Arts Education

This paper presents data from a study examining the use of Theatre of the Oppressed as a critical pedagogy and research method for exploring notions of identity, belonging, and culture with francophone secondary students (Schroeter, 2009). It describes the process whereby Black African–Canadian students with refugee backgrounds identified their program, as well as their language, citizenship status, and race as factors limiting their imagined social futures (New London Group, 2000). The paper finds that students used their identities, symbolism, and ambiguity to challenge authorized discourses and show how their identities intersected in their educational experiences.

This paper asks what pedagogies are needed as Canadians are invited to reconcile colonial pasts with contemporary forms of racism and enduring colonial structures. Sharing discourses of race from youth who participated in a year-long ethnography, and moments from a drama-based pedagogical collaboration, this paper suggests ways of updating multiliteracies frameworks so as to better account for the networks of power that circulate in classrooms. This project had the dual aims of exploring discourses of difference used by students, as well as drama as a multimodal, embodied, and (post)critical pedagogy for unpacking differences embedded in the Grade 9 social studies curriculum. Drawing on feminist pedagogies, critical race studies, and Indigenous critiques of education, the author argues that embodiment and subjectivity are central to teaching and learning, and illustrates through excerpts from interviews and fieldnotes, how race, intersectionality, and White supremacy influence interactions in the classroom. The paper concludes by proposing that multiliteracies and multimodal pedagogies would benefit from centralizing anti-racist and decolonizing approaches to learning, in addition to the networks in which literacy practices occur and through which meaning is made.

This paper asks what pedagogies are needed as Canadians are invited to reconcile colonial pasts with contemporary forms of racism and enduring colonial structures. Sharing discourses of race from youth who participated in a year-long ethnography, and moments from a drama-based pedagogical collaboration, this paper suggests ways of updating multiliteracies frameworks so as to better account for the networks of power that circulate in classrooms. This project had the dual aims of exploring discourses of difference used by students, as well as drama as a multimodal, embodied, and (post)critical pedagogy for unpacking differences embedded in the Grade 9 social studies curriculum. Drawing on feminist pedagogies, critical race studies, and Indigenous critiques of education, the author argues that embodiment and subjectivity are central to teaching and learning, and illustrates through excerpts from interviews and fieldnotes, how race, intersectionality, and White supremacy influence inter...