Sculpting Social Justice Concepts to Uncover Implicit Meanings

• In Event: Response Abilities II: Generating Arts-Based Research With Martin Luther King Jr. and Maxine Greene at the Maxine Greene High School for the Arts and Imaginative Inquiry

Abstract

Sculpting Social Justice Concepts to Uncover Implicit Meanings

Purpose: To demonstrate how process drama techniques (O’Neill, 1995) are forms of an emergent curriculum (Osberg, & Biesta, 2008) in which dialogic and mutualistic interactions (Anonymous and Bilash, 2016) occur among students and teachers.

Inquiry: This presentation will apply 1) process drama techniques (O’Neill, 1995), a constructivist educational approach through which students make meanings individually and in groups, 2) image theatre (Boal, 1985), a theatrical technique in which participants “sculpt” an image of a selected theme with their own and others’ bodies, expressing their feelings and/or experiences, 3) inner dialogue (Neelands and Goode, 29015) where observers give what they believe the sculptures might be thinking and 4) improvisation (Johnstone, 1979) to bring the statues to life. Greene’s concept of “teacher as stranger” (1973) will be exemplified as the initiator and the sculptor of the concept will be unknown to one another and the audience will respond to the sculpture without knowledge of the concept represented.

Perspectives
As examples of a participatory democratic pedagogy (Powell & Serriere, 2013), the techniques can be theorized as a continuous and lifelong process or mode of reconceptualization through which visual representations create a “wide-awakeness to imaginative action, and to renewed consciousness of possibility" (Greene, 1995, p. 43).

Scholarly Significance Building upon ‘readers’ response theory’ (Rosenblatt, 1978), it is our contention that data does not exist on the page, rather it is coemergent (Kieren, 2005) through the interaction between a text/object/creator/responder. “Data” is generated through the interplay of the participants who will challenge and blur the boundaries that exist between art and life.


References

Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (Trans.). New York, NY: Theater Communications Group.
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan.
Greene, M. (1973). Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing Co.
Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Johnstone, K. (1979). Impro. New York: Theatre Arts Books.
Kieren, T. (2005). A perspective on the idea of ‘complicity’. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 2(2), 73-76.
Lewis, T. E. (2011). The future of the image in critical pedagogy. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30: 37–51
Neelands, J., & Goode, T. (2000). Structuring drama work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
O’Neill, C. (1995). Drama worlds: A framework for process drama. Portsmouth: Heinemann. 37–51
Parker, W. (2003). Teaching democracy: Unity and diversity in public life (Vol. 14). Teachers College Press.
Powell, K. & Serriere, S. (2013). Image-based participatory pedagogies: Reimaginging social justice. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 14(15): 1-27.
Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press.
Stinson, M., & Freebody, K. (2006). The Dol Project: The Contributions of Process Drama to Improved Results in English Oral Communication. Youth Theatre Journal, 20(1), 27-41. doi: 10.1080/08929092.2006.10012585

Authors

• Joe Norris, Brock University

• Kimberly Anne Powell, The Pennsylvania State University