Rehearsing Alternative Futures for Sex Education: Embracing the Unknowing of Collaborative Meaning-Making

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Towards A Politics of Multiplicity: Reimagining the Future of “Ensemble” in Art and Education

Abstract

Sex education has historically relied on deficit frameworks, casting youth as sexually unknowing and vulnerable to pregnancy, violence, and disease. Alternatively, recognizing vulnerability as constitutive of human interdependency (Quinlivan, 2018) and unknowing as ethical openness to uncertainty and the limits of one’s own perspective (Logue, 2022) offers a necessary shift for re-imagining sexual learning: a process rooted in intimacy, trust, and discovery versus fear, shame, and ignorance. This paper explores ensemble-based theatre rehearsals as an onto-axio-epistemological orientation that disrupts traditional paradigms, instead, embracing a model that engages the interplay between risk-taking, vulnerability, and agency within the safe space of performance.

I draw on applied theatre methodologies, particularly Boal’s (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) and improvisation (Spolin, 1999), as critical performative pedagogy to re-envision sex education as a site of experimentation where vulnerability and unknowing fuel the ensemble’s alchemy. TO provides a “rehearsal for life” where participants interrogate lived experiences of oppression through embodied dialogue, reflecting on and restaging social realities in real time. The “Yes, and” ethos of improvisation encourages risk-taking through offering incomplete, raw contributions and remaining open to having them reshaped by others (Fischlin et. al, 2013). This epistemological engagement requires stepping into the unknowing of collaborative meaning-making (O’Grady & Peters, 2017).

Data for this paper come from rehearsals with a 12-member undergraduate ensemble for a theatre-based sex education course where students workshopped creative assignments inspired by lived experiences to devise an original performance for local high schoolers. As performer-ethnographer (Conquergood, 2002), I participated in the ensemble rehearsals and performances. Ensemble members represented a range of gender identities, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds, shaping how sexual health was understood and explored. Data sources include person-centered interviews (Levy & Hollan, 2015), students’ assignments, and transcripts of rehearsal sessions, specifically the devising process of three car-based improvisation scenes (consent, “aftercare”, and parent-child communication around contraception), which involved iterative scene development and discussions among students/ensemble and instructors/directors.

From the perspective of metaxis, the “in-betweenness” of reality and fiction (Boal, 2000), I analyze “rehearsal” as a liminal space (Schechner, 1985) where sexual scripts are disrupted and alternative futures rehearsed. Using interaction analysis and micro-ethnographic methods (Goodwin, 2017; Jordan & Henderson, 1995), I highlight dialogic moments during the ensemble’s devising process where competing discourses surfaced. Triangulating transcripts with other data sources, I traced “taken-for-granted” assumptions (Boal, 2000) that influenced artistic choices. Analysis illustrates how the rehearsal context enabled students to collectively engage epistemic tensions. During the consent scene, for example, one student-actor challenged the directors’ suggestion to use “the backseat” as a comedic innuendo, advocating instead for modeling direct engagement with the topic for audiences. This interaction sparked a class-wide discussion on the broader pedagogical implications of euphemistic framings that reinforce sexual taboo.

Findings emphasize how ensemble performance offers a powerful framework for sex education research and pedagogy, attending to the relational and context-dependent nature of student meaning-making. This work advances educational justice, “unforgetting” erasure of youth lived experience by engaging them as authors of their own sexual knowledge.

Author

• Amanda Harris, University of California - Los Angeles