Identities and intersectionalities: performance, power and the possibilities for multicultural education
Author: Rivière, Dominique1
Source: Research in Drama Education, Volume 10, Number 3, November 2005 , pp. 341-354(14)
Key:
- Free Content
- New Content
- Subscribed Content
- Free Trial Content
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 schoolas a social institutioninfluenced 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.Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.1080/13569780500276020
Affiliations: 1: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada
Key:
- Free Content
- New Content
- Subscribed Content
- Free Trial Content

Click here for Page Help