Ethnodrama With Marginalized Youth as Educational Resistance and Reenvisioning

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: #RiseUp: Youth Activism and Curriculum-Making

Abstract

This paper posits how youth resistance emerges in a study that utilized ethnodrama to confront the manifestations of racism and neoliberalism in schools and to propose alternate futures of education to a target audience of educators. Many under-represented voices contributed to the research-based theatre devising and performance processes undertaken in this adult-youth collaborative study. The youth artists explored counter-knowledges of marginalized voices such as Black feminists, engaged in transnational political dialogue between racialized, socio-economically under-resourced peers, and conducted research that privileged community members and independent progressive media sources. Public education transformations youth proposed included a focus on Indigenous knowledges, examining the roots of structural injustice, and utilizing creative production as a means of direct action in inspiring and demanding change.

Author

• Rachel Rhoades, University of Toronto