Urban Playmaking

Constructivist Teaching with a Radical Agenda

Bethany Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367559267
• eBook ISBN: 9781000341379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book explores the concept of playmaking and activism through three research projects in which culturally and linguistically diverse high school students and young adults created original theatre around the issues that inform their lives and constrain their futures.

Each study discussed by the author is considered through the lens of one or more best practices. The outcomes of the playmaking experiences, communicated through detailed ethnographic data and the voices of student participants, make a strong case for using what we already know about teaching to positively impact gross inequities of outcome for culturally and linguistically diverse students.

This study will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in Applied Theatre, Theatre Education, and Art Therapy.

1
Introduction

We tell ourselves about where we came from, what we are now and where we are going; such stories are urgently needed to restore security, build trust and make ‘meaningful interaction with others’ possible.

(Jeffrey Weeks, 2000, in Bauman, 2001, pp. 98–99)

My Story: Who’s talking?

In 1989, I had my first real experience with multicultural education. I was invited to join a research team conducting a study with urban 5th and 6th graders in a project designed to explore the use of a new computer program and drama to impact the drop-off in interest in science by girls and students of color at that age level. Previous to that, I had worked successfully as a drama teacher/drama resource in a wealthy upper middle class, primarily White suburb in western Massachusetts. So, though I knew nothing about conducting research, I knew kids, and I knew teaching; I was sure of that. By the end of the year-long project, I knew a lot about conducting research, but I was much less sure about what I had thought I knew about teaching kids. At the end of the project, a group of urban girls of color, who had been peripheralized throughout the project due to their ELL issues and reported “lack of interest,” demolished my complacency by demonstrating their substantial science knowledge in a textbook example of scaffolding, collaborative learning, constructivist meaning making, and Multiple Intelligences understandings. Two days later, in a project post-test, they were unable to answer a single question; one would think they knew nothing about the science. It seemed impossible, and I was tortured by the idea that these bright children were being failed by a system in which they spent so much of their time. So I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for my Masters Degree to find out why they could demonstrate their understandings in the drama context but not in the traditional question-and-answer format typical in schools.

What I learned during my quest for an answer, through theories of culturally specific development, human development in school contexts, motivation and achievement, constructivist approaches to teaching and learning, and culturally relevant pedagogy, informed my work with urban students of color moving forward. I carried my understandings of the importance of affect in learning, the critical role of community in working with students for whom community, rather than individualism, is a normative foundational state, the impact of expectation on school performance, and the role of learning styles on curriculum engagement. I’ve learned more since. And I’ve never looked back.

(This is the beginning of my story relative to the topics and ideas researched and discussed in this book. Who I am, as an educator and person, cannot be held completely separate from my role as a researcher in these pages. Following the lead of Gloria Ladson-Billings in Dreamkeepers (2009), I choose to embrace this complexity, rather than ignore it. My story will continue to appear periodically as you read, hopefully clarifying how I got to where I am as a person who works with young people of color to try to change the world.)

Playmaking for social change

In 2009, as the final phase of my doctoral research, I conducted a playmaking project with urban high school students, primarily of color, in an under-resourced community outside of Boston. This was a qualitative research project, an information-rich case study (Patton, 2002), in which I led students through the creation of an original play – On the Shoulders of Giants – then interviewed them about the experience.

For the purposes of this text, playmaking refers to the use of a variety of drama/theatre techniques to develop original performance work with students that emphasizes the exploration of their ideas and realities with the goal of developing their voices and visions of the world and bringing them to a broader audience. Play-making is a component of Applied Theatre/Drama (AT/D), defined by Nicholson (2005) as “dramatic activity that primarily exist outside conventional mainstream theatre institutions, and which are specifically intended to benefit individuals, communities and societies” (p. 2) and characterized as “the relationship between theatre practice, social efficacy, and community building” (p. 2). AT/D is “responsive to ordinary people and their stories, local settings and priorities” (Prentki & Preston, 2009, p. 9), and the goal tends to be group (or social) rather than individual transformation. Taylor (2003) conceives AT/D as “a medium for action, for reflection, but most important, for transformation – a theatre in which new modes of being can be encountered and new possibilities for humankind can be imagined” (p. xxx).

This conception of AT/D as a vehicle for transforming society and, to some extent, the individuals directly involved in AT/D projects, has been hotly debated over the past decade by theorists and practitioners. For every Jill Dolan (2010), “inspired by reimagining and, however briefly, resurrecting those performative acts as… rehearsals for a social utopian goal” (p. 168), and arguing that “live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world” (p. 2), there is a Dani Snyder-Young (2019), who identifies the challenges of interrupting hegemonic hierarchies and actually affecting audiences as limitations of the impact of Applied Theatre. She doesn’t completely discount their effectiveness but challenges a unilateral and unquestioning acceptance of its efficacy, asking a pertinent question, “under what conditions and what kind of art?” (Snyder-Young, 2013). These questions will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, in relation to the impact on audiences of the work detailed here.

The original intent of the project was to facilitate students’ understandings about the role collective action played in the histories of oppressed people in the United States. We had, at that time and in response to high stakes, annual, standardized testing dictated by No Child Left Behind, deleted that information from the social studies curriculum and effectively denied students in oppressed communities access to one of the more powerful tools for social change available to them. However, the play developed a life of its own, and the students took it in another direction. It became about the interaction of money and violence, about their struggles as young men and women in one of the poorest cities in the state (according to government data, in 2009, the poverty level in this city was 202.7% greater than the Massachusetts average and 89.5% greater than the national average) (City Data, 2011), and ultimately about their strength as a community, overcoming challenges that few of us are asked to face. In interview, the students spoke with eloquent conviction about how “life-changing” the experience had been for them. Would they say that now, ten years later? I don’t know. But I can honestly say that it changed my life, and using playmaking with urban students of color has become the focus of my professional life and the center of my contribution to the fight for equity and social change.

I replicated that project in the same school with a different group of students in 2012. The piece, entitled Working on Wings to Fly, explored the obstacles students face in their lives and the mentors who help them meet and survive them. The students in Working on Wings to Fly had outcomes that reflected those of the Giants cast; in spite of a different topic and different students, the responses were similar. The play, according to the students, was “fire” – revelatory, reinforcing of their sense of themselves as powerful people with something to say.

So when I was subsequently approached to help develop an admissions “pipeline” program in theatre for Emerson College, I suggested that we move away from acting classes and create a playmaking program for urban high school students in the Greater Boston Area. From 2013 to the present, I have run a playmaking group called EmersonTHEATRE, which brings students from various culturally and linguistically diverse urban communities to create original plays around the issues that inform their lives and constrain their futures. We create two or three original plays each year, around such topics as the American Dream/the American Nightmare, the roles of fear, hope, dreams, and judgment in their world, the complicated relationship between the police and populations of color in the wake of the killings of unarmed boys, girls, men, and women, the risks and benefits of political resistance in an era of conservatism, the casual use of racist language and its impact on our nation, the experience of being a first generation immigrant in the United States, and the broken promises of the United States to her immigrants.

This book presents the research findings from three projects: On the Shoulders of Giants, Working on Wings to Fly, and a recent EmersonTHEATRE (ET) production, Childhood is Fun. All share a similar methodology and similar research questions (see Chapter 2), and there are clear throughlines in participants’ reflections on the process and research outcomes, particularly around community:

Collaboration. Ya’ know, pretty much coming together as one and the issues behind our stories and how they speak to others… I don’t know, in this world in these days it’s kinda’ hard to like interact with other people because we’re all so different. So when we come together as one and we are different ages, different class grades, races, ethnicities. It’s kinda’ like a beautiful thing. Katzia, age 15, 2009

alternative teaching strategies:

If it wasn’t for this class I don’t know what I would be doing today, I probably would still be into 4th quarter failing like I was the first half of the year… and I mean, because of that, because of this class, I’ve changed my attitude around, I’ve become myself again and it was hard because I wasn’t myself the first half of the year. Cody, age 16, 2012

and the social-emotional nature of the experience:

I really got to understand a lot about other people. Different people feel different things because of their different experiences. If I really want to help people, if I really want to listen to people, I really need to take into consideration that the way I see things, that other people will definitely not always feel it and see it the same way that I do and that I can’t just be stuck on, ‘this is the way I see it, this is the way that I see you can solve the problem,’ but to be like ‘This is the way I see it, this is the way I see you can solve the problem, but if you need me to see it a different way, I can also look for that.’ Armando, age 18, 2018

These research outcomes will be detailed in Chapters 3–5, respectively.

Why a book?

My interest in presenting these projects in book form, rather than as a series of articles, is to consider the wider ramifications of playmaking as a teaching strategy, demonstrating its connection to effective educational theory and offering it as a vehicle, useful in a variety of settings and for a range of educational goals, designed to address the racial and cultural inequities plaguing our schools (Giroux, 2017; Hill, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2009). Consequently, each of the three playmaking projects is considered individually in relation to one or more best practices in teaching and learning: Culturally Relevant/Responsive Teaching, Constructivist Learning Theory, and Social-Emotional Learning (detailed later). Though the projects share a number of outcomes, each provides clear and specific examples of the teaching theory with which it is paired, and offer indications of the potential for playmaking to be used as an effective pedagogical approach. Further, I have fully presented the research methods utilized in these projects (see Chapter 2). Given my relationship with the students, particularly those in the most recent study, and my reliance on student/participant voice in my analysis, I opted to detail the rigorous, triangulated qualitative studies that yielded the data.

My intention was to create a book that would speak to three groups: practitioners – those working with young people in playmaking and other Applied Theatre approaches; educators at all levels – those shaping society through the ideologies that frame their teaching; and researchers – those whose academic voices often have a credibility and, consequently, volume to impact practice and foster change.

Playmaking

Playmaking is a robust and an effective strategy for engaging and educating young people, facilitating their higher order thinking skills, and allowing them to practice using their voices in the interests of social change. The tools and approaches used in these playmaking projects are utilized both nationally and internationally (Etheridge-Woodson & Underiner, 2017; Hughes & Nicholson, 2016; Prendergast & Saxton, 2009; Prentki & Preston, 2009) and are based on the foundations of effective teaching and learning established through education research in the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, strategies abandoned in large part after standardized testing became the 900 pound gorilla on the backs of public schools, forcing the reallocation of financial resources and exerting undue influence on curricular structure, topics, and teaching approaches. What follows is a concise consideration of three educational theories to be discussed in later chapters as they relate to playmaking: Culturally Relevant/Responsive Teaching, Constructivist Learning, and Social-Emotional Learning. The intent of these definitions is to establish a working understanding of the lens through which these will be discussed in relation to the playmaking projects, not to create a definitive understanding of each approach, which is beyond the scope of this book.

Introduction: on education in the United States

Some recent history: No Child Left Behind

The United States has a long history of inequitable educational ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Methodology
• 3 On the Shoulders of Giants
• 4 Working on Wings to Fly
• 5 Childhood is Fun
• 6 Conclusion
• 7 Epilogue
• Index