The theatre of urban : youth and schooling in dangerous times

Author

• Gallagher, Kathleen

Additional Author(s)

-

Publisher

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012

Language

English

ISBN

9780802094834

Series

Subject(s)

• COLLEGE AND SCHOOL DRAMA-HISTORY AND CRITICISM
• URBAN HIGH SCHOOLS-CASE STUDIES
• HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS-SOCIAL CONDITION-CASE STUDIES

Notes

. Bibliography: p. 183-195. Index: p. 203-222

Abstract

Because of its powerful socializing effects, the school has always been a site of cultural, political, and academic conflict. In an age where terms such as hard-to-teach, and at-risk beset our pedagogical discourses, where students have grown up in systems plagued by anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, zero-tolerance rhetoric, how we frame and understand the dynamics of classrooms has serious ethical implications and powerful consequences.
Using theatre and drama education as a special window into school life in four urban secondary schools in Toronto and New York City, The Theatre of Urban examines the ways in which these schools reflect the cultural and political shifts in big city North American schooling policies, politics, and practices of the early twenty-first century.
Resisting facile comparisons of Canadian and American schooling systems, Kathleen Gallagher opts instead for a rigorous analysis of the context-specific features, both the differences and similarities, between urban cultures and urban schools in the two countries. Gallagher re-examines familiar urban issues facing these schools, such as racism, classism, (hetero)sexism, and religious fundamentalism in light of the theatre performances of diverse young people and their reflections upon their own creative work together. By using theatre as a sociological lens, The Theatre of Urban not only explores the very notion of performance in a novel and interesting way, it also provides new insights into the conflicts that often erupt in these highly charged school spaces.

Physical Dimension

Number of Page(s)

xvi, 222 p.

Dimension

23 cm.

Other Desc.

ill.

Summary / Review / Table of Content

Discourse, space, and competing narratives --
Space and subjects : security, surveillance, and 'zero tolerance' --
An ethnographic critique --
The situated character of ethnography --
Disenchanted youth, falling test scores, rigourous curriculum and other prevailing myths --
The social and the artistic --
Social dramas : relations of power, gender, and race --
Imaginative trespassing and ethnographic artefacts --
The gay other not among us : sexuality and its guises --
Dark dramas : the occupied imagination --
Pedagogies of conflict --
Alternative literacies and the sociology of aesthetics --
A problem-posing ethnography.

Exemplar(s)

#	Accession No.	Call Number	Location	Status
1.	00766/18	373.1809713541 Gal T	Library - 7th Floor	Available