A Critical Performative Process: Supporting the Second-Language Literacies and Voices of Emergent Bilingual Learners

Abstract

This article presents illustrations from a Boalian theatrical intervention in a Southeastern U.S. middle school designed to enable Latina students to enact experiential performances depicting common problems they face in their daily lives with discrimination and hostility as well as possible solutions to those challenges to their feelings of inclusion and well-being. The work relies on theories that emphasize the role of drama as personal and educational, particularly with regard to young people’s growing political awareness and understanding of the agency they have in contesting bigoted conduct toward them and their immigrant communities. The authors present data from an ongoing ethnographic study of a Southeastern U.S. middle school classroom and demonstrate the students’ use of various modalities—discussion, performance, art, and others—through which to mediate their growth into more socially aware and active citizens, as evidenced by their understanding of appropriate forms of resistance and their public performances for academic communities that embody their learning of new dispositions and strategies. Central to the argument is the need for teachers to learn about social conditions from their engagement with immigrant students and to develop intimate knowledge of how social institutions and practices work both for and against them. There is a consequent need for teachers to use this knowledge to inform their interpretation of academic standards concerned with taking a critical global perspective and to inform their pedagogy to include more performative opportunities through which youth may learn to depict and act on their worlds. The article concludes with suggestions for the role of theatre in youth education that dialectically informs teachers’ and researchers’ growth into more sensitive and nuanced educators.