In Search of Critical Theatre Pedagogy: Teaching Artists' Practice with Students of Color
Abstract
This case study investigated the instructional practices of two theatre teaching artists (TAs) in classrooms that serve students of color. Specifically, this study scrutinized how theatre TAs employed drama instruction to respond to the perspectives, experiences, and cultural knowledge and foster the racialized critical consciousness of Black and Brown youth. Utilizing the constant comparative method, the researcher conducted individual and cross-case analyses of data collected via classroom observations of TAs’ practice, audio journals maintained by TAs, individual interviews with TAs and partnering classroom teachers, and student focus groups. Findings indicated that two theatre TAs responded to the lives and cultures of youth of color when they employed instruction that elicited student voice, attended to students as social and emotional beings, integrated cultural practices and products meaningful to students, and addressed sociopolitical issues that impact students. This study also revealed that the TAs fostered students’ racialized critical consciousness when they positioned students in drama roles or scenarios that functioned to critique hegemonic operations of power in the lives of people of color and engaged students in dialogic interactions about racial injustice. However, the TAs demonstrated wide variances in the types of practices they employed and the extents to which they applied them to respond to perspectives, experiences, and cultural knowledge and foster racialized critical consciousness among youth of color. Indeed, one TA demonstrated greater attention to learners’ experiential knowledge and critical consciousness via a more variegated and student-centered repertoire of arts-based practices than the other.
Subject Area
Performing arts education|Theater|Pedagogy|Multicultural Education
Recommended Citation
Simons, Brian Manuel, "In Search of Critical Theatre Pedagogy: Teaching Artists' Practice with Students of Color" (2020). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI28002481.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI28002481
