title: Playbuilding: Considering Identities, Agency and Self-Efficacy
Creators: name: Wong, Jennifer
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: Positive self-efficacy
subject: Collaborative playbuilding processes
subject: Low income homes Singapore
subject: Young people in poverty
subject: Identities, Agency and Self-Efficacy
subject: Ages six to twelve years
subject: Improvisatory and collaborative processes

description: The purpose of this study is to examine the role improvisatory and collaborative playbuilding processes play in enabling positive self-efficacy in children from low-income homes in Singapore. The study also examines how shifts in identities and agency, and the participants’ relationship with a facilitator outside of the low-income community affected the young people’s perceptions of selves and opened up the space for them to reflect on their possible futures. This thesis discusses the findings from a thirty-two-hour playbuilding programme with a group of sixteen children from a subsidized public rental neighbourhood in Singapore. The participants were between the ages of six and twelve and the project was conducted in collaboration with a voluntary welfare organization located in the same neighbourhood. The playbuilding programme took place between March and May in 2015. This qualitative case study critiques and reports how improvisatory and collaborative processes within playbuilding acted as sources of influence to the young participants’ sense of self-efficacy. Employing reflective practitioner approach, this study investigated the facilitator-researcher’s use of specific drama conventions and techniques in the playbuilding process and at the same time, examined the impacts of the close working relationship the researcher shared with the community worker from the voluntary welfare organization. The facilitator’s reflection journal was the main source of data in the research, and the notes in the journal were examined together with data collected through observation, video recordings, semi-structured and unstructured interviews with the children and community worker, debrief sessions after each workshop and performances. The qualitative data were analysed initially using categories that had been pre-determined through the literature reviewed and also the researcher’s prior experiences of working with young people in similar settings. New categories were added later when the data did not fit into the existing ones. Collectively, the categories formed the core arguments in this thesis which are reflected in the three chapters that examined topics of ‘playbuilding processes’, ‘shifts in identities’, and ‘voice, perspectives and ownership’. This thesis argues that participation in collaborative and improvisatory playbuilding processes created the space for young people to re-imagine and visualise possible outcomes in their lives and devised ways to achieve plausible counterdistinctive ends in the drama. It is expected that this study will contribute to the existing discussion on the use of theatre-making processes as a tool to support the healthy development of young people from challenging backgrounds. At the same time, it is hoped that narratives presented in this thesis will add to the current conversation in Singapore about the struggles and problems faced by young people in poverty.