Representation and Reception

Representation and Reception: Brechtian ‘Pedagogics of Theatre’ and Critical Thinking deploys German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of drama and performance, what he calls "the pedagogics of theatre", to create modes of critical thinking in the classroom. Extrapolating on Brecht’s estranged forms of representation—narrative, story, montage, Verfremdüngseffeckt or alienation, tableaux, ostension (showing), gestus, masks and music—Burney constructs an original "3-R Pedagogy" or "spiral of semiosis"—"Rethinking/Replaying/Re-cognition"—that is designed to create critical thinking and "complex seeing". Her dramatic production of Brecht’s Lehrstück, or learning-play, The Exception and the Rule, for a non-literate, working-class audience in Hyderabad, India, critically analyses how audiences make meaning through image, word and ideology, gesture, memory, collective experience and personal
(hi)stories.

Shehla Burney is Professor of Cultural Studies and Education at Queen’s University, one of Canada’s leading universities. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, with an international award for her doctoral dissertation from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education at New York, 1989. She is also the recipient of three gold medals for her academic degrees. Her previous book, Pedagogy of the Other: Edward Said, Postcolonial Theory and Strategies for Critique (Peter Lang 2012) was well-received internationally. Dr. Burney’s research interests lie in contemporary critical and cultural theory, poststructuralist critique, postcolonialism, and critical pedagogy, which she innovatively applies to the study of media, representation, drama in education, and the semiotics of theatre reception.