During the 1990s an African American university band director brought together Rosa Parks and Mark Camphouse for a performance of Camphouse's composition, A Movement for Rosa. Teaching the composition, the conductor and Camphouse communicated with language describing musical and lived realities that student musicians attempted to express and reproduce through their performance. Engaging students substantively with issues of social justice was constrained, because pedagogy dependent on representational language confirms the common sense of what everyone knows, and installs the good sense stabilizing knowledge that tacitly discourages challenges or critiques. Communication that is performative, by contrast, enacts pedagogies that create partial, multiple, and contingent understandings, moving students' responses to action. Beginning with a discussion of the limitations of representational pedagogy using Briankle Chang's model of traditional communication theory, I propose applications of performative pedagogy through Della Pollock's characteristics of performative writing. (Contains 8 notes.)