All the School's A Stage: Critical Performative Pedagogy in Urban Teacher Education

Abstract

The authors of this article investigate how a performance module was integrated into a graduate course on children's literature to provide teachers with a space to re-enact and challenge the institutional tensions that were impacting their work as multicultural educators. Based on a combined ethnographic and systemic functional linguistics analysis, this study investigates how performance functioned in the context of this course. Did teachers co-construct a collaborative and transgressive space to challenge the top-down discourses informed by deficit views of diverse students and communities in the school district? Data collected for the study include videotapes of course sessions, field notes, teachers’ written critiques, and curriculum materials. Findings show that the use of this performance module helped expose and challenge institutional power dynamics. However, the invoked heteroglossia of voices and perspectives also maintained deficit discourses about students and parents. Implications about how theater and other arts-based approaches can be integrated into critical teacher education curricula in ways that promote broader social change are discussed.