“The Lines Are Increasingly Hazier”: Reframing Drug Education as Critical Collaborative Inquiry

• In Event: Drugs, Poetry, Music, and Care: Illuminating While Reimagining Possibilities Using Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
This paper shares findings from a months-long project involving five high school teachers in Ontario, Canada who wrote across their experiences doing school-based drug education. Most approaches to drug education rely on the certainty of science and scare tactics to impose no-substance-use injunctions (Beck, 1998; Tupper, 2014) and neglect the broader psychosocial and relational contexts of drug-taking (Bennett, 2014; Farrugia, 2014; Leahy & Malins, 2015). Animated by multimodal composition practices, our inquiry surfaced the many ethical and epistemological tensions that shape our encounters with adolescent substance use, enacting an alternative approach to drug education that resituates substance use as a resource for supporting critical collaborative inquiry.

Theoretical framework
To trace the ways our multimodal compositions enacted an alternative approach to traditional drug education, I follow the blueprints laid by Ashcraft (2012) and Fine and McLelland (2006) who explored youth sexualities and sexual education—an equally contentious and often neglected domain of experience—through literacies frameworks. I also take analytic cues from the posthuman turn in literacies (e.g. Nichols & Campano, 2017; Boldt, 2021; Wargo, 2018), and transliteracies specifically (Stornaiuolo et al., 2017).

Methods and data sources
We teachers met virtually, via Zoom, over four two-hour sessions. Our collaborative inquiry borrowed its methods from the communities theorized by Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009), and modeled by Campano and colleagues (2016), Simon and colleagues (2018), and others (Blackburn, 2014; Morrell, 2008; Vasquez, 2014). The data for this paper include recordings and transcripts of our group meetings, as well as the writing participants shared in response to our weekly prompts, media and textual artifacts, and questions and reflections posted to our virtual message board.

Results
While the field of formal drug education remains “dominated by a technical rationality model” (Tupper, 2008, p. 363) that seeks to distill “evidence-based” interventions and for preventing youth drug use, our multimodal inquiry, like our experiences on the ground, was punctuated by paradox, uncertainty, and possibility. By writing across the concepts of substance use and addiction using multimodal composition tools like Google Jamboard, we also laid bare and broadened the discursive repertoires we use to construct substance use as a “problem” demanding educational intervention. Many of our narrative vignettes, for example, bore echoes of the legal, medical, and moral war on drugs—a war that has overwhelming targeted poor and racialized communities for criminal sanction (Virani & Haines-Saah, 2019; Werb, 2018). Situating these alongside other multimodal texts, such as policy documents, statistical data reports, and short films, called into question the “unspokenness,” as Lea put it, of the assumption that “‘drugs and alcohol are dangerous and bad.’”

Scholarly significance
While North America’s widely publicized opioid epidemic has brought substance use and addiction to the centre of civic discourse (Watson et al., 2020), drugs and drug education are rarely explored in qualitative research. In substance and form, our inquiry unraveled the deficit narratives of youth and frontline educators that often circulate in drug education research and broadened the narrow onto-epistemological horizons that stymy how we encounter substance use at school.

Author

• Ty Walkland, University of Toronto