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Constructivist pedagogical roles played by my
teacher personas
Being at the mercy of an educational landscape in crisis (Jansen 2017; 2018; 2019; Jansen & Walters 2018), resource shortages, recurring protests, loadshedding and a pandemic, teaching at a public university is, as Freire (2005) says, an act of courage and love. In essence, there is a range of roles that I play when activating my teacher persona as will be explained next.
Constructivist pedagogical role: Teacher as a
playful performer
Teacher as a playful performer is a calculated stage persona to appeal to the hearts and minds of students who become playful co-performers (Nørgård, Toft-Nielsen & Whitton 2017; Whitton & Langan 2019) that allows for spontaneity, creativity and improvisation (Liew 2013). To this end, my playful pedagogical performance is often noisy, full of laughter and characterised by fun and engaging banter.
Practices include role-playing media conferences with me acting the satirical, difficult journalist and students playing the roles of confident, company spokespersons in our jointly enacted flexible scripts. During the role-play, I act out a somewhat notorious and larger-than-life fictional character, so-called ‘Suzy from The Star’, a difficult Debora Patta-like journalist. As a result, role-play is a lot of fun but also stressful (Motta 2013), especially for shy students. For this reason, I make it clear that
I play a role to facilitate learning which is accelerated when we are
out of our comfort zones, as articulated by hooks (1994). Also, as I explain to students, media training prepares us to face the difficult journalist, not the friendly neighbourhood journalist. In a few instances, final-year students said they were placed in difficult situations during job interviews and were actually asked how they would respond to journalists’ questions. More than once, students said they remembered ‘Suzy from The Star’, and were able to comfortably handle interviews, giving very good answers.
When learning the theory of media conferences, we critique funny videos which are typical of spokespersons that tried to hide the truth or protect corrupt officials. Also included in my lecture slides is a video of me being interviewed on a live television panel. This, of course, gives us all a lot of pleasure and laughter as students critique my interviewee skills.
A favourite is trending topics on Twitter, which is a rich source of satirical mocking and parody highlighting the pressing issues related to social injustices such as prejudice, disinformation, unethical conduct in advertising and marketing campaigns.
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