Performed identities
Subtitle: drama and the transformation of multicultural education
By: by Dominique Rivière.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 275
ISBN-13: 9780494157787
Subjects: Multicultural education -- Ontario.; Drama in education -- Ontario.; High school students -- Ontario -- Attitudes.
Description: I conclude the thesis, therefore, by making explicit the relationship between the performative aspects of education (in particular, educational policymaking), and the power of schools to socialize students and teachers to perform particular identities which reinforce Western hegemony. I suggest an alternative configuration of that relationship, and show how multicultural curricular policy might be revised in order to interrupt that cycle of hegemony. Finally, I show how a very specific, social-justice-oriented drama pedagogy can be used to create and implement such a revised curricular policy, such that multicultural education can be transformed into a flexible, continually (re)negotiated, critical practice, that has implications both for educational policy and for how "official" multiculturalism in Canada is envisioned.Drawing from theories of identity construction, schooling and socialization, critical multiculturalism, and drama research,  this study sought to address the following question: "How can Drama education be used to facilitate a different understanding of social identities (e.g. "race", "culture", "ethnicity"), in order to foster a more critical approach to multicultural education?" In the Fall Semester of 2004, I conducted a critical ethnographic case study of a Grade Nine Drama classroom in an ethno-culturally diverse high school located in the Greater Toronto Area, Given that schools are socio-cultural sites which can serve to reproduce hegemony, I paid specific attention to the students' performances of identity (both in and out of dramatic role), and to how those performances confirmed and/or challenged normative assumptions about those identities. In addition, I interviewed the Drama teacher, as well as conducted twelve, bi-weekly focus group interviews with fourteen students. This thesis investigates the performances of the most salient identities for the students---gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity---and situates them within the larger contexts of identity (re)production, and multiculturalism in Canada. By analyzing the connections between the students' "fictional" identity performances, and their "actual" ones, outside of dramatic role, I show how, in this particular classroom, those connections mainly served to reinforce hegemonic norms and values about the nature of social identity and identification.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2024.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 262-275).