Dr. Steven E. Noble
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
My approach to, or style of, teaching, remains “in process” after 25 years of development within
a variety of contexts (post-secondary, corporate training, community development, and not-forprofit teaching). My methodology of teaching remains open to new ideas and ways of
understanding, but all the while very student-centred. Currently, my philosophy incorporates
elements from a number of educationalists’ frameworks, notably:
1) Praxis-Driven: My approach does not separate theory from practice, but blends both
together. Seemingly oppositional ideas are brought into evaluative relationships, so that
their underlying principles can be better understood. Context shapes the ‘truthiness’ or
usefulness of any idea (it’s one thing to understand theory on its own, it’s quite another to
come to awareness within practice). Experience is the test of any insight; ideas are
defined by their limitations and consequences, which can be known only through
embodied engagement.
2) Nurturing/Social Reform (Freire, Pratt): Teaching is about relationships first and
foremost – between students and subject matter, among students themselves and among
learners with my role as facilitator. The contribution of my experiences, as the result of
my own interactions with texts and others, is offered to students who are open to engage
with it alongside their own experience and backgrounds to create new awareness. I am
most concerned with the learner as an individual and what he or she is willing to bring to
the interactive classroom environment and the teaching-learning process. I teach with a
high regard to classroom climate, inclusivity, openness and safety in order for students to
take “risks” for themselves. Mine is, perhaps, a “softer” more nurturing approach that
encourages students to reach out in new ways for themselves, while taking in novel
awareness to inform their broader lives. My approach is as much about encouraging
insights, providing information, experiencing processes and understanding theories as it
is for the students to find their own ways for incorporating what they learn into their
broader everyday lives and become more critical of and in the world.
3) Embodied/Holistic Learning/ Ecological Teaching (Barba, Fels, Boal): All past
experience, first and foremost, resides within one’s body. For many individuals, they
have spent years learning that their physical selves are not as important as their brains or
cognitive abilities. Paradoxically, imagination and creativity have become non-essential
in the project of learning. My approach is to bring experience centrally back into the
teaching/learning relationship and process. Texts and technology are important to support
the experiences within which students participate. Doing, creating, playing and becoming
are all critical learning processes that are brought back alongside reading, writing,
researching, analyzing, listening and discussing. Evaluations include traditional writing
of papers, but also reliance is placed upon learners reflectively assessing their
performance within particular experiential exercises.
4) Cross Cultural: My view is that each learner arrives from within a particular overlapping
of social experiences – depending on ethnicity, (dis)ability, regionality, gender, sexuality,
age, class and view of the world – so that what each person in the classroom is engaged
within is a cross-cultural experience. Great care is taken to encourage each person’s
unique background to come to bear upon classroom material and processes so that other
students (and I) can co-create a greater depth of understanding.
1
General Teaching Areas: Course content areas I have, or am capable, of teaching within
include: Applied Research; Community Interventions; Qualitative Research Methodologies;
Introduction to Action Research; Transformative Community Practice; Sociology of
Sexuality; Sociology of Men’s Lives; Sociology of Drugs and Addiction; Sociology of
Poverty; Arts-Based and Performative Research Methodologies; Critical Disability Theory;
Popular Theatre, Arts and Health; Interdisciplinary Research; Communities of Disabled
People and the Mainstream; Sexual Communities and Society; Queer Theory/Sexuality;
Social Policy and Inclusion; Community-Based Social Justice; Psychiatric Disabilities and
Identity; Contemporary Social Movements and Community; Enactivist and Complexity
Theory; Sociology of Rural Communities.
Statement of Research Interests
1) COMMUNITY DIALOGUE AND INFORMAL/NON-FORMAL ADULT EDUCATION:
Create spaces/processes for community dialogue/acts of knowledge as a process of
individual learning and community (broadly defined) education, through arts-based
processes and performance. One area of non-visibility is the myth of the unified
community. Gatherings of people are as unique as the people that comprise them – so it is
with cities and villages. Of late, I’ve become interested in wriggling out small pockets of
space, place, time and people to explore issues facing groups and communities through
arts-based modalities, in particular the performative arts. Rather than simply display for
passive amusements, what evolves is something interactive with audiences, similar to
what occurs in a critically minded classroom: teacher/learners become one another as a
topic is played with and pulled apart. Sociological research has to be as much about
empowerment for communities as it is informative for the Academy. New pieces and
processes can be incorporated that serve to (re)empower a particular group or
community, or parts therein. Communities are full of conflicting interests and identities in
tension that, if made visible, could allow opportunities for social growth and change. It is
through bridging between university/college and communities that post-secondary
institutions can play a most significant role for regions and areas beyond. A goal for each
project that has been engaged in, in the past, has been social action stemming from
theatre and qualitative research methodologies.
2) MARGINALIZED IDENTITIES: Non-visible markers of difference – Centrally, my
research focus is upon the exploration of those individual and group differences that can
be noticed, but for a variety of reasons are overlooked by others. These markers become
rendered non-visible (unlike invisible differences, which are those that simply cannot be
seen – non-visible incorporates the dynamics of proof, choice and value). Dynamics that
support non-visibility include the use of ritual, habit, procedures, rules, laws, and other
human constructs. These performative acts are used to hide, suppress, and restrict
freedom. Critical theories and the concept of power and social justice are central to my
explorations. Individuals and groups that are of particular interest for exploration of
“non-visibility” include marginalized/out groups (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, non-visibly
disabled people, “deviants,” ex-convicts, class), but also I explore how intra-group
differences work to form power and resistances (dynamics of mestizo, mulatto, “straightacting” gays/lesbians, gradations of skin colour among visible minorities – and those who
do not fit common generalizations of group identity). Central notions include: “proof,”
“coming out,” “closet,” “public secrets” and power dynamics of exclusion.
3) CRITICAL DISABILITY THEORY: Constructions of Illness remains an aspect of human
life that remains largely taboo to research and explore. Within critical disability circles
there is much contestation about who can study what, without recognizing the value of
2
allies working within the field of Critical Disabilities. My work connects with the point
above in that it is focused on how psychiatric disabilities become contested and
constructed by various groups: medical elites, family members, friends, social workers,
the psychiatrically disabled person or survivor, the media, politicians, historians, and so
on. Related to this are my explorations in how individuals with physical and mental
disabilities are ensnared by various systems of power to silence and oppress. Another
significant area of research is my wishing to understand how loved ones are also affected
by shifts in ability or the onset of illness or injury of someone close to them.
4) SEXUAL MINORITIES: Since the late 19th century, when the term “invert” or
homosexual was first coined to later that same century when heterosexual (initially a term
of deviance) arose, there have been various social constructions of sexual minorities –
typically in opposition to the “norm” of heterosexuality. Sexuality has often been spoken
about in terms of a binary – good = heterosexual; bad = homosexual. Further, within each
end of these binaries there are narrow senses of what is “normal”. Much sexual
theorization has looked at broadening sense of normal beyond this either/or construction,
or that there is diversity within the gay/straight divide. Theorizations and qualitative
studies of sexual minorities that include ALBGTTTQQ (Asexual, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Gay, Two-Spirited, Trans-sexual, Trans-gendered, Queer and Questioning) are left
largely silenced and rendered “deviant” rather various states of normalcy. Within
communities and institutions the universe of forces and influences that shape the
identities of these groups and individuals is not always visible, preferring to be reified as
taken-for-granted and “natural.”
5) PERFORMATIVITY: Use of performance/performative processes as sociological
research methodologies to render visible exclusionary practices of oppression and
knowledge/perspectives unquestioned by larger audiences. Because identity is habitually
and physically performed to become reinforced as “normal” and realized, through various
bodily (inter)actions, the centrality of performance and performativity are key, as a
research methodology, to render visible taken-for-granted (and, therefore, non-visible)
practices of concealment, accommodation, tolerance and acceptance. Working with
groups, either of one group examining another or a group researching itself, a form of
“applied sociology” is created whereby theory and practice become entwined to inform
what evolves out from beneath the surfaces of complex and complicated
(inter)relationships.
RESEARCH PLAN
Over the next six years, my research plan is to identify particular communities, based within rural
and urban contexts, and engage three to four of these communities, through theatre-based
research processes and performance around an identified community issue. Within each smaller
project, of approximately one year in length, each group will engage with a theatre process to
develop a popular theatre play that identifies and plays with an existing community issue, with
the target being engaging the larger community, through social action, to address the particular
problem. Based on my past work, issues that are fairly common across communities, themes of
homelessness, violence, crime, alienation, addiction, poverty, silences and discrimination all play
roles. Further, the players seem to be those mislabelled or misread because of their non-visible
identities (bi-raciality, sexual diversity, ‘invisible’ impairment). Rather than examine the more
‘obvious’ communities based on simple binaries, this research program looks at the greyness
within the continuum of identities and communities.
3
Even though, what follows is a year-by-year plan, there will be, in fact, periods of overlap. As
one research project is winding down, another is commencing. Typically, there will be three
months of overlap as one group opens, another closes.
The first year, I would establish potential communities to work with and begin initial discussions
with them about the feasibility of my working with them. Secondly, I would engage in identifying
and applying for research grants (national foundation, governmental and special interest monies).
The second year, research plans will be developed with the first group most ready to commence
its community development, based upon theatre research and performance and community need.
Typically, a research project will run approximately ten months, following a rough schedule of:
two months for group development, three months for learning about theatre processes, four
months for performance development and ‘performance’ with one month to identify and
implement community social action (although identification of the social action is likely to occur
well before the ‘performance’ is achieved.).
The third year opens, as the first group’s theatre processes are slowly drawing to a close, with a
second group commencing its theatre-based research process in community. The majority of the
year will be focused on one group as it investigates, plays with and develops performance around
pressing community issues.
Within the fourth year, as the second group’s theatre process is drawing to a close, a third group’s
theatre process will commence and continue through the year.
The fifth year, as a third group’s theatre process is drawing to a close, a fourth – and last- group’s
theatre process will commence and continue through the year.
During the fifth and sixth years, will be the summing up and writing of a book (including the
voices of participants alongside those of my own) documenting the processes undertaken, insights
gained and shifts achieved within communities engaged with in the first five years of this plan.
I am confident, given the past six years of funded sociology research projects, that this six year
plan is achievable and will bring many direct rewards into the classroom as part of ongoing
teaching.
4