Representation and Reception: Brechtian ‘Pedagogics of Theatre’ and Critical Thinking deploys German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of drama and performance, what he calls the pedagogics of theatre , to create modes of critical thinking in the classroom. Extrapolating on Brecht’s estranged forms of representation-narrative, story, montage, Verfremdungseffeckt or alienation, tableaux, ostension (showing), gestus, masks and music-Burney constructs an original 3-R Pedagogy or spiral of semiosis - Rethinking/Replaying/Re-cognition -that is designed to create critical thinking and complex seeing . Her dramatic production of Brecht’s Lehrstuck, or learning-play, The Exception and the Rule, for a non-literate, working-class audience in Hyderabad, India, critically analyses how audiences make meaning through image, word and ideology, gesture, memory, collective experience and personal
(hi)stories.