Media Education as Counter-Conduct: Developing Dialogic Practices and Analyzing Change in Subjectivities

Abstract

In this chapter, dialogic practices of engagement are identified as a technology of counter-conduct because they are rooted in democratic strategies of participation and preserve the autonomy of all the stakeholders participating in the process. These practices are deployed to enable students to acknowledge why and how their subjective identities influence their classroom participation and their attitude toward the “religious other.” As a result, students experience alternate subjectivities and often require a platform to enact/act out their newly acquired identities. In this chapter, we demonstrate how theater can be appropriated for creating a new reality and a new set of experiences in and through a story to subvert particular forms of action. We demonstrate how as children enact the role of the “other,” the dominant rationality is disturbed, their subjectification is challenged, and they are encouraged to study the coalition of multiple contexts in which the performance was conceived and enacted.