Staging Equality With Dramatic Inquiry Pedagogy: Changing Presumptions of Students and Teachers

• In Event: Literacies, Learning, and Drama: Engaging Multiliterate Knowledge Through Action Within Possible Worlds

Abstract

For Ranciere, the fundamental question in education is: Who can speak? In this paper I introduce core ideas from the theoretical framework of Jacques Ranciere to analyze three classroom examples from a one-year study in a first grade classroom. Dramatic inquiry pedagogy was used by the classroom teacher, Jean, to integrate classroom learning (2010). Research questions included: how is dramatic inquiry pedagogy used to create spaces in which the ideas and interpretations of marginalized students are heard and used by the teacher and other students; and, how do adults change their understanding of themselves as teachers?
In most schooling there is a “presumption of inequality” that is apparent in a hierarchical culture of “explanation”; instructors assume they have more access to truth than the students who are largely viewed as lacking in knowledge and skill. Likewise, students accept a view of themselves as incompetent as they participate in practices demonstrating their inequality. In contrast, an “emancipatory” teacher begins with a different axiom: a presumption of equality. Equality is neither viewed as a future ideal nor as able to be granted. Teachers disrupt hierarchies, in “political” and democratic acts, when they “stage” equality so that students may speak and demonstrate their competence. The teacher is an “authority”, not in terms of controlling students and giving them explanations, but rather in the sense that she “reminds her students that they can already speak” (Bingham & Biesta, 2010, p. 154).
Aesthetic experiences, such as dramatic approaches in representing meaning, are sources of equality. In particular, Ranciere argues the theatre can literally be a “stage” for equality: “political subjects come into being only in the gap between identities” (Davis, p. 89) – the sort of gaps that actors create in the theatre for themselves and the audience. The art of classroom drama can similarly create emancipatory spaces that “stage” the equality of participants when “we assume equality in our creative practices [and] in our role as spectators” (Tanke, 2011, p. 109) in dramatic playing and dramatic performance.
Across one year of observation and documentation, the participation of some children changed radically in the aesthetic spaces of dramatic inquiry. Children who previously had been “policed” and marginalized, assumed a freedom to speak, move, act, and interact. For example, the ideas of Mark, a boy who had been seen by his teacher as a social and academic “problem” and by his peers as someone to be ignored, became central. He was able to “create a stage” and “establish a theatre where none was supposed to exist according to the logic of the established order” (Bayly, 2009, p.24).
In addition, interviews and documentation shared and reflected on with Jean, indicated that her teacher identity was transformed over the year. Dramatic activities allowed her to “see” students’ competencies that had previously been invisible to her and recognize an assumption of inequality of which she had been largely unaware. As she shifted more toward an assumption of equality in relation to all students she changed her classroom practices.

Author

• Meredith Whittaker