Amanda Wager

Delineating a Spectrum of Research-Based Theatre

This article builds on existing definitions and classification systems of research-based theatre to offer a way to define subgenres within the field. In order to identify similarities and particularities of theatrical performances based on research, the authors first consider definitions from practitioners working within the academy and those creating theatre for the general public. After reviewing these existing traditions and definitions, the authors delineate a spectrum of research-based theatre. This spectrum is based on two defining continua: the research continuum, which distinguishes among many types of research used to inform research-based theatre, and the performance continuum, which distinguishes among different kinds of performances, audiences, and purposes of a given research-based theatre piece. The spectrum of research-based theatre formed by combining these continua may assist practitioners in determining and honoring the goals and outcomes of their own work, while not making unnecessary comparisons with those working toward different goals and outcomes.

From Playbuilding to Devising in Literacy Education: Aesthetic and Pedagogical Approaches.

The field of literacy education encompasses many different modalities of reading and writing the world, including those of drama, theatre, and performance practiced in both school and community settings. As contemporary theatre practices have broadened performance creation approaches available to literacy and arts educators working with youth and adults, playbuilding and devising offer two modes of creating student-authored collective performance. Although the processes of playbuilding and devising overlap, they differ in both intention and practice. Both approaches include important frameworks and possibilities for work across literacy education. Following a discussion on the connections between literacy and drama in education, this paper introduces the forms of playbuilding and devising, followed by step-by-step illustrations of the practices at work in classrooms. This article, then, acts as an invitation to explore these two vehicles of performance creation in educational and literacy contexts.

Public Pedagogies of Street-entrenched Youth: New Literacies, Identity and Social Critique

In this chapter we describe a project in which we investigated the ways street youth engage in public life through informal educational opportunities in one urban centre in Canada. We explore the contradictions and complexities of these engagements, particularly when youth might be understood as living with “precarity”—a condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support. Such precarious subjects, Butler argues, struggle to be legible and recognizable within established societal norms. Our work asks how, as scholars, educators and community members, we might reconsider ways to support these youth in their efforts to become legible and recognizable citizens through complex discursive participation in civic life.

Drama with street youth: visual methodology dialogues across distance

Abstract As past school educators and doctoral students, the authors aim to further collaborative analytical discussions across distances through the use of technology and supported readings. They describe their journey of collaboratively analyzing two different examples of data, two film clippings from an applied theatre rehearsal with street youth, while using a visual methodology to enhance their discussions. In conclusion, they explain that their analysis of this pedagogical and methodological experiment supported them as they returned to their own respective research and writing equipped with new methodological and analytical tools that facilitated seeing their own visual data differently. Through this dialogical experiment they are advocating for a fuller recognition of a collective learning methodology in education, especially in what can be the very lonely and isolating stage of analysis in doctoral research and in the beginning stages of entering the classroom.