Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This study examines social justice teaching through drama and conflict pedagogies, and diverse students’ responses to these pedagogies, infused in academic curriculum practice in three publicly funded urban classrooms (grades 4-8). Qualitative and arts-based methodologies included teacher interviews, participant observation, and students’ improvised drama workshops facilitated by the researcher. The three participating teachers, working in demographically different (privileged and marginalized) contexts, conceptualized and taught social justice education through drama pedagogies that embraced conflict as a learning opportunity. Each emphasized a somewhat different approach: critical care (learning about Others and interpersonal relationships); critical shit disturbing (questioning to elicit conflict and tools for developing agency); cautious risk taking (eliciting multiple understandings of broad social issues, acknowledging uncertainty). These three teachers addressed justice primarily in affirmative ways, and sometimes set the stage for potentially transformative justice education (Fraser, 2005). Students from each classroom had contrasting interpretations of social justice, and responded to their teachers’ pedagogies with varied, sometimes contradicting, forms of engagement, including humour and silence. The findings reveal a set of tensions within the pedagogical “dramatic encounter”. 1, Teachers’ perceptions of students’ differences were key to how they taught, and identities also influenced students’ responses to social justice and drama pedagogies. Students with more personal experience with oppression tended to make improvisational drama choices that addressed broader social structural issues, while others tended to remain distant from oppression by dramatizing issues only as generic interpersonal conflicts. 2, Social justice drama pedagogies surfaced danger and potential: conflict in these pedagogies could be (but was not always) generative and agonistic (constructive rather than antagonistic). 3, Carefully designed pedagogies that allocated time to dramatic processes created opportunities for students’ expressed understandings to develop complexity. This study provides complex examples of social justice education through drama and conflict embedded in varied subject areas that were demonstrably feasible in three contrasting public classrooms with young students. This study shows the challenges of seeking one right way to teach conflict, drama, and social justice in all contexts, and recognizes ways students participate in the refashioning of social justice for their own lives.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Antonino Giambrone
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2623781429