What are possible overlaps between arts practice and school pedagogy? How is teacher subjectivity and pedagogy affected when teachers are inducted and engage with arts practice, in particular, theatre practices? We draw on research conducted into the Learning Performance Network (LPN), a project that involved school teachers working with The Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Warwick. The aim of the commissioned research was to look at the effects on teacher development, particularly focusing on the active rehearsal room pedagogic techniques and ensemble methods of exploring Shakespearean text and performance teachers were introduced. The practices of working as an ensemble through rehearsal room pedagogy were central to the LPN. Our interest is in looking for possible shifts in teachers’ subjectivity, their self-perception, through the process of the project. What affordances, limitations, accommodations and tensions are experienced by the teachers in transposing work from the rehearsal room to the classroom? To explain and understand the facilitations or limitations in teachers’ practice, we draw on a range of cultural theories that provide different but complementary perspectives on aspects of subjectivity that include Vygotskian approaches to the psychology of art and acting, Bourdieu’s account of fields and habitus Raymond Williams’s work on the dramatized society and Jacques Rancière’s work on spectatorship and pedagogy.

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