DARE: A Live Art Methodology that Embraces Disruption Towards a Pedagogy of Agonism

Abstract

This paper presents a new live art methodology for secondary education art classrooms, designed and tested through action research. This research investigated how pedagogical elements of live art, an embodied art practice not yet included in the secondary art curriculum, contribute to young people's development. It emerged in the context of the globalised crisis in education that instrumentalises and marginalises arts subjects. In contrast, I developed an approach that frames art as a process‐based pedagogy that uses disruptions as productive tensions, inspired by agonism (a political concept that emerged in the 1960s). I present DARE (Disruptive, Artistic, Reflexive, Exploration), a methodology that uses disruption and critical reflexivity identified as elements of live art that can transform education. DARE builds on a radical constructivist educational theory that embraces discomfort as dialogic knowledge production. Through examples of students' actions, I examine how tensions inherent in the formation of identity in adolescents become moments of learning through performance, often unravelling on the edge of chaos. The use of reflection‐in‐action defines how learning emerges from this methodology. DARE plays a complementary and transformative role in the art classroom as a pedagogy that disrupts the curriculum with liveness. It contrasts with traditional pedagogy by redefining art as research into the self, using the flow of students' lives, and bringing them into the world. Such a contrast highlights issues of institutional and existential power to foster new modes of becoming across educational practice.