What is the primary focus of the SCENARIO FORUM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2027?

The conference is dedicated to exploring performative teaching, learning, and research, highlighting their integration into educational frameworks.

What is the format of the conference?

The conference is an international gathering, suggesting a format that includes presentations, workshops, and discussions among global participants.

SCENARIO FORUM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2027

Name: SCENARIO FORUM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2027
Start: 2027-03-24T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-03-27T00:00:00Z
Location: Tokyo

Mar 24–27, 2027Tokyo, JapanIn-person

Registration open

The SCENARIO FORUM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2027 is set to convene in Tokyo, JPN, bringing together educators, researchers, and practitioners from around the globe. This international gathering will focus on the critical role of performative teaching, learning, and research within educational frameworks. Participants will explore innovative methodologies and share insights on integrating performative approaches into diverse academic disciplines.

Committees & topics

Topics
Performative Teaching, Learning, and Research · Culture-Specific Arts Practices as Inspiration for Performative Teaching, Learning, and Research · Performative Approaches to Language, Literature, and Culture · Performative Approaches in Everyday Educational Practice across Asia-Pacific Cultural Contexts · Associated Arts Traditions · International Collaborations and Projects in the Asia-Pacific Region · Other Aspects of Performative Teaching, Learning, and Research · Performance Pieces

Why it matters

In an increasingly interconnected world, the methods by which knowledge is imparted and understood are constantly evolving. Performative teaching and learning offer dynamic avenues for deeper engagement and critical thinking, moving beyond traditional didactic models. This conference provides a vital platform for advancing these pedagogical strategies, fostering a more interactive and experiential educational landscape.

The discussions and collaborations at this event are particularly relevant for addressing global challenges that demand creative problem-solving and interdisciplinary approaches. By emphasizing performative research, the conference also highlights the importance of embodied knowledge and practical application in scholarly inquiry, bridging the gap between theory and practice. The insights shared here can influence educational policies and practices worldwide, ultimately shaping the next generation of learners and leaders.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the SCENARIO FORUM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2027 should consider the diverse applications of performative methodologies across various cultural and educational contexts. Understanding the nuances of how performative teaching and learning are perceived and implemented in different regions, particularly in Asia, will be beneficial. Participants might review existing literature on the impact of performative arts in education and prepare to discuss case studies or research findings from their own experiences.

Furthermore, engaging with concepts such as "Stakeholder Mapping Workshop" and "Engagement Strategies" could provide a framework for understanding how performative approaches can effectively involve various educational stakeholders. Considering the "Dynamic Analysis" of educational trends and the "Gender Dynamics Across Cultures" in learning environments will also enrich contributions to the discussions, allowing for a more comprehensive and inclusive dialogue on the future of performative education.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Japan

Host nation with a rich tradition of performative arts and a growing interest in innovative educational practices.

Role in topic

As the host country, JPN offers a unique cultural backdrop for discussions on performative teaching and learning. Its educational system, while historically structured, is increasingly exploring modern pedagogical approaches, making it a fertile ground for the exchange of ideas on integrating performative elements into curricula. The nation's deep appreciation for various art forms provides a strong foundation for understanding the value of performative methods.

Germany

Pioneer in pedagogical research, likely contributing theoretical frameworks and practical models for performative education.

Role in topic

DEU has a strong tradition in educational theory and practice, often leading in pedagogical innovation. Its researchers and educators are likely to present advanced theoretical models and empirical studies on the effectiveness of performative teaching and learning, drawing from a history of integrating arts and humanities into comprehensive educational programs. Contributions from DEU could focus on curriculum development and teacher training in performative methods.

United States

Significant contributor to educational research and diverse applications of performative arts in learning.

Role in topic

The USA, with its vast and diverse educational landscape, has a substantial body of research and practical experience in performative teaching. Universities and educational institutions across the country often experiment with innovative pedagogical approaches, including drama-based learning and experiential education. Delegates from the USA are expected to share insights on large-scale implementation, assessment strategies, and the impact of performative methods on student engagement and outcomes.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Performative Teaching, Learning, and Research

Performative teaching, learning, and research emerged from the convergence of drama-in-education, performance studies, and qualitative research traditions in the late twentieth century. Scholars in the United Kingdom, Germany, and North America—building on the work of figures such as Dorothy Heathcote, Augusto Boal, Richard Schechner, and Hans-Thies Lehmann—argued that classroom encounters and scholarly inquiry could themselves be staged as embodied, aesthetic events rather than purely cognitive transactions. The approach gained institutional traction through the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association (IDEA), founded in Porto in 1992, and through the steady expansion of practice-based doctoral research in the arts and humanities. The core dispute concerns how far education and research can or should adopt aesthetic, embodied, and improvisational forms without forfeiting rigor, assessability, and equity of access. Advocates argue that performative methods foster critical reflexivity, intercultural competence, and deeper engagement with language and literature; skeptics worry about reproducibility, teacher preparation, and the marginalization of performative work within standardized curricula. The debate also intersects with broader questions about decolonizing pedagogy and integrating non-Western knowledge systems. Today, performative approaches are formally embedded in teacher-education programs across Europe, parts of the Asia-Pacific, and the Americas, but their status in national curricula remains uneven. UNESCO's 2006 and 2010 Road Maps for Arts Education and the ongoing Framework for Culture and Arts Education adopted in Abu Dhabi in 2024 have raised the profile of the field, even as funding pressures and post-pandemic learning-loss agendas push many education systems back toward measurable cognitive outcomes.

Key players

Culture-Specific Arts Practices as Inspiration for Performative Teaching, Learning, and Research

Long before the term "performative pedagogy" was coined, cultures around the world transmitted knowledge through embodied arts—Indian Natyashastra-based forms such as Kathakali and Kutiyattam, Japanese Noh and Kyogen, Chinese xiqu, Indonesian wayang, West African griot traditions, and Indigenous ceremonial practices in the Pacific and the Americas. Many of these traditions integrate text, music, movement, ethics, and community ritual, and were historically taught through long apprenticeships rather than written curricula. UNESCO's 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage gave formal international recognition to such practices and encouraged their incorporation into education. The central issue is how to draw on culture-specific arts as inspiration for contemporary teaching and research without flattening them into generic "techniques" or appropriating them outside their ethical frameworks. Practitioners debate the boundary between respectful adaptation and extraction, especially when forms tied to particular communities or cosmologies are repackaged for foreign classrooms. Questions of authorship, benefit-sharing, and the role of tradition-bearers in academic settings remain contested. Current practice ranges from carefully negotiated collaborations—where master practitioners co-teach and co-author research—to looser uses of culturally derived exercises in language and arts education. Debates have sharpened with the rise of decolonial scholarship and Indigenous research methodologies, and with the inclusion of arts-and-heritage indicators in Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 on global citizenship and cultural diversity.

Key players

Performative Approaches to Language, Literature, and Culture

The use of drama and performance to teach language and literature has roots in early twentieth-century progressive education, but consolidated as a distinct field with the work of practitioners such as Gavin Bolton, Cecily O'Neill, and Manfred Schewe, whose journal Scenario (founded in 2007) has been a key forum for performative foreign-language teaching. The approach treats language not as a code to be decoded but as embodied social action, and literature not merely as text to be analyzed but as material to be staged, voiced, and physically inhabited. The core debate sits between communicative and performative paradigms in language education. Communicative approaches dominate national curricula and high-stakes testing regimes, while performative methods emphasize aesthetic experience, improvisation, and intercultural encounter—outcomes that resist easy measurement. There is also tension over the place of literary canon: performative work often draws on canonical texts to defamiliarize them, but is increasingly used to amplify minority, multilingual, and translingual voices. The field has expanded through the Council of Europe's Common European Framework Companion Volume (2020), which gives more weight to mediation and creative use of language, and through growing networks linking European and Asian universities. Practical challenges include teacher training, large class sizes, and the marginal status of arts subjects in many secondary systems.

Key players

Performative Approaches in Everyday Educational Practice across Asia-Pacific Cultural Contexts

Across the Asia-Pacific, performative pedagogy has developed unevenly and in dialogue with deeply rooted educational traditions—Confucian-influenced examination cultures in East Asia, post-colonial bilingual systems in South and Southeast Asia, and Indigenous and Pasifika knowledge traditions in Oceania. From the 1990s onward, ministries of education in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Australia experimented with drama and arts-integrated curricula, partly in response to concerns that rote learning was inadequate preparation for creative economies. The Asia-Pacific Bureau for Educational Innovation for Development and UNESCO Bangkok have repeatedly highlighted arts-based learning in their regional reports. The central question is how performative methods—often theorized in European terms—translate into classrooms shaped by different conceptions of teacher authority, student silence, collective harmony, and the body in public space. Practitioners debate whether performative work should adapt to local norms (for instance, less direct confrontation, more ensemble emphasis) or deliberately disrupt them in the name of critical pedagogy. Linguistic diversity, religious sensitivities, and varying levels of arts-teacher preparation add further complexity. Current practice ranges from well-resourced drama curricula in Australia and New Zealand, to applied theatre projects on health and citizenship in the Philippines and Indonesia, to cautious incorporation of role-play and process drama in Japanese and Korean language classrooms. Funding pressures, narrow test-based accountability, and post-pandemic mental-health concerns are all reshaping the space available for performative work in everyday teaching.

Key players

Associated Arts Traditions

Performative teaching and research rarely stand alone; they draw on a wider constellation of arts traditions including music, dance, visual and media arts, storytelling, puppetry, and ritual practice. Historically these forms were integrated—Greek choral drama, Sanskrit theatre, Yoruba egungun, and European liturgical performance all combined disciplines that modern schooling later separated. Twentieth-century reformers such as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rudolf Laban, and Zoltán Kodály reasserted the educational value of integrated arts, and contemporary frameworks like UNESCO's 2024 Framework for Culture and Arts Education again emphasize the interconnection of artistic disciplines. The debate concerns how to articulate the relationship between performance and these associated traditions in curricula and research. Some argue for arts integration, in which disciplines mutually reinforce each other across the school day; others defend discipline-specific depth, warning that integration can become superficial. There are further disagreements about whether digital and screen-based arts—now central to young people's lives—belong within the same performative frame or require distinct pedagogies. In practice, associated arts traditions feature prominently in teacher-education programs, community arts projects, and intangible-heritage initiatives, but receive inconsistent support in formal schooling. The post-pandemic surge in hybrid and digitally mediated performance has further complicated questions about what counts as an "associated" arts practice and how such forms should be researched.

Key players

International Collaborations and Projects in the Asia-Pacific Region

International collaboration in performative education across the Asia-Pacific has grown steadily since the 1990s, driven by bodies such as the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association (IDEA), the Asia-Pacific Bond of Theatre Schools, UNESCO Bangkok, and bilateral cultural agencies including the Japan Foundation, Korea Foundation, British Council, Goethe-Institut, and Australia's DFAT cultural diplomacy programs. University partnerships, Erasmus+ ICM projects, and ASEAN cultural exchanges have produced joint curricula, co-authored research, and traveling performance projects linking institutions from Tokyo and Seoul to Manila, Jakarta, Auckland, and Melbourne. The core issues involve power asymmetries, funding dependency, and the sustainability of partnerships beyond short project cycles. Critics note that many collaborations are still framed by Northern partners and Northern theoretical vocabularies, even when fieldwork is located in the Global South. Visa restrictions, language barriers, intellectual-property questions around traditional performance forms, and the carbon footprint of touring have all become more prominent concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of digital platforms for cross-border rehearsal, teaching, and research, but also revealed sharp inequalities in connectivity and institutional support. Geopolitical tensions—particularly around the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, and Taiwan Strait—are increasingly shaping which collaborations are politically viable, even as ASEAN and Pacific Islands Forum frameworks try to keep cultural cooperation insulated from harder security disputes.

Key players

Other Aspects of Performative Teaching, Learning, and Research

Beyond established debates over methods and curricula, performative education engages a widening range of concerns: inclusion of learners with disabilities, trauma-informed practice in conflict-affected contexts, climate and ecological pedagogies, artificial intelligence and virtual performance, ethics of research with vulnerable participants, and the mental-health implications of embodied work. International instruments such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), and UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2021) increasingly inform how performative work is designed and evaluated. The disputes here are less about whether performative methods "work" and more about how they should be governed. Questions include who has the authority to research embodied practice, how consent operates when performance involves personal stories or community heritage, and how AI-generated content and motion capture reshape notions of authorship and presence. There is also ongoing debate about assessment: whether portfolios, viva voce, and performance itself can serve as legitimate forms of academic evidence. These aspects are now central to grant criteria, university ethics boards, and accreditation frameworks in many jurisdictions, even where performative pedagogy remains a minority practice. Climate concerns in particular are prompting a rethink of touring, residencies, and large-scale performance research projects.

Key players

Performance Pieces

Performance pieces—short works staged by practitioners, students, and researchers—are a longstanding feature of conferences and gatherings in the performative-education field, serving as both research outputs and pedagogical demonstrations. Their status as legitimate scholarship has gradually been formalized through practice-as-research and artistic-research frameworks developed in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland, and Australia from the 1990s onward, and supported by organizations such as the Society for Artistic Research and the journal JAR. They allow embodied knowledge that resists written articulation to be shared, witnessed, and critiqued by peers. The core debate concerns evaluation and equivalence: how performance pieces relate to written publications in academic assessment, how they are peer-reviewed, and how they are archived and cited. There are also ethical questions about consent and representation when pieces draw on community stories, autobiography, or culturally specific forms, and practical questions about resources, technical support, and accessibility for audiences with different needs. Contemporary practice spans solo and ensemble work, lecture-performances, durational installations, site-specific interventions, and increasingly hybrid digital pieces. Debates about environmental sustainability of touring, the use of AI-generated elements, and the inclusion of non-Western performance vocabularies are reshaping what is presented and how it is received in international academic settings.

Key players