How Ben teaches…

Ben’s main focus to teaching, feedback and assessment has been around developing students’ self-learning before teaching and, accordingly, establishing a non-hierarchical culture and community within a discipline that can be overly ‘de-marked’, patriarchal, and furnished by what Ranciere calls “the stultifying pedagogue”.  Ben establishes core plenary and discussion classes that merge with practical classes offering multiple contexts to explore ideas and develop individual identity, developing, in the process, the core creative empowerment of what Richard Gerver calls “the positivity of failure”. Ben attempts to provide a liberating cross-over of philosophical thinking between creative education processes, cultural identity and creativity: how best we learn, how best we develop identity, how best we create art.

Accordingly, Ben encourages a playful and open-access approach to creative learning – with break-out environments and space and time to share work both formally and informally, encouraging the notion of the plenary led by student observation rather than teacher direction;  

He encourages diverse approaches to teaching, and celebrates the key principle of shared delivery. He loves teaching with others in the same space.   This celebrates the community of shared learning, but also encourages different and contradictory advice and insight on students’ creative practice – which returns us to the key notion of student-centred learning: their responsibilities, their academic understanding and their personal ideas strengthened by diverse observations on their work.

He feels that the significance of feedback, therefore, becomes embedded in the learning context.  Adopting different and diverse methods of feedback (group, individual discussion and written), in the context of class and tutorial (but mainly in the creative rehearsal), offers students essential skills for future employment.  It also helps overcome the emotional tensions of creative performance exposure: making a lot of work and having it reviewed and reflected upon constantly, helps students to be realistic and confident in their own practice.

This approach to establishing a shared learning community reflects the core notion of post-structural theatre practice and has served as an excellent grounding for his own development towards a recognised dramaturg in the independent theatre sector.