Why Theater Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and Pedagogy of the Real

• In Event: School Engagement, Artistic Practice, and Democracy

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
In considering representations of 'voice' in research and global neoliberalisms in which 'voice' is now everywhere invoked, Paul Ricoeur’s (in Kearny 2004) concept of the long detour will provide an exemplar as it articulates the 'me' that speaks, which is only conceivable after one makes sense of the world where the me is speaking already. Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and Pedagogy of the Real is an ethnographic study which mixes quantitative and qualitative methodologies in an international multi-sited project, tying together the issues of urban and arts education through the lens of student engagement.
Theoretical framework – with a few selected citations:
Multiple theoretical frameworks inform the study: feminist and poststrucuralist; pedagogical and affect theory (Anyon, 2005; Ahmed 2010); storytelling and 'the other'; youth racialization and criminality; and drama and performance theory (Neelands 2009); These theoretical frameworks intersect at the nexus of youth social and dramatic performances in the context of public schooling.
Methods, techniques, modes of inquiry:
Over 4 years, across all sites, we videotaped and analyzed 58.5 hours of classroom footage, 6 teacher interviews, 2 principal interviews, 15 focus group interviews of 4-5 students each and 99 individual interviews. We also filmed 9 student performances. We used an on-line survey (n=108) completed by students across all sites and what we called a reflective survey completed in-person by students at the completion of classes where teachers assessed such classes to have been especially engaging.
Data sources, evidence, objects or materials:
In addition to all the data sets described above, we aimed to foreground dramatic performances of youth to share digitally across sites in order to engage in analysis with our global collaborators and with the youth themselves.
Results:
When is disengage¬ment operating as social position or political resistance? How does an artistic idea take hold? Our study considered how young people feel most engaged when there is the possibility of community in their lives, the opportunity for dialogue and the chance that participation may lead to transformations in their immediate worlds. We learned how youth who are cared for, and care for others, within and beyond school communities are more likely to be engaged in a school’s normative academic and social trajectories. We also discovered a critical engagement with the construct of 'hope', in teacher, artist and youth artistic practices.
Scientific or scholarly significance of study/work:
Around the globe, young people have shouldered the weight of growing inequality in very real and tangible ways, as their struggle for an education attests. But, they have struggled in ways beyond ‘the real’ and the material; they have also withstood assaults on their imaginaries and their desires. The central study of this symposium, which acts as a provocation for other similar youth-centered studies, exposes the multidimensional role of teachers, their moves between the aesthetic, academic, and the social curricula of teaching, in a climate of youth disenfranchisement and growing socio-spatial inequality.

Author

• Kathleen M. Gallagher, OISE/University of Toronto