Permission to Be Confused: A Youth Participatory Action Research, Theatrical Inquiry Into Whiteness

• In Event: 56.034 - Second-Wave White Teacher Identity Studies: Toward Whiteness Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning About Race

Abstract

This presentation will report on my teacher-researcher installment of second wave, critical whiteness pedagogy at a large, suburban public high school near a major city in the Midwest. As a white English and drama teacher invested in anti-racist practice, I designed a voluntary teacher-researcher project so that the mostly white high school students in the extracurricular drama program at our school could study whiteness. Critical ethnographic practices were used to collect data that included interviews, student work, field notes, and video recordings. The constant comparative approach to analysis (see Fram 2013) was used to both test and confirm assertions against an enormous data corpus.

Nearly forty, 9th-12th grade students spent the 2012-2013 school year voluntarily engaged with The Whiteness Project. In the fall, they participated in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) collective tasked with researching whiteness (see Appadurai, 2006; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Guishard, 2009; Morrell, 2008 for descriptions of YPAR). In the winter, findings from diverse student research projects were used as the source material for a playbuilding collective (see Boal, 1979; Norris, 2009; Zipes, 2004 for descriptions of playbuilding) that resulted in an 82-page script entitled Blanchekreist: A Collaborative Play about Whiteness. Finally, the students performed the play five times during the course of one weekend in May of 2013 as the spring play at the high school. Theses performance received both local and national media attention.

This presentation will highlight ethnographic findings to consider how YPAR and theatre can be in used as pedagogical approaches in school that address Lensmire’s (2010) call for more complex, nuanced pedagogical treatments meant to motivate anti-racist action in white students, with the significant goal of working toward the dismantlement of white supremacy in schools through a second wave of whiteness pedagogy.

References

Appadurai, A. (2006). The right to research. Globisation, societies and education, 4(2), 167-177.

Boal, Augusto. (1979). Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: TCG, 1979.

Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Fram, S. (2013). The constant comparative analysis method outside of grounded theory. The Qualitative Report, 18, 1-25.

Guishard, M. (2009). The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that: participatory action research, mutual vulnerability, and the politics of inquiry. Urban revolution, 41, 85-105.

Lensmire, Timothy J. (2010) 'Ambivalent white racial identities: fear and an elusive innocence', Race Ethnicity and Education, 13: 2, 159 — 172.

Lensmire, T., McManimon, S., Dockter Tierney, J., Lee-Nichols, M., Casey, Z.,

Lensmire, A., & Davis, B. (2013). Mcintosh as synecdoche: how teacher education’s focus on white privilege undermines antiracism. Harvard Educational Review, 83(3), 410-430.

Morrell, E. (2004). Becoming critical researchers: Literacy and empowerment for urban youth. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Norris, J. (2009). Playbuilding as qualitative research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc.

Zipes, Jack. (2004) Speaking Out; Storytelling and Creative Drama for Children. Routledge: New York.

Author

• Samuel Jaye Tanner, The Pennsylvania State University - Altoona