Identities and intersectionalities: performance, power and the possibilities for multicultural education

Abstract

This paper presents some of the emergent findings from my Ph.D. research, which is connected to the large-scale, federally-funded research project on which I am an assistant. This project investigates how drama education highlights the intersections between students’ school and personal lives, and the influence of those intersections on the formation of social identities that are consistent with academic success. Taking this as a point of departure, my dissertation research asks the following question: how can drama education be used to facilitate a different understanding of social identities, in order to foster a more critical approach to multicultural curriculum and policy initiatives? In order to explore the possible answers to this question, an ethnographic case study of a Grade 9 high school drama classroom was conducted in the autumn of 2004. Given the history of ‘official’ multiculturalism in Canadian schools, and the particular colonial history and location of the study site, I was interested in whether or not those factors affected the way this school—as a social institution—influenced students’ identity-construction processes. It is my belief that the ways in which students participate in a drama class can inform our understandings of those processes (particularly because students embody multiple social identity categories, which intersect with each other in multiple ways), and that this, in turn, can better inform our approach to multicultural education.

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