Digital culture, and the viewing/participating pre-service teacher: (re)envisioning theatre teacher training for a social media culture

Abstract

This paper explores how our ‘digital world’ shapes the ways that young people want to be engaged and how those desires subsequently shape academic theatre spaces. The paper uses artefacts developed in a university classroom to demonstrate that pre-service theatre educators can create educational materials that interrogate and deploy multiple media forms to explore, play with, re-combine and re-produce those multimedia images for and with their students. It also explores the notion of consumption as a means of production and argues that educators should aid young people to acquire new agency and power through theatre education processes that provide opportunities to reinterpret and appropriate popular digital culture as a means of understanding. To demonstrate the possibilities of this argument, I document and explore examples of pre-service theatre teachers who are practicing these ‘processes of utilization’ with the young people they teach in educational theatre settings. Specifically I attempt to re-envision the acts of viewing and participation that occur in educational theatre settings as opportunities for teachers and their students to actively engage in the nuances of (digital) culture at large.