Playing With Pedagogy: Drama for Social Change With Street Youth

• In Event: Collaborative Arts, Creative Research, and Youth Engagement in Social Justice Practices

Abstract

Purpose: This paper investigates the learning constituted within a street youth-led, participatory theatre production that was advocating for the reopening of emergency safe houses for youth ages 13 to 15 (Author et al., 2014). By focusing on particular pedagogical moments within the play creation, the youth and I examined how meaning is collectively constructed through multimodal literacy practices, inquiring into how critical multimodal meaning-making processes with street youth contribute to social change.

Theoretical Framework: Researchers studying critical arts pedagogies as modes for literacy learning and identity construction within social contexts (Medina, 2004; Rogers, Winters, Perry, & LaMonde, 2010; Author, 2016) use arts–based and critical multimodal representations (e.g., play scripts, photography, film) to demonstrate how youth negotiate their beliefs and opinions. These scholars argue that within situated contexts, multimodal literacy experiences (Jewitt & Kress, 2008; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012) are a large part of how people construct knowledge and their identities.

Research Methodology: This qualitative inquiry is methodologically informed by a critical youth studies framework, critiquing and challenging the production and maintenance of social inequity—by, for and with youth—and across disciplines (Best, 2007; Fine & Weis, 1998). Eight youth between the ages of 16 to 25 participated in the project. The youth-leaders were co-researchers, co-writers of the script, and actors. Script creation and rehearsals took place in an adult shelter and urban hospital on Sunday afternoons in a city in North America. I directed the play and collaboratively analyzed the script and rehearsal footage with one of the youth-leaders.

Data Sources: Using ethnographic field methods of the theatre production during a six-month period a rich set of ethnographic data was collected: video footage, youth-led focus groups and interviews, the youth-written script, a youth actor journal, observational field notes, and a director’s journal.

Results: Although this participatory research can be seen as a “formal pedagogy of resistance” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) because the youth attempted to create systemic and institutional change to promote social justice, there were limitations to the youth's’ civic engagement. In a system that chooses to not value the perspectives of these youth, as demonstrated by the Ministry members who did not attend any of the performances after multiple invitations, the youth learned that conditions of injustice may be challengeable, but not always changeable. Within these sites of critical inquiry and ‘independent’ youth resistances (Vizenor, 2014), the youth provoked ripples of social change, beginning with the youth themselves. Many of their interview responses express how, even during times of resistance and conflict, the community that was built was very important to them.

Importance of the study: With no previous script-building or acting experiences, and no high school degrees, the youth risked much in the exploration of themselves and their collective in creating and performing their stories in front of public audiences. I propose that we need to take more risks with youth in collaboratively creating spaces for critical multimodal arts and resistances that occur within the process, in order to further future pedagogical directions and possibilities.

Author

• Amanda C. Wager, Lesley University