Many urban classrooms feature few white European children but are located in nations dominated by Eurocentric epistemologies and discourses that oppress minority students by devaluing their cultures. In this article, I tease out how the 'Whiteness' embedded in his pedagogy served to perpetuate institutional racism at the school.ĭiverse schools have become the norm throughout much of what is considered the West. I suspected that this had much to do with their teacher's pedagogical orientations and practices, with respect to multiculturalism and ethno-cultural difference.
Using a performative lens to analyse the connections between their 'fictional' identity performances, and their 'actual' ones, I showed how, in this particular classroom, those connections often served to reinforce rather than challenge hegemonic constructions of social identity and identification.
During the Fall semester of the 2004-2005 academic year, I observed the students' performances (both in and out of dramatic role) of their gender, sexuality, racial and ethnic identities. The participants in my study comprised of 15 Grade Nine Drama students and their teacher at 'May Valley High School', located just outside of Toronto, Canada. That project was concerned with using transformative Drama pedagogy to reconceptualise cultural identity in multicultural curricular policy. This article discusses my interactions with the teacher in whose classroom I conducted my doctoral research.
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