Making Invisible Intersectionality Visible Through Theater of the Oppressed in Teacher Education

Abstract

The arts generally and theater specifically offer effective strategies to help educators recognize and make visible the multiple student and teacher identities within classrooms. Without student and teacher agency in schools, there cannot be equitable and liberatory learning environments. Noted Brazilian theater artist and activist Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed (TO) offers promising opportunities to embody Crenshaw’s notion of intersectional identities and Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach’s concept of Invisible Intersectionality. This article shares research conducted in a teacher education course on culturally relevant pedagogy where students engaged in TO activities to explore the multiplicity of their and their future students’ identities. The authors suggest that embodied and artistic approaches in preservice teacher education create so-called small openings where students may recognize their and their future students’ identities and move toward including varied identities in their future classroom communities.