Smallest Circles First: Using Drama Education and Theater to Explore Reconciliatory Praxis

• In Event: Rehearsals for Change: Engaging in Meaningful Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teacher Education

Abstract

Purpose
This research focuses on the experiences of elementary and post-secondary pre- and in-service teacher’s agency. It looks at how this agency engages with the educational calls to action from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) using drama education and theatre. Two research projects took place focusing on the question What dispositions do pre- and in- service teachers need to develop in order to enact critical-creative agency through the lived provincial arts curriculum?

Perspective
The TRC was intended to be a process that would guide Canadians to “lay the foundation for lasting reconciliation across Canada” (Moran, 2015). Over ten years later, the way(s) that the TRC’s calls to action have been taken up are numerous and varied. Yet there is still lingering confusion about what the foundation “to be laid” is, what “lasting reconciliation” looks like, and how to achieve it.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Narrative inquiry, arts-based research and phenomenology are used to consider how to work with participants as a means to explore the research question. A component of this research began with a focus on testing the phenomenological bracketing of the subject self-process to determine not only if a participant could “see something as if for the first time” through the creation of a character, but if they should. A posthuman phenomenology was considered as a means to situate conversations and critiques of identity and subjectification and the problems with posthuman approaches for possible suturing over Indigenous Ways of Knowing (Higgens & Madden, 2019). An autophenomenological approach (Carter, 2022), in which participants did not learn to “walk in someone else’s shoes” was theorized as a way to argue for the importance of “walking in one’s own shoes” when exploring issues and topics related to racism, identity, agency and anti-oppression.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Three case studies exemplify how pre- and in-service teachers in Quebec use teacher agency to engage with the TRC’s educational calls to action while co-creating collaborative drama and theatre performances. These examples cover a range of pre- and in-service K-University contexts using both drama education and theatre performances to learn and present shared understandings.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
Participants developed inter-personal skills such as negotiation, seeing another’s point of view, spatial awareness, pacing, embodied learning, self-regulation, resiliency, and empathy, which were also described as kinds of learning and (un)learning that took place. In this way, there was a turn in the pedagogical space distinguished by Gadamer (1997) as the difference between experience as reconstruction and experience as construction.

Scholarly significance of the study or work
This research points to a need to end the reification of using drama education as an opportunity to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” because of the harm that appropriative actions can have when this statement is taken up uncritically.

Author

• Mindy Roberta Carter, McGill University
  Presenting Author