Kathleen Gallagher

In search of a theoretical basis for storytelling in education research: story as method

In this article, the author argues that storytelling is centrally important to education research. The proliferation of narrative methodologies, albeit significant and innovative in the evolution of qualitative studies in education, has, nonetheless, not been accompanied by a theoretical body that has captured the complexities – ethical and methodological – inherent in such work. Despite a presumed emancipatory inclination, one might reasonably argue that storytelling in education research has frequently produced reactionary and imperialistic accounts. Turning to some of the works of Hannah Arendt and Bertold Brecht, two theorists of great storytelling capability, the author considers how their methodological thinking might be productively imported. Finally, the author draws some lines between these methodological innovators and the kind of empirical research that would most clearly profit from their more politicized and theoretically engaged considerations of the art of storytelling.

I.D.ology and the technologies of public (school) space: an ethnographic inquiry into the neo-liberal tactics of social (re)production

This paper explores spatial theory, and particularly a Foucauldian analysis of space, power, and the subject, as a frame within which to examine moves toward security in North American urban schools. We bring into play empirical data from an ethnographic study of New York City and Toronto schools where policies and technologies of record-keeping, identification-verifying, and spatial arrangements are producing altered experiences of subjectivity and the ways in which youth, workers, and researchers experience public (school) space. What is possible to know in ethnographic studies of these new high-security school sites? We argue that notions of ‘risk’ and ‘otherness’ in the nation state, and the exploitation of real fears in the wake of real school violence, have permitted a culture of acute surveillance that significantly alters the enterprise of school-based, ethnographic research.

Which New Literacies? Dialogue and Performance in Youth Writing

Measurements of literacy learning in schools, the authors argue, have settled into static and individualized understandings of what should be the most invigorating and social aspect of schooling for youth. By contrast, this article explores the place of aesthetic, dialogic, and performative forms of literacy in the adolescent classroom by excavating ethnographic data from an urban multicultural high school. Close examination of student writing, field notes, and teacher interviews illustrates how the space of the drama classroom creates a laboratory for experimentation with many forms of “new literacies” through rich engagements with the lives inside and the worlds beyond the classroom. The authors reason that drama pedagogies are both creative and critical forms of literacy that offer empirical weight to newer theories of literacy and lead to new modes of theorizing the multiple acts of literacy in schools.

Becoming a Networked Public: Digital Ethnography, Youth and Global Research Collectives.

The following article describes a research context that has privileged both virtual and placed-based ethnographic fieldwork, using a hybrid methodology of live and digital communications across school sites in Toronto, Canada; Lucknow, India; Taipei, Taiwan; and Boston, USA. The multi-site ethnographic study is concerned with questions of school (dis)engagement, as experienced by young people often marked as ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘marginal’ to the traditional practices of schooling. Throughout the paper we illustrate, and argue for, the productive use of such methods that combine the live and the digital while also advocating for more methodological experimentation in the processes of fieldwork and analysis. To substantiate our argument for hypertextual and multimodal modes of ethnographic engagement, we offer, in the first section of the paper, examples from face-to-face meetings that generatively combine live discussion and digital video methods. At the same time, we problematise the limits of such exchanges, acknowledging the challenges of trying to map one anothers contexts and living conditions through the aesthetic prism of digital video, drama performance and ethnographic interviews. In the second section of the paper, we shift our focus to three illustrative episodes from our Toronto and Lucknow sites. Drawing on theorists Sarah Pink and Patti Lather and Chris Smithies, we bring reflexive analyses to bear on participant-created video texts and Verbatim theatre performances, reading these data as narrative constructions that reveal multiple perspectives rather than literal, representative truths. We further argue that as student participants take control of their drama performances and digital video creations, focusing on the contours of their daily lives, they become co-constructors of an emerging youth knowledge base across these global sites. Drawing on the work of Wendy Morgan, who observes the changing power relations made possible through hypertextual digital media, we maintain that as these students create both live and digital performances and make meaning through discussion and ethnographic interviews, they shift relations of power, inviting researchers into a ‘networked community’ premised upon a fluctuating virtual, live, and digitally mediated culture.

Building Theories of Their Lives: Youth Engaged In Drama Research

When we entered one of our school research sites for the very first time, three years ago, we asked the group of 35 grade-11 students whether they had any advice for us as we began our research. This is after we had taken some time to explain to them that we were interested in understanding better how students worked in a drama classroom, how they related to one another, to their teacher, and how they saw themselves in the larger world of the school. A lone hand rose:

Emergent Pedagogy and Affect in Collaborative Research: A Metho-Pedagogical Paradigm.

The widespread turn towards ‘collaboration’ in qualitative research methodologies warrants careful and continuous critique. This paper addresses the possibilities and the challenges of collaborative methodology, and in particular what happens when the line between pedagogy and methodology is blurred in classroom-based ethnographic research. Troubling the prized notion of collaboration, and decoupling the easy relationship drawn between collaborative, participatory methods and empowering, democratic research experiences, we draw upon empirical data from one site in a multi-site, international ethnographic project: Urban School Performances: The Interplay Through Live and Digital Drama, of Local–Global Knowledge About Student Engagement. In underscoring some tensions and conflict in the creation of a Verbatim Theatre unit, we analyse significant affective encounters that surfaced in the course of our research work. Mobilising feminist post-structuralism and current theories of affect, we question the privileging of voice as an unmediated and authentic phenomenon, while ultimately arguing for the importance of affect and emotion in ethnographic analysis and for persistent reflexivity in the negotiation of collaborative metho-pedagogical work.

Conceptions of Creativity in Drama Education

A chapter exploring the notion of creativity in drama education presents not only an empirical but also a conceptual challenge. The ever-elusive concept of creativity, taken as a philosophical, cognitive, or artistic idea has not been particularly well researched in the field of drama education, despite being regularly referenced and consistently favored. In this chapter, I will explore some definitions of and frameworks for the concept of creativity and examine the drama/arts studies that have claimed an interest in it or provided some evidence of its impact on children/youth engaged in drama. While some large-scale arts studies have included measures for drama and produced some interesting findings, those “inside” the field of drama, itself, have paid scant attention to its relationship to questions of creativity more generally. I will speculate, in this chapter, about why this may be the case. Finally, I will draw a few conclusions from my own research project in drama with youth and point to some promising new directions for future study. In his important essay “On the relation of analytic psychology to poetic art,” Carl Jung (1933) leaves open all definitional possibilities:

“Listening to the Affective Life of Injustice”: Drama Pedagogy, Race, Identity, and Learning

This article draws from three different ethnographic research projects situated in Canadian urban and suburban drama classrooms in which the student population is highly diverse linguistically, culturally, racially, and ethnically. In each of these classes, as students engage in discussion in and out of role, some of the unsettling events of their lives concerned with the “affective politics” of race come to light. We critique notions of consensus and demonstrate, through our examples, the central importance of the drama classroom space as one that ignites discussion and engages divergent opinions and feelings. To analyze these events, we draw upon Frantz Fanon and Sara Ahmed who acknowledge how different bodies experience the power relations associated with emotion differently.

Between the frames: youth spectatorship and theatre as curated, ‘unruly’ pedagogical space

In this article, we consider the aesthetic, political and pedagogical strengths of a verbatim theatre performance, The Middle Place by Project: Humanity, a play that explores the experiences of shelter youth in Toronto, Canada. This ethnographic study moved from drama classrooms into theatres and charted audience responses to the production, its pre- and post-show programming and the companys curation of the theatre space. Using data from post-performance interviews with youth, we analyse how young people articulate the impact of socially engaged theatre. And pulling from ethnographic fieldnotes and researcher email correspondence, we further illustrate how the mere presence of youth and shelter youth at the theatre altered the ways in which audiences interacted with the play and the extended programming, disrupting the usual social contract of theatre-going. Project: Humanitys intentional mix of social classes and ages among the audience created encounters that have much to teach us about theatres ability to unleash the ‘unruly’ and to artistically re-create a world highly recognisable to those who inhabit it.

Multi-site ethnography, hypermedia and the productive hazards of digital methods: a struggle for liveness

This article explores the possibilities and frustrations of using digital methods in a multi-sited ethnographic research project. The project, Urban School Performances: The interplay, through live and digital drama, of local-global knowledge about student engagement, is a study of youth and teachers in drama classrooms in contexts of schooling marked as ‘disadvantaged’ in research sites in Toronto (Canada), Lucknow (India), Taipei (Taiwan) and Boston (USA). The authors first outline the place of digital methods in the research, describing how software such as Adobe Connect and Survey Monkey, as well as a project Wiki and blog, enabled some virtual communication among and within research sites. They go on to suggest that their experience with these methods exposed the significant limitations of the technology, but also that coming up against these limitations posed useful questions about the nature of specific research methods and about the overall priorities of the study. As an example, the article focuses on how digital methods have usefully complicated available conceptions of ‘liveness’, an important dimension both of live performance and of ethnographic fieldwork. Despite their skepticism about the promise of new technologies, the authors conclude that their experience valuably relocated research analysis from post-facto interpretation to an ongoing negotiation with method in the field.