Facilitating a "Community Cultural Wealth" of Drama Classrooms Using Applied Theater Methodology

• In Event: Applied Theater as Methodological Intervention in Qualitative Research With Urban Youth

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how theatre methodologies were mobilized in a global multi-sited project of drama classrooms in Athens (Greece), Lucknow (India), Tainan (Taiwan), Toronto (Canada), and Coventry (England). Growing inequality, economic polarization, and social dislocation mark each of these research sites and threaten strong pedagogical models of learning and youth citizenship. Using theatre methodology, this global research project sought to explore, through drama pedagogy, youth understandings of civic engagement in order to learn from and with the youth about their hopes, and for what and whom they care.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:

This paper will specifically focus on Year 1 of this 4-year project where the genre of verbatim theatre was used in each of the five sites as the curricular frame to conduct this exploration. Verbatim theatre involves a performance whose dramatic script is constructed from original interview transcripts around a particular theme or question. In this project, the original interview transcripts were generated from, by, with the students around the ideas of 'hope' and 'care' in each of the five sites. The five distinct dramatic scripts resulted in five different performances. Throughout the process of verbatim creation, traditional qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups were also conducted.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

This paper uses critical race theory and, in particular, Tara Yosso’s (2005) conceptualization of “community cultural wealth” to consider the ways in which this applied theatre methodology troubled majoritarian discourses of access, capacity, and success with urban youth across the globe. Building on Octavio Villalpando and Daniel Solórzano’s (2004) work on cultural wealth, Yosso advanced a typology of “community cultural wealth” to refer to the resources and assets mobilized by minoritized young people in spaces of marginality. This typology will be applied in this paper.

RESULTS:

The paper will highlight some of the ways in which applied theatre methodologies across the different sites enlivened Yosso’s typology of cultural wealth including aspirational, navigational, familial, and resistant forms of capital through the youth’s engagement with drama. Aspirational capital refers to the ability to develop, maintain, and nurture hopes and future goals regardless of real and perceived barriers. Yosso describes navigational capital as the resiliency that may develop through social networks to persist through institutional barriers. The broad understanding of kinship that includes extended family and even communities constitutes familial capital, whereas, resistant capital is defined as “those knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behaviour that challenges inequality” (p. 80). Here, a motivation to facilitate change exists but through a lens of resistance to subordination and being constructed as deficit. This paper will utilize the video recordings of the final verbatim performances to demonstrate how theatre methodologies opened up a process of support framed by the mutually reinforcing forms of community cultural wealth.

SIGNIFICANCE:

This work illustrates how applied theatre can re-position qualitative research through creative engagement. Through these micro-encounters, theatre methodologies can help shift the landscape of traditional qualitative research and open up avenues for different, and more complex, analytical possibilities.

Author

• Dirk J. Rodricks, University of Toronto