Reflections on the formation of philosophy teachers in the light of Jerzy Grotowski’s theatrical phase

Abstract

This article argues that philosophy is a practice and requires techniques for working on itself that must be learned in formative contexts. These techniques go beyond the aspects of the precision of the philosophical contents because, in addition to the conceptual and specific work of philosophy, it’s necessary to prepare the undergraduates for the teaching practice, which implies creativity, corporeality, use of space, and interaction with the public in practice. All these, to a certain extent, are typical practices of actor training. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to investigate how the knowledge and the training techniques of actors can help in the formation of philosophy teachers. However, there is little attention from theorists of the area on the practical dimension of teaching philosophy, that is, on how to do philosophy in the classroom. To establish the relationship between the formation of the actor and the teacher, a bibliographic review of national articles of philosophy was carried out. But, in the absence of texts that approach this theme, we sought to explain some correlations between the knowledge and practices of the performing arts and the training of philosophy teachers based on the analysis of texts from the theatrical phase of the director Jerzy Grotowski. In this way, we identified elements in the polish director’s work such as the use of the body, space, and voice, which can contribute to the training of philosophy teachers.