Raising Voice and Power (Sometimes): Teaching Artists' Instruction With Students of Color

• In Event: Voice, Equity, and Critical Consciousness: Antiracist Arts Education and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Abstract

This case study examined how two theatre teaching artists (TAs) employed instruction to respond to the sociocultural knowledge and foster the racialized critical consciousness of students of color. Findings indicated that theatre TAs responded to the lives and cultures of Black and Brown youth when arts activities addressed students’ voices, social and emotional development, cultural practices, and sociopolitical concerns. TAs fostered students’ racialized critical consciousness when they engaged learners in dialogic discussions about racial injustice and positioned students in roles that functioned to critique hegemonic operations of power in the lives of people of color. However, the TAs demonstrated wide variances in the practices they employed and extents to which they taught to learners’ lives and critical consciousness.

Author

• Manuel Simons, Brooklyn College