Race, Gender, and the Pedagogies of Drama/Applied Theater as a Relational Ethic in Neoliberal Times

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Racing Minds: Curriculum Scholars Making Sense of Race, Gender, and Pedagogies of Justice

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate how theatre pedagogy was mobilized, and to what effects, in one Toronto drama classroom, strongly divided along racial lines. Using the work of Reay (2012) and Yosso (2005) as well as data from a multi-year, multi-sited global ethnographic research project of drama classrooms, we offer two micro-encounters from our data to illustrate how drama pedagogy intervened and provided space for seven different youth to negotiate who they are, what they know, and the world in which they live. Through these micro-encounters, we demonstrate how youth can shift the landscape of traditional learning and explore avenues where different, relational, socially-embedded, and more complex, intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2015) possibilities for "having" a voice may exist.

Authors

• Kathleen M. Gallagher, OISE/University of Toronto

• Dirk J. Rodricks, University of Toronto