"Yes, And ...": How Flexibility Within Drama-Based Learning Contexts Can Support Disabled Adults' Agentic Participation

• In Event: Methods, Histories, and Outcomes in Drama/Theater Education

Abstract

The harmful myth that adults with intellectual disabilities lack agency pervades learning and research spaces, justifying ableist practices. This qualitative case study, grounded in perspectives from Disability Studies in Education and the Disability Justice movement, advances a counternarrative, exploring how one group of adults with intellectual disabilities exercised agency in and through a drama-based learning and research context. I identify a characteristic of this context—flexibility—which afforded participants’ agency and explore productive tensions that arose during research. Results suggest an argument for the arts in learning and research with disabled participants, grounded not in their therapeutic benefit but in their capacity to afford agency.

Author

• Maddie N. Zdeblick, University of Washington
  Presenting Author