"So Good Luck With Your Life—Your Mediocrity!" Interrogating Identity, Belonging, and the Future Through Verbatim Theater

• In Event: Dreaming the Possible: Exploring Global Worlds and Micro-Ecologies Using the Pedagogies of Drama

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:
This paper focuses on a Grade 12 drama classroom of a public school located in a gentrifying neighbourhood in Toronto’s east end. It specifically explores how four diverse female students - M&M (African-Canadian), Mya Ibrahim (Somali), Scarlet (Canadian/Irish Scandinavian), and Zeida (Chinese), engaged with a verbatim unit that focused on exploring their ideas about the future. It further elucidates how these young women “perform” concepts of self-assessment and self-censorship, while navigating classroom dynamics that often reproduce larger societal dynamics. Current issues of migration and National multicultural policies bear down on this site.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
Diane Reay’s (2012) critique of contemporary neo-capitalist and neoliberal models of schooling frames this paper. Reay argues that education is now commonly viewed as “a commodity to be competed for in an educational marketplace” (p. 595). Instead, she proposes a system where education becomes a space that people seek out because “they are what they are” rather than a means for getting ahead of others, of stealing a competitive edge (p. 590). Along with Reay, we use gender and youth scholars Pomerantz and Raby (2017) whose “supergirls” research in a Canadian context is particularly useful to the analysis.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
This paper draws on data from Year 1 of the project, specifically the verbatim theatre process that engaged a Grade 12 class of 11 diverse youth. We will use rehearsal and performance footage as well as individual and focus group interviews with the youth, field notes, artefacts, and insights/questions from our international collaborators who came to Toronto in year 2 of our study and visited our Toronto research site to observe and engage with the youth there.

RESULTS:
In their study of “self-described smart girls,” Pomerantz and Raby (2017) argue that this neoliberal environment has, in part, produced a post-feminist moment – “an overarching belief that girls now live in a gender-neutral world where anything is possible as long as they try hard and maintain a positive attitude” (p. 153). Our own experiences of this Toronto drama classroom underscore the students’ complex negotiations within this so-called post-feminist neoliberal moment. Stereotypes, often unconsciously mobilized, and school competitiveness, often led the white students to exclude others by “emphasizing cultural differences or social incompatibility, without seeing themselves as racist” (p. 143). Yet, the white students, too, are products of these same systems regularly rewarded for celebrating diversity without addressing deep and underlying issues of inequality. All of the girls, we discovered, were negotiating a complex interplay of their racial, gender, and academic identities, in a s-called post-race, gender-neutral world.

SIGNIFICANCE:
This paper suggests that the collective impulse of some drama pedagogies, the explicit emphasis on speaking and listening to each other, as well as representing each other, are no panacea, but if they allow young people to break out of prescribed and limiting social roles, even temporarily, and talk back to the larger structures of racism, competition, white privilege, and individualism in schools, they remain hopeful possibilities.

Author

• Andrew Kushnir, Project: Humanity