Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann: A Play About Power in a College of Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Methodologies: Ethnodrama, Storying, and Listening

Abstract

This is a critical, auto-ethnographic ethnodrama. The ethnodrama is the creation of a script from significant selections from interviews, field notes, journal entries, and other artifacts, and reworking these data as a five-act play. Here, I take a creative approach to detail a personal experience with fear-laden university-plantation-colonial-patriarchal politics. The play stars two assistant professors and two educational leaders assigned to the characters of Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann. These formal titles are used here as pejorative parallels to represent these individuals’ whiteness, white supremacy, arrogance, and abuse of power.

Author

• Leslie Ann Locke, University of Iowa