Mia Perry

From image to ideology: analysing shifting identity positions of marginalized youth across the cultural sites of video production

In this article, we make visible the ways youth position themselves in and through the cultural sites of video production. Drawing on data from a three-year case study of the multiple literacy practices of youth in an alternative secondary school, we use visual cultural methodology and theories of subject positioning and embodiment to analyse two student-produced videos, illustrating how youth play with multimodal discursive and material resources to inscribe their shifting subject positions. The findings illustrate how otherwise marginalized students negotiate and represent complex, and sometimes contradictory, identity positions tied to both local and larger cultural contexts and ideologies, and suggest new questions and possibilities for multimodal analysis and pedagogy.

Theatre and Knowing: Considering the Pedagogical Spaces in Devised Theatre

With an overarching intention to explore the pedagogical possibilities within devised theatre, this article considers how the creative process, performance event, and spectator emerge within this genre. Although the field of arts-based education is becoming ever more prevalent in educational theory, contemporary theatre practices in the context of pedagogy and social impact are largely undertheorized. Considering the history and the practices of devised theatre alongside those of critical pedagogy, I argue that devised theatre offers a site for productive critical pedagogies. I use the practice of Forced Entertainment to illustrate this argument.

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.

Theatre as a place of learning : the forces and affects of devised theatre processes in education

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Talking, wrestling, and recycling: an investigation of three analytic approaches to qualitative data in education research

This article is a product of qualitative analyses followed by a collaboration and conversation amongst critical friends. Three methodologies (social semiotic/sociocultural, ethnomethodology, and rhizomatic analysis) were used to analyze the same piece of interview data. An inquiry into the various characteristics, commonalities, and distinctions of these diverse approaches to analysis was then undertaken through extended conversations. Authors worked through the kinds of questions that could be asked and the answers that might be possible given particular theoretical and methodological stances and choices. Analysis of the ensuing inquiry suggests the possibility of deeper reflexivity and new understandings in talking across paradigms. Struggles over representation and compromises in the process created tensions and questions that could not be easily resolved.

Devising Theatre and Consenting Bodies in the Classroom

This chapter draws the writings of Deleuze and Guattari into the field of drama and theatre education. Intersecting with MLT in various ways, the endeavour of this chapter is to think nomadically through an experience of collaboration and improvisation in classroom-based devised theatre creation.

Meddling with ‘drama class’, muddling ‘urban’: imagining aspects of the urban feminine self through an experimental theatre process with youth

This paper addresses how the urban is imagined and troubled through performances of youth engaged in a devised theatre project. These youth, situated next to a particular and storied urban place, reshaped the discourses of ‘The Downtown Eastside’ (DTES) in a classroom-based performance project. Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Ellsworth, who argues for the pedagogical power of considering the student who is in motion and performing in relation to an outside world, we describe how the youth in this study accessed their lived experiences to reconfigure common representations of young women in the DTES. Through devised theatre methods, the youth explored and created more complex and proximal representations of lives and circumstances otherwise steeped in taboo and stereotype. The theatre process used in this school-based project evolved from the meeting of contemporary devising practices with more traditional drama education expectations. This paper describes the circumstances and process of this work and focuses on the analysis of one scene from a final performance of the work.

Unpacking the imaginary in literacies of globality

ABSTRACT As global mobility and communications proliferate, ever-increasing exchanges and influences occur across cultures, geographies, politics, and positions. This paper addresses the practice of literacy education in this context, and in particular the nature of engagement across difference and the role of the imaginary in literacies of globality. Grounded in a theorisation of difference and the imaginary in spaces of learning and inquiry, the paper proposes a methodological framework for working across difference that acknowledges and engages with the inevitable but enigmatic resource of often conflicting imaginaries in literacy practices.