All t/Truths Are Not Created Equal: Lessons From Applied Drama Practice in Lucknow (India) and Toronto (Canada)

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-4 - Truth, Trust, and Story: Practice, Pedagogy, and Power in the Lives of Youth

Abstract

PURPOSE:
What might it mean to center Indigenous discourses in research with young people? As a scholar of Indian ancestry but now living in Canada, I return to my own indigenous context to make meaning of how young people speak back to power. Specifically, I use Dalit Feminist Theory to illustrate how young people, first in Lucknow (India) and then turning towards Toronto (Canada), use drama pedagogies to enliven their “soul stories”, weave composite characters, and speak back to a dominant Truth, while exposing the multiple truths that matter to them.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
Dalit Feminist Theory lifts Dalit women who are not only viewed as “pollutants” or “untouchable” but also marginalized because they are women (Thomas, 2016). Specifically, I use “atmakathan” to capture the multiplicity of the Dalit experience constituted by a set of diverse and complex historical, linguistic, and religious conditions. Atmakathan (soul stories) refer to life narratives that trace the individual journey and its movement to collective journey through and against systems and structures. Rather than glorify or self-indulge the teller, atmakathan become “signifiers of the historically culturally specific understandings of memory, experiences, and identity” (Mukhopadhyay, 2016, p. 258). This paper centers historically marginalized knowledges in the analysis of data from a Lucknow school educating lowest caste girls, and then offers an alternative reading of data from Regal Heights Collegiate – a public high school in Toronto.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
The research team visited Lucknow in March 2016 for 9 days conducting 70 hours of participant observation, 5-individual interviews, 3 focus groups with 6 participants, and delivered 4 workshops. The data from our Toronto site includes 37 individual youth interviews and 11 focus groups with 51 students, 60 hours of video footage over 61 total days of classroom observation. Specifically, this paper draws from analysis of traditional qualitative methods (e.g. individual and focus group interviews) as well as video-documented engagement with applied drama practices (e.g. devising, rehearsals, and performances).

RESULTS/FINDINGS:
The use of applied drama, important in our attempts to render productive the tensions between the personal and the structural, or the micro and the macro, makes visible important contradictions. These young people do not necessarily see themselves as the group we adults see them as. They do not feel how we think they feel. This paper illustrates how applied drama practices and the creation of composite characters facilitated both a distance as well as a compelling intimacy, enlivening young people’s multiple truths that, at times, stood in opposition to the larger Truth proposed by the state, the classroom, or even us, the researchers.

SCHOLARLY SIGNIFICANCE:
Young people learn better in and from the worlds they actually inhabit. Creating space for young people to speak their atmakathan (soul stories), offers rich possibilities for learning. Applied drama becomes a way for young people to bridge the gap between the real and the imagined, and facilitates both an individual and a collective rehearsal of strategies to engage survivance in their quotidian lives.

Author

• Dirk J. Rodricks, University of Toronto