‘How Does Knowin’ My Business Make You Any Safer?': Critical Pedagogy in Dangerous Times

Abstract

The paper is an account of the second year of a three-year research project titled, Drama Education, Y outh, and Social Cohesion: (re)constructing identities in urban contexts, examining the experiences of youth in urban drama classrooms, and the dynamic forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced there. The researchers contemplate findings based on a methodological shift, in which they dramatically engage the students in an exploration of their pressing concerns about the school administration's new security policies. The students’ issues provide clear examples of just how far the neoliberal agenda in schools has gone and the unambiguous ways in which democracy is under attack. Implications of this experimentation are drawn for educators and researchers about the potential of attuning to students' ‘watching’ as a developing pedagogy, a form of critical engagement of the imagination, and a space for creative resistance against the school's institutional gaze. ‘How does knowin’ my business make you any safer?’: critical pedagogy in dangerous times Public Imagination as Occupied Space As we write, the New York State’s Department of Education website homepage offers a scrolling message, highlighted in yellow, that reads: “New York State is now at a Yellow Alert Level (Elevated) . All New York State schools outside New York City should follow the guidance for Yellow Alert Level (Elevated) in the NY S Homeland Security System for Schools. New York City remains at an Orange Alert Level (High) . Guidance on that level is also contained in the Homeland Security Document”. When I click on the “Color Coded Risk Level System and Recommended Actions for Schools Flowchart”, I learn that level Blue (Guarded), beneath both levels Yellow and Orange, already calls for increased security. So we are somewhere in between being “Normal” (Green) where we are told to “continue normal operations” and “Severe” (Red) where we “close down the school, follow lockdown procedures, and transfer to an emergency shelter”. But clearly, nothing is “normal” in schools anymore. “Risk”, and its now familiar bedfellow “suspension of civil liberties” is ever present. Such is the largely unquestioned new school face of the neoliberal order. Within this neoliberal order, David Livingstone, at a recent lecture outlined three kinds of contemporary capitalism: Shareholder Capitalism, Stakeholder Capitalism, and Democratizing Capitalism, with the latter being both the only sustainable economic system and the one in which the breaking down of hierarchized and ritualized workplace behaviours could be accomplished. This, he claimed, means combining learning with everyday life in order to create the conditions for greater participation of workers and use of their skills within our context of an “increasingly