Volume 8

Reflections on Teaching Process Drama: A Critical Inquiry into Our Practice with/as Educators

Amanda Claudia Wager

VANCOUVER ISLAND UNIVERSITY 

Sara Schroeter

UNIVERSITY OF REGINA

PROCESS DRAMA AS A GIFT?

The paradox of the gift is that, because it can be seen simultaneously as both a present and a poison, it is sometimes worth remembering the unpalatable truth that a present, however well intentioned, may be thought to be poisonous by those who live in a different context and whose vision of a good life differs from our own. (Nicholson, 2005, pp. 161-162)

We open with Nicholson’s reminder that experiences are received differently by each person. What we perceive as a beautiful skill and way of learning, such as process drama, others may experience as harmful and damaging. In this narrative of practice we reflect on our experiences as drama-in-education professors teaching educators to create and facilitate process dramas in their classrooms (Bolton & Heathcote, 1995; Bowell & Heap, 2013; Neelands & Goode, 2000; O’Neill, 1995). Having taught process drama to children, youth, and educators over the past 15 years, we explain our approach, while reflexively questioning our practice and those of educators we have worked with to critically examine ethical dilemmas we encountered using this strategy as white educators. We hope to contribute to ongoing conversations about race and theatre (Young, 2013), as we strive to develop more race-conscious practices in drama-in-education.

We write this narrative of practice from two different geographic locations; Amanda works and lives on the unceded territory of the K’ómoks First Nation and Sara on Treaty 4 territory, the traditional land of the Nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda peoples and the homeland of the Métis people. As white cisgender female educators, we seek to shine a critical lens on teacher education; acknowledging that our practices build on pedagogies established by brilliant, yet predominantly white, figures in drama-in-education. With others (Jones, 2014; Reason & Jones, 2021; Streeter, 2020), we recognize the many contributions of scholars and teachers who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, whose work informs our teaching and our critiques (Deavere Smith, 2002; Luhning, 2010), yet whose valuable contributions are not always recognized in this field.

Over the past twelve years, we have acted as critical friends (Samaras, 2011), giving each other feedback as we investigate using process drama and role-play as a critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) in the classroom. Drawing on our teaching experiences, our goal is to call for artists and educators, including ourselves, to be even more thoughtful in planning and facilitating process dramas, especially when teaching people with different subjectivities and positionalities. More specifically, we seek to unpack the ways that whiteness can manifest when drama-based methods are used to address critical issues that impact people differently and, to use Nicholson’s (2005) metaphor, might poison the well of potential “gifts” out of which these dramas emerge.

PROCESS DRAMA: ENGAGING IN A RANGE OF DRAMATIC STRATEGIES

Process dramas are embodied, aesthetic, and multimodal explorations of specific topics through engagement in a range of dramatic strategies. They rely on facilitators and participants co-creating imaginary worlds, through improvisation, for the purpose of learning (Bowell & Heap, 2013; Dunn, 2016). In the case we present, our students created and facilitated a process drama that broached a social justice topic for their students and/or classmates to explore. Our students ranged in experience from teacher candidates in a Bachelor of Education program, to teachers with many years of experience completing a Master of Education.

Exploring the intersections of drama, culture, and power (e.g., Baldwin & Fleming, 2003; Conrad, 2004; Gallagher, Wessels, & Ntelioglou, 2012; Medina & Campano, 2006; O’Toole & O’Mara, 2007; Schneider, Crumpler, & Rogers, 2006; Winn, 2011), many studies advocate that process dramas have the potential to create transformative spaces where critical literacy exploration happens and where students can work together to better understand cultural divisions. Our discussion in this paper is drawn from critical self-reflection on being white educators and multiple co- and individual teaching experiences we have had over the years, as well as our review of feedback we have given to our students during the creation and following the facilitation of their process dramas. Specifically, we wanted to explore how educators enrolled in university drama-in-education courses might use drama ethically, to inform their understandings of inequities (i.e. related to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc.) and expand their pedagogical practices.

INQUIRY INTO OUR PRACTICE: WHO WE ARE AND ARE BECOMING

There is no "one moment" that we, the co-authors, realized the possible harm of our practice and our students’ practices; rather there are several moments that bring us to this critical reflection. We met as doctoral students at a university on the west coast of Canada, where we spent hours discussing theories and problematizing drama-in-education and literacy methods. We are what collaborative self-study scholars name as “critical friends” (Goessling & Wager, 2020; Samaras, 2011), ones who nurture and support each other’s ongoing research through a commitment to reflexivity in our work as drama educators, artists, and scholars. We share a passion for humanizing inquiry, a theoretical and methodological framework that fosters a consciousness-raising teaching and research approach guided by respect, care, reciprocity and humility with those we work/teach/research with (Freire, 1970; Paris & Winn, 2013).

Amanda has worked by, for and with many diverse communities using arts as education and advocacy. In the beginning of the 20th Century, Amanda’s great-grandparents came to Turtle Island, known today as North America, from Poland/Russia—the borders were constantly shifting—fleeing the Jewish genocide of the Russian Red Army. They in turn became settler colonizers of other people’s land. Her family history and experiences living in diverse geographic places, have made her adapt to new locations and languages quickly. Sara is of French and German heritage, a positioning that has afforded her unearned privilege and access to full citizenship rights on the land currently known as Canada. Raised in a multiethnic, multiracial, and multifaith, yet historically Jewish, neighbourhood in Montreal, Sara was taught to confront her family’s complex ties to the Holocaust at a young age. This led to a wariness of ethno-nationalism and a commitment to protecting the rights of minoritized peoples.

Throughout our careers, we have positioned our work with marginalized youth as “critical.” Although critical pedagogy revolutionized understandings of education in the 1960s, it carries with it a number of limitations, such as the absence of an examination of patriarchal white privilege and a troubling meta-narrative of a binary liberation (oppressed vs. oppressor) (Ellsworth, 1989; Gore, 1992; Grady, 2003; Lather, 2001; Weiler, 2001). Reflecting on Ellsworth’s (1989) statement that “everyone who has grown up in a racist culture has to work at unlearning racism” (p. 303), we have become aware of our complicity in the maintenance of whiteness in the educational system. We see our roles as antiracist pedagogues as a continuous, never-ending road of self-awareness and learning about our privileges and power to create learning and working environments that are spaces in which individuals may question themselves and each other, and become comfortable expressing their differences.

Our discussions about process drama began seven years ago while co-teaching a drama-in-education course. Later, as we went on to teach at different institutions, we continued to model a process drama for our students as facilitators–in–role to guide our university students through critical dramatic inquiries. When we teach process drama, we invite questions, note-taking, facilitate participatory multimodal activities (e.g., guided tours, map–making, town council meetings) and role-play alongside the participants. Students work in groups of three to six to create a process drama that they facilitate for their peers. We make suggestions and offer critiques throughout the planning process and following their facilitation.

As our teaching in new contexts with differently positioned students (i.e., age, race, context, location) has evolved, we continue to engage in critical discussion about teaching process drama, which has led to the following questions:

• What are the ethical limitations to process drama?

• How might process dramas position teachers, encouraging them to examine the ways in which culture, knowledge, language, and power intersect within classroom settings?

This narrative of practice begins to answer these questions by presenting feedback that we gave to a group of predominantly white students who facilitated a process drama on residential schools. In 2017, we revisited this feedback when we were teaching from our respective new locations. As critical educators and friends, we turned to our teaching notes, examples of process drama planning sheets made by students, and the feedback we provided them, to uncover repeated patterns and concerns that arose from our practice.

CONTEXTUALIZING THE PROBLEM

Our pedagogical approach and understanding of ethics have been shaped by applied theatre and drama-in-education, feminist, and critical race scholars and practitioners who inspire us and who have shifted our focus toward culturally responsive and anti-racist education in order to meet the needs of racially minoritized students.

Drama-in-Education

Art is an aesthetic, affective means of knowledge production and a multimodal form of meaning-making with the potential to effect social change. Our work is informed by the work of theatre and drama pioneers, such as Augusto Boal (1979), Dorothy Heathcote (1995), and Cecily O’Neill (1995), among other drama-in-education, critical and multiple literacy scholars (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Gallagher, Wessels, & Ntelioglou, 2012; Medina & Campano, 2006; Nicholson, 2005; Rivière, 2008; Winn, 2011) who highlight advocacy, access, language, multimodality, and the experiences of minoritized people. Like these practitioners and scholars, we believe that drama-in-education may provide a viable framework through which education can engage young people in thinking about and taking action on social justice issues.

Feminist and Critical Race Critiques

We heed Ellsworth’s (1989) critique that critical pedagogies are not always empowering for everyone when they are enacted in classrooms, as well as Lather’s (2012) call to question the places where our pedagogies “get stuck.” One factor that undeniably shapes educators’ worldviews and life experiences is their race. In our case, our positionality as white women shapes our teaching practice, and we are not alone. Education is a field dominated by women and, while statistics on race and employment are difficult to obtain in Canada, white educators are estimated to make up between 71-96% of teachers across this country (Ryan, Pollock, & Antonelli, 2009), and 85% of the teaching force in the United States (Howard, 2016). For decades, research has demonstrated that white educators are not always well-equipped to teach students from different racial backgrounds (Delpit, 2006; Dei, 1994; Evans-Williams & Hines, 2020; Howard, 2016) because Black, Indigenous, and other students of colour drop-out and are pushed-out of schools that fail to meet their needs in alarming numbers (Codjoe, 2001; Fine, 1991; Morris, 2016). Growing out of the multicultural education movement of the 1970s and 80s, calls for culturally relevant, affirming, and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 2014), as well as anti-racist (Dei, 2006), decolonizing (Battiste, 2013), and abolitionist education (Love, 2019) have grown louder. Our research and work in and out of schools affirms that significant changes to curriculum, including in drama-in-education, are needed to meet the needs of all students.

Teacher Education

We are concerned by the ways in which whiteness is reinforced in education and in teacher education programs (Schroeter, 2019; Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2020) and how a dominant lens is applied to curriculum and educational scholarship. When creating our syllabi, we seek to include diverse voices from drama-in-education and have often found this task challenging, turning to theatre and performance studies and other areas of education to fulfill this requirement. There are white drama educators who work with and highlight the voices of minoritized groups, such as Heathcote’s (1971) work with working class children in Three Looms Waiting, yet few widely recognized “pioneers” of drama education are minoritized. Therefore, while drama may have the potential to disrupt conventional thinking and examine diverse perspectives, we wonder whether, in practice, this is always done in ways that are affirming for minoritized students.

Gallagher and Rodricks (2017) illustrate the challenges drama teachers experience in trying to avoid stereotyping, a shallow representation of an individual or a group that is fixed and oversimplified, when they bring real world examples into the classroom to explore dramatically. In their study, they illustrate how a Black drama teacher was able to problematize their source material because they could relate to their racially minoritized students. However, we wonder how much white teachers would share this instinct. As noted above, white teachers are overrepresented in education and teacher education programs (Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2020) in Canada and the United States. Souto-Manning and Emdin note that although teacher education programs have begun to integrate multicultural materials, they often do so in ways that uphold Eurocentric values. We take this point seriously, for, we have come to note this pattern when our students, with “good intentions,” select critical issues to examine through process drama.

LEARNING THROUGH EXPERIENCE: 2014 CO-TEACHING PROCESS DRAMA

In 2014, we co-taught a Drama-in-Education course for 35 predominantly white graduate and undergraduate students. It was then that we first witnessed a group create a process drama that we considered unethical in that we believed it could cause more harm than good for participants. In this particular process drama, the group of four students created a simulation of a residential school experience from a white settler-colonial perspective, rather than creating an imagined metaphorical world, as they had been instructed to do. Debriefing this process drama, with the class and each other, we asked ‘what are the ethical limitations of creating a process drama?’ This led to deep discussion with the students, which included in-depth written feedback about why we felt the process drama crossed ethical boundaries. In our feedback to the group, Sara began by commending them for their decision to explore residential schools with Grade 5 and 6 students especially since, at the time, few educators seemed willing to do so and truth-telling about residential schools is a necessary part of reconciliation. The second part of the written feedback was specific to ideas about how to shift the power dynamics in an imagined world:

Instead of having the students in role as students in a simulated residential school, you could tell them that they are school designers/engineers/district representatives who are going to be evaluating a school that existed not long ago, and that their job is to determine whether it was a good school or whether it should have been shut down. Then the students get to decide what should or should not have happened to the school using their own ethics and value judgements. These alterations shift the power in the process drama in a significant way that would make it more open for the students to explore their own feelings about something they know little or nothing about and further develop their own sense of ethics. This approach also protects them from being made to feel excluded, anxious or ashamed by the process drama. The trick with this powerful medium is not to use it in order to create mini social experiments à la Stanford Prison Experiment, but to open up spaces in the curriculum to explore issues through creative and dramatic engagement.

The reactions from the group were varied. Some students reacted in a way consistent with the features of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018), expressing shame, hostility, and defensiveness, and believed that we had accused them of being racist. As their instructors, it was our responsibility to let our students know their process drama had crossed an ethical boundary. We had intervened during the planning and rehearsal process, attempting to shift the direction that the group was heading with their non-metaphorical scenario, but the students ultimately chose to ignore our concerns. Their process drama was too realistic and, therefore, potentially damaging. Some students in the class agreed. Moreover, this process drama was created with only white settler students in mind, not with a concern for Indigenous and other racialized students, or teaching from a perspective that was mindful of historical trauma. In the following sections, we discuss further implications for this particular process drama and how we have altered our teaching of process dramas since.

CRITICAL INQUIRY: WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENDED DIFFERENTLY

It’s important to firstly note that at the time of this process drama, there was less focus on Indigenous ways of knowing in education that are now being integrated into some provinces’ curriculum (Campbell, 2004). Although this reflects progress in moving towards more diverse ways of learning that include culturally relevant, affirming, and sustaining pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris, 2012), as well as anti-racist (Dei, 2006), decolonizing (Battiste, 2013), and abolitionist education (Love, 2019), it also comes with many challenges. Firstly, all schools do not follow this mandate and when they do it often looks more like cultural appropriation, the adoption of one culture's traditions into the dominant culture, than a pedagogical tool. When there are attempts to interweave Indigenous knowledge into the curriculum, Elders and Knowledge Keepers are sought out, or should be, to affirm that the protocols are being respected and taught in a sound manner. This puts overwhelming pressure on the few Elders and Knowledge Keepers who can be funded, albeit very little funding, to share and collaborate with urban public school districts. Often times teachers, the majority white, are left with nobody to get feedback from and may misrepresent the knowledges.

Next, we reflect on how this process drama engaged in the imaginary world, a key principle of this approach, and then follow with specific changes that we discussed with the group to change the power dynamics. The group had their process drama participants begin in an imaginary world where the facilitators were teachers and the participants were students at a school. They asked the students to recollect and share their experiences about their first day of school and many reflected positive memories. However, there are and will be many cases when the first day of school have been terrible or traumatic for students for various reasons. We suggested that it might be more productive to start by asking what participants liked most about recess or summer vacation. This shift could more readily lead the students to think about ideas related to freedom, play, home, and happiness, providing a strong contrast to what occurred in residential schools. The group facilitators showed considerable expertise in leading drama activities within their process drama, such as image work (Boal, 2002) to reflect on their positive feelings of the first day of school, many of which showed children playing.

A potentially triggering experience for the participants was when they were later asked to act in-role as residential school students. This took away any sense of power from the participants, breaking with established traditions in process drama to have participants act in a position of power (Heathcote & Bolton, 1995) and put them in a place where they could be harmed. The scenario suggested in the feedback above sought to rebalance the power dynamic. Since the purpose of the process drama was to teach Grade 5 and 6 students about residential schools, the participants could learn about the facts of these schools through role-playing as school designers, engineers, or district representatives tasked with evaluating residential schools of the past. A variety of residential school media (photographs, stories, film, etc.) chosen by the facilitators could be shared with the “expert school designers,” who would evaluate the residential schools based on contemporary materials about learning and school design. As expert school designers, participants would be in a position of power and recall positive playful environments that they shared initially in their first tableau.

There could be a moment where, after learning more about the residential schools, the participants could still create a tableau reflecting how they imagined that children in residential schools may have felt being taken away from their parents, unable to speak their language, and forced to be separated from their brothers and sisters. In this instance tableau would be used to explore emotional connections for one moment, rather than subjecting participants to abusive behaviours while in role. This “one moment” tableau would also serve as an interesting contrast from the first tableau, and lead to a discussion that might capture how feelings associated with freedom and play might have been lost through the imposition of the residential school system.

Another alternative we proposed was the use of a children’s book, like Shi-shi-etko (Campbell, 2005) and exploring residential schools through story drama (Booth, 2005; Miller & Saxton, 2016). Here a book is used as a starting point, while interrupting the reading to enable participants to play in-role as characters in the book (i.e. hot seating), or other characters students may imagine. Story drama creates imaginative points of dialogue for young students, which is essential to language learning, literacies, play and critical inquiry (Berriz et al., 2018). An added benefit of doing story drama with Shi-shi-etko is that Campbell is a Nłeʔkepmx, Syilx, and Métis author, thus enabling the educators to honor authentic stories, lived experiences, and the knowledge of Indigenous people. Drama-in-education provides multiple entry points demanding complex problem-solving skills, but it also provides tangible scaffolding for literacy work and critical thinking. Materials and strategies must be carefully selected to address different issues with care.

LOOKING FORWARD TO FUTURE ETHICAL PROCESS DRAMAS AND ROLE-PLAYS

As critical friends, we have spent many hours discussing what we could have done differently as drama educators to better explain the principles and facilitation of process dramas. In 2017, we had phone conversations about our experiences teaching process drama independently since 2014. One key issue we observed was that students sometimes chose a critical issue to illuminate through a process drama without using a sufficiently strong metaphor to create distance between students and the issue. We felt that this was one place where ethical challenges became most evident. In all of our times teaching process drama, we have explained the importance of imagined/metaphorical ideas to students, but we find that students new to drama often resist this aspect, preferring to use real world examples. Sometimes this impulse is guided by their desires to be “good” critical educators who address real problems with their students. We understand this persuasion, which is why we examine the ethical conundrums in our own practice with process drama.

As well, given that many Canadians live in denial about the events that occurred in residential schools as exemplified by reactions of shock and surprise at the recent unveiling of evidence showing the existence of over a thousand unmarked graves (MacDonald, 2021), we now feel that residential schools should be learned about from Indigenous perspectives/voices, with an emphasis on truth-telling rather than metaphor. Therefore, our current position is that non-Indigenous educators should not teach about residential schools through the use of process drama or any metaphor that moves away from truth-telling. This reflection leads us to the conclusion that there may be other topics that are not best explored through process drama, led by educators in dominant positions or who are outsiders to the communities that have been harmed (e.g., slavery, the Holocaust, etc.). In those instances, we believe that the use of other carefully planned drama strategies is preferable.

A Peek into Sara’s Courses

Currently in Sara’s university classrooms, students continue to want to address residential schools through process drama, as this is part of the curriculum. Through increased engagement with Indigenous colleagues, local Elders, kokums, and Knowledge Keepers, Sara has learned the edict “no stories about us, without us.” That is, no stories about Indigenous peoples without their full and voluntary participation, as stories about colonization have been (mis)told by settlers for too long. Teaching from this frame, Sara directs her students to think about the perspective from which they would have to explore residential schools in order to connect authentically to the source material and avoid telling someone else’s stories. She also asks her students to reflect on who they would have been in that particular historical context. For students who are white settlers, this has meant realizing that they may have been teachers in residential schools. These discussions have led students to make connections between education and its role in enduring colonization. It is telling that students move away from the topic when they realize which perspective they would need to examine it from. The desire to protect one’s own feelings and emotions is strong, which is how the potential for doing harm with affective art becomes apparent. Part of Sara’s practice is also to problematize process dramas she has created and facilitated, highlighting some of the pitfalls she has encountered in this work, in spite of their affective power and positive educational outcomes.

A Peek into Amanda’s Courses

In Amanda’s courses, she first models a process drama based on a metaphorical idea and has students create their process dramas using an adaptation of Heathcote’s Mantle of the Experts Task Sheet that she obtained during a workshop with Dorothy Heathcote at the University of Victoria in 2009. She has found that by using this task sheet, she is able to further guide her students to think about how to represent their process drama through a metaphorical imaginary world. Heathcote’s task sheet includes the following questions to guide the creation process:

• Task: What "strategy" are you using in order to create a fictional/imaginary world for your participants? (e.g., prereading articles, tableaux work, newspaper reporters interviewing people, etc.)

• Demands: What do the participants need to do during this task in order to be a part of the fictional/imaginary world? What role are you having them play?

• Purpose: What perspective are you trying to have your participants understand through role play? What are your goals as the facilitator in having your participants do this task?

• Preparations: What do the participants need access to in order to be successful in this task? What props might you need? What costumes? What materials (e.g., if you are making a map you would need poster paper and markers)?

• Devices: What devices (i.e., drama strategy such as tableaux) do the participant(s) use in order to gain further understanding of the issue/topic? Why does this particular device help them gain a different perspective?

• Outcomes: (answer after process drama is finished) What happened during this task?

Amanda also suggests that students use story drama, where a children’s book or young adult novel may become the starting point or pre-text for their process dramas, as many books stem from metaphorical teachings. After modeling a process drama and giving her students the task sheet as a creative guide, she has found that some student groups still create process dramas that can push the ethical boundaries of drama because they position the participants as victims, in potentially traumatizing circumstances, especially for students who have been marginalized. This was especially true for those groups of student teachers who were creating process dramas for middle or high school students that based their process dramas off of fictional young adult novels.

For instance, one group of middle school teachers created a process drama stemming from the book The Giver (Lowry, 1993), in which they created a dystopian world where they wanted participants to understand government control. As facilitators they initially wanted to always be in control of their fictional world to control participants. Amanda discussed in depth with the group about the potential harm in retraumatizing students. Through these discussions this multiracial and multicultural group of students quickly recognized the potential harm their process drama could cause. Returning to this idea of giving all the students/participants positions of power by positioning them as ‘experts’ in their particular role, they rewrote their task sheet so that all participants at one point were in a position of power via their chosen ages, jobs, and by visualizing their characters dreams. This changed the dynamics of the process drama, as well as geared it away from their realistic examples where the facilitators controlled everything and participants were victims of their control.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE OF DRAMA-IN-EDUCATION

We continue to explore the ethical limitations of process drama and our own practice in our writing (Schroeter & Wager, 2017), and ponder how to support student teachers in developing ethical practices, while addressing real world issues. Process dramas can lay the groundwork for gaining multiple perspectives, offering an embodied critical space as a springboard for discussion, raising awareness about current issues, and helping learners gain understanding of their own socio–cultural identities. They can also, if created and facilitated unethically, as with the process drama about residential schools, lead participants into turbulent waters that can be damaging. We argue that when teaching process drama, ethical limitations need to be thoroughly discussed and that insisting on the use of metaphor is useful for avoiding harmful practice. As well, even with the use of metaphor, drama works with emotions, on an affective level, and there is always the possibility that a participant will be deeply impacted by the experience. We look towards art to move us, so we wonder how to create a place where participants feel that they can express the impact that a process drama has on them, and not walk away hurt. One solution in addition to a long debrief between facilitators and participants is to have a support system available, such as informing a guidance counsellor, drama therapist, or Elder about the work ahead of time, and having them available to participants during and/or afterward.

We hope that writing and publications in drama-in-education will begin to better reflect the diverse voices and perspectives of practitioners who already make up a large part of the field. We are aware of the inherent limitations of our lenses, as white educators, even as we strive to make our classrooms safer for minoritized students. We agree with other critical drama educators who promote the use of process drama in the K-12 classroom and in pre-service education courses (Jones, 2014; Reason & Jones, 2021; Streeter, 2020), especially in utilizing process dramas to further dig into critical issues. We advise other educators to continuously check and question their positions, those of the students/participants, and their roles they have them play in process drama. This can happen through exploring the imaginary world of the process dramas and assuring that all participants experience multiple perspectives, especially those of power, within the process dramas through an imagined/metaphorical world. Nevertheless, even metaphor has its pitfalls. Luckett (2017) reminds us that we must be mindful about who we cast in particular fictional roles because certain characters and animals have particular histories with different racialized groups.

Returning to Nicholson (2005), cited at the beginning of this essay, process drama is meant for us to experience “a different context” or contexts, and art has the potential to “make experiences visible, felt, and shared—even across different positionalities” (Fox, 2020, p. 99). However, we argue that we must unpack power structures in drama classrooms with learners and be thoughtful and patient as we work to create meaningful and ethical spaces in the curriculum through process drama.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We would like to acknowledge, with great respect, Dr. Laura Cranmer of the ‘Namgis  First Nation, retired professor of Indigenous/Xwulmuxw Studies Department at Vancouver Island University, for her time reviewing and providing thoughtful feedback on this article.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Wager, A. C., and Schroeter, S. (2021). Reflections on teaching process drama: A critical inquiry into our practice with/as educators. ArtsPraxis, 8 (1), 115-135.

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Amanda Claudia Wager, PhD is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Community-Engaged Research and Professor in the Faculty of Education at Vancouver Island University in Canada. As an interdisciplinary scholar, she practices community-engaged research, pedagogy, and scholarship that encompasses literacies, languages, and the arts with local youth, families, and communities. Her participatory research methodologies and pedagogies are informed by 20 years of experience as a trilingual/literate/cultural educator. Amanda has published multiple journal articles and co-edited/authored three books using art as a form of advocacy, Engaging youth in critical arts pedagogies and creative research for social justice, Art as a way of talking for emergent bilingual youth and The reading turn-around with emergent bilinguals.

Sara Schroeter, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. She has worked in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and Regina as an informal educator with non-governmental organizations and as a drama facilitator with youth in elementary and secondary schools. Sara’s research focuses on difference, race, drama, and applied theatre in schools serving multiracial students, primarily within Francophone minority language communities. More broadly, her work examines how drama, an aesthetic form of meaning-making and literacy, might create spaces for broaching difficult knowledge and topics such as racism, colonization, heterosexism, and class. 

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