Watching tendencies of fragmentation, (digital) social bubbles, alienation from politics up to narratives of post democratic times, to us as a philosopher of education and a theatre pedagogue and performance artist it seems like a pedagogical urge to think about settings and methods that - in an undogmatic way - focus on ideas of democracy and approaches of experiencing those.

1.     Phenomenological theories of the body as chiasmatic figures

2.     Cultural theories about the concept of hybridity

3.     Theories of democratic philosophy and pedagogy

1. We understand that there is nothing that is so much existential and undeniable as the body itself, so we concentrate on it as a core angle to approach learners.

In his theory of perception the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty centers the body as subject, vehicle and object of understanding oneself in the world. Thus it is the body that works as a philosophical and concrete figure in connecting the transcendental level and the world. It is directed to the world and furthermore incorporates it. With the Greek expression chiasma (engl: cross) Merleau-Ponty creates a figure of thought that generates visual processes of intermingling, for example hybridity (see 18). 

2. The concept that “connects things that only seemingly do not belong” together is hybridity and especially hybrid didactical methods. Hybridity works on a banal and a complex level. On the banal level it states the fact that we people are all biological and social products of at least two merging entities. It opens a view on how many past and present mergings we consist of due to our chiasmatic becoming in the world (see 15). The rather complex level of hybridity shows itself when we take theories and discourses into consideration that raise questions of power and its effects on people‘s ‘subjectivation‘ (see 1,6,11,13,19). On an existential level we are all vulnerable and fragile, but seeing this through the aspects of power it becomes obvious that there are levels of vulnerability depending on one’s position in society and the world (class, race, gender, disabilities, direct effects of the climate crisis). Both, the banal and complex level of hybridity offer a raying potential for a broader pedagogical field.

3. John Dewey, a pedagogue and philosopher of education and democracy states that learning requires an undergoing of processes of alienation from things and oneself, but also a re-connection to those things and oneself again (12). Thus, experience means to near the world by feeling frustration, boredom, joy and all other phases of learning. The dealing with ‘here and now‘ problems point to a pedagogy of a “Radical Present”. We think that deep learning happens a lot through experiences that include the whole body in its chiasmatic or furthermore hybrid connection to oneself and others. What makes these theoretical perspectives interesting is the emphasis on the worth of individuality and community, such as the inner and the outer world at the same time. Consequently, it is a pedagogical task to find ways of initiating awareness for them and experience the worth of both.

Unlike Thomas Hobbes’ figure of the Leviathan describing the almighty power of the state, from a postmodern point of view, democracy rather can be shown through various aspects of a body in its fragility, constant failures, trial and errors, but also the power of acting and resisting. The postcolonial thinker Homi K. Bhabha refers to that power as agency (8). The non-perfectness (see 20) of democracy is based on its actual power to deconstruct, construct and evolve. With that hybridity furthermore can be understood as an "art of becoming".

We will present 3 methodical approaches to our didactical concept of the “Radical Present” and from a performative didactical mindset: 1. Create a common ethical space This common ethical space is based on a paradoxical idea of all humans being already complete and enough in order to be recognized as human beings and at the same time also being basically non-perfect and in a stage of becoming (see 8,18). LV: “In my experience of working with children from ‘vulnerable‘ schools or refugee communities in Berlin, respect and validation are the first things to work on” (also see 15,16,17). 2. Where am I, where are we? (Awareness for the common space with others) We will initiate interviews about scars where the students can choose to tell a story about a probably hurtful experience they had, they also practice taking a distant point of view to it. By presenting their interview partner’s scars stories as if it was their own experience, they start practicing empathy (see 5). -‘Present body’ and ‘soft eyes’: We work on the psycho-physical consciousness of the group, that is, we recognize ourselves as a collective. For this we apply „View Points methods“ which are to be seen as an open process rather than a closed methodology” (see 10). For example, participants walk through the room trying to have an open unfocused gaze (see 2,14) to train their awareness/relationship between ‘me-being somewhere with somebody‘: After walking for a moment the group stops, closes their eyes and has to try to remember/identify who is around them. 3. Who are we as a group and community (recognition of one’s dependencies on others)? - Another exercise is that the group stops at the same time or walks at the same time, but without someone giving the signal. The group decides when to move forward and when to stop. - A “barometer of positions'': For groups or circumstances where there is not much time or patience to train the above, we apply games of questions and positioning in space. One side of the space represents 100%/ yes and the other side represents 0% /no. The group positions itself towards questions like “How much do you like chocolate ice cream”? Participants seek their own opinion and move towards this position in the room with significant others (see 4,6,14). 4. “Soft Eyes” - Endurance, scepticism and refusal to be distracted by “rethorical overtures of authenticist dispisitifs” (see 3)

This paper‘s theoretical and practical angle was to show pedagogical impulses and settings to motivate students to use the power of their own hybridity as an "art of becoming". They shall be motivated to look at what made them become the person they are now and see its individual and collective worth. As education requires and establishes a democratic space in which others are recognized, our being in coexistence is influenced and modified. In this sense, our pedagogy is related to accompanying or mobilizing processes of recognition, contemplation and reflection, so that the person achieves the potential to learn by itself through its experiences. Performing arts are tools to access philosophies and reflections from and towards bodies, where all share a skin that is fragile, flexible and mutable, as well as structural bones. To reflect from the body means to generate an experience, to ask oneself within it what it means for my existence and then to act from it. Speaking at the beginning of this paper of tendencies of alienation and fragmentation, we may see those observations with the above pair of theoretical glasses differently. Optimistically, we might be able to assume that the alienations towards politics and from other social groups might not be a sign of post democratic times. Contrariwise, these alienations may be signaling a normal phase of democratic systems that simply need to go the next step of (re-) connecting with a broader community. To us, hybridity with its methods of application is an auspicious concept. It is a key pedagogical approach as it has a banal, complex and also arty level and thus can address a heterogeneous group of people who all share the fact that we all are at the same time good enough and in the process of becoming and creating.

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