words, what matters is the transformation of those who take part in the event [14].

As with any artistic manifestation, performance art can be described through certain formal elements: time, space, and the body, defined by its limits.

4. Aims of the Workshop “The Words of Exclusion”

The workshop was designed for the professional development of lower secondary school teachers attending the Specialization Course for Support Teaching Activities at Link Campus University. The workshop lasted 20 h and involved 200 teachers.

Its primary aim was to enable teachers to experience activities fostering group construction, supportive relationships, and a serene, collaborative climate through the sharing of spaces, ideas, and projects, as well as through bodily and emotional engagement. The workshop promoted reflective processes that facilitate awareness and reasoning about one’s own strengths and limitations, encouraging participants to transfer the experience to their school practice after having personally engaged in it.

Teachers were actively involved in planning, designing, organizing, and performing the activities, as bearers of situated knowledge rooted in practice and returning to it [15]. The critical–reflective dimension was fostered through a movement from individual experience to collective meaning-making [16]. In this context, performative methodologies enabled participants to share experiences and emotions while questioning underlying assumptions and taken-for-granted values shaping discourses and practices within schools and professional communities.

Relational and reflective performative practices were prioritized, aimed at collective negotiation, the development of critical and creative thinking, and the enhancement of awareness and the ability to seize learning opportunities arising from professional experience in school contexts [17]. This required engaging with participants’ personal and professional experiential flows, as well as with their ongoing processes of interpretation in action.

Teachers actively engaged in the process and experienced a proposal capable of fostering synergy between body and mind, exploration of space and others, and the creation of a cohesive and supportive group that promotes learning. In school practice, this translates into creating conditions in which each student feels free to express themselves, supported rather than judged by peers and teachers.

5. Workshop Activities

Initially, ice-breaking exercises were proposed. Progressive bodily and mental closeness facilitates the sharing of thoughts and emotions, leading to the design and realization of a performance through which the group approaches an emotional understanding of words associated with exclusion and loneliness. This activity stems from teachers’ awareness of the need to sensitize students to the emotional experiences of those who feel isolated and excluded.

Given that only a small proportion of communication (approximately 10%) is conveyed verbally, while the remaining 90% is transmitted through non-verbal and paraverbal channels (gestures, gaze, posture), performance emphasizes these dimensions. Teachers in training selected a word related to exclusion (e.g., anger, sadness, loneliness) and sought to become that word through performance—not by imitation or representation, but by embodying and sensing it. Through the unity of body and mind, participants learned and approached meaning experientially.

Designing and embodying the chosen word collectively strengthened group cohesion, enabling shared emotional experience. Teachers thus recognized the importance of building and belonging to a group, exercising reflectivity and learning to promote it among their students.

The performance art activities were documented through photography. In educational contexts, photography enhances individual and collective reflectivity by fostering externalization of thought, temporal distancing, and perspectival decentering—conditions that amplify metacognition and critical inquiry. From a pedagogical standpoint, photography acts as a mediator between lived experience and conceptualization, making tacit dimensions of learning visible and supporting dialogic and collaborative practices. Within a curriculum oriented toward reflectivity, photography functions as a catalyst for awareness, responsibility, and projectual thinking, enabling deep and transferable learning.

Finally, a questionnaire administered at the end of the workshop investigated participants’ experiences and the perceived transferability of the activities to school contexts.

6. Data Analysis and Concluding Reflections

Data were collected through questionnaires administered to participants before and after the workshop. The data collection instruments consisted of 18 closed-ended questions with three response options (Yes/Partly/No) and one open-ended question aimed at gathering qualitative reflections on the training experience. The closed-ended questions explored teachers’ perceptions regarding group climate, emotional sharing, the role of non-verbal communication, and the usefulness of performative methodologies in teaching practice.

Data analysis was conducted using a descriptive approach, combining a quantitative reading of the closed-ended responses with a thematic interpretation of the reflections expressed in the open-ended question. This procedure made it possible to identify recurring patterns related to group cohesion, emotional engagement, and the perceived transferability of the activities to school contexts.

The analysis of responses revealed a strongly positive perception of the training experience among participants. A large majority of teachers (86%) reported that it is possible to design and implement activities involving the body and non-verbal communication in everyday teaching practice, while 12% considered this possibility only partial and a very small percentage (2%) expressed disagreement.

Similarly, 93% of participants considered non-verbal communication to be a fundamental element in classroom interaction. The same percentage (93%) declared their willingness to propose activities similar to those experienced during the workshop in their own classrooms, while 6% considered this possibility only partial and 1% expressed some reservations. Moreover, 93% of teachers reported that the proposed activities effectively supported the development of reflective practice.

Overall, the results show a remarkable convergence in participants’ perceptions, with very high levels of agreement (between 86% and 93%) across the main dimensions explored. These findings suggest a shared recognition of the pedagogical value of performative and embodied approaches in teacher education.

The results also provide empirical support for the relevance of performative methodologies in teacher training, suggesting that such approaches can foster reflective processes, emotional engagement, and collaborative learning within educational settings.

In particular, the analysis highlights three main dimensions: the recognition of the pedagogical value of non-verbal communication, the perceived feasibility of integrating embodied activities into everyday teaching practice, and the role of such experiences in fostering teachers’ reflective awareness.

Among the various ways of conceptualizing the teaching profession, the reflective practitioner model is currently one of the most prominent theoretical perspectives. Numerous studies describe teachers as professionals capable of reflecting both in action and on action [18], as well as on the implicit dimensions of teaching practice and its pedagogical formats [1]. Teachers must therefore be able to reflect on themselves and on their implicit assumptions, becoming aware of them and capable of transforming both their professional practice and the contextual conditions in which they operate [19].

In this regard, performative methodologies offer a significant contribution [20] to collaborative teacher reflection on how lived experiences may influence—and sometimes distort—ways of thinking about emotions and educational needs. Performative methodological devices facilitate collaborative inquiry processes that support the development of collective action models and the construction of reflective knowledge [6,17].

The specific nature of performative methodologies allows participants to actively interpret experiences that, due to their ambiguity and indeterminacy, are particularly conducive to critical–reflective learning. In the workshop described, these methodologies supported teachers in critically reflecting on the meanings of exclusion and inclusion and in analyzing institutional and social practices that may foster one or the other.

From this perspective, performative methodologies can represent a promising pedagogical resource for promoting inclusive, reflective, and experience-based teacher education, particularly in contexts where emotional awareness and relational competencies play a central role. Further research could explore the long-term impact of such approaches on classroom practices and on teachers’ professional development trajectories.