Fake it until you make it! Questions raised by the lockdown about performativity and learning

The paper addresses Bruce Macfarlane’s ideas of a performative turn in higher education (2017, 2021), which systematically endorses a certain participatory, bodily and emotional behaviour at the expense of students’ rights to develop authentically. The discussion takes recent empirical studies among students in Denmark (Frederiksen and Fenger 2021; Sarauw and Frederiksen, 2020; Sarauw and Madsen, 2020) as a starting point for shedding a different light to the interrelation between performativity and learning. In the face of the lockdown many of us became aware of our professional dependency on bodily presence of our students as a way of measuring the success of our pedagogic setup. While the smiles and nods of our students, the engaged look on their face and impatiently waving hands are not formally approved as objects of assessment, many of us felt entirely lost in terms of evaluating our own performance as teachers, when our teaching moved online and deprived us from these bodily indicators and subtle affirmation (Lindelof, 202).Indirectly, the lockdown therefore called for reflection about the extent to which we can actually interpret students’ bodily performance as an indication of learning? Based on Macfarlane’s ideas that students increasingly perform visually detectable engagement, it might also be the case that what we in reality found ourselves missing, when our teaching moved online, was our students’ ability to fake that they were learning by complying with our unwritten expectations of particular bodily behaviours? Theoretical framework The analyses of the paper are framed by a discussion between a) Macfarlane’s(2017, 2021)negative notion of performativity as the opposite of authentic, student-centred learning as it was originally conceived by,e.g.,Carl Rogers,and b) other notions of performativity as a precondition for processes learning, unfolding in particular cultural and discursive settings, that delimit what is seen as legitimate practices of teaching and learning.