Communal Expression Through Enacting the Laramie Project: Intertwining Voices of Creative Learning Communities

• In Event: 63.084 - Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: 63.084-9 - The Possibility of Justice in Schools: Anti-Oppressive and Multicultural Pedagogies

Abstract

This presentation explores the potential meanings of communal expression embedded in my teaching of The Laramie Project (TLP)—an ethno-drama script written as a response to the tragic death of a young gay man murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998—in a Multicultural Education course taught to undergraduate pre-service teachers at a Midwest state university in the U.S. I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of phenomenological ontology in order to articulate how I attempted to enable my students to envision a kind of community where various expressive voices intertwine and are listened to while multiplying meanings of living, learning, and communicating, by engaging the students in the process and the product of a culminating collaborative performance of TLP.

Author

• Soon Ye Hwang, University of Nebraska - Lincoln