Rehearsing for Change: Freire, Play, and Making It Real

Abstract

This study explores the process and impact of building an ethnodrama in a Higher Education classroom. It examines the ways in which play, image theatre, and improvisation are used to invite students to explore their individual and collective narratives in order to develop professional identity and personal agency. This work is based on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. An example class in which students analyse the key concepts of privilege, opportunity, knowledge, democracy and education is described and located within the process of building the ethnodrama. Student responses to the experience of participating in building an ethnodrama are examined. In particular, their perceptions of the enactment of change in the process of making the play, and playing within the play, highlight their understandings of themselves as changed people, and their sense of collaborative and community empowerment.