Representation and Reception

This study applies the dramatic theory of Bertolt Brecht to classroom teaching, drawing on his idea that theatre can serve as a form of education. Author Shehla Burney examines Brecht's techniques of estrangement, including narrative, story, montage, the alienation effect, tableaux, showing, gestus, masks and music, and turns them into a teaching method aimed at developing critical thinking.

From these techniques Burney builds her own framework, the "3-R Pedagogy," also described as a spiral of semiosis. Its three stages are Rethinking, Replaying and Re-cognition, and its goal is to cultivate what she calls "complex seeing."

To test the approach, Burney staged Brecht's learning-play The Exception and the Rule for a non-literate, working-class audience in Hyderabad, India. She analyses how those viewers made meaning from image, word and ideology, gesture, memory, shared experience and their own personal histories.