The Legacy of Ludlow: Exploring Labor Dynamics With Urban Youth

Abstract

This article reflects on outcomes of a research project conducted with fourteen to twenty-year-old urban students in Chelsea, MA, in which process drama was utilized as an approach to teaching U.S. labor history and collective action. The project addressed the Ludlow Massacre, a coal strike in Ludlow, CO, in 1914, as an exemplar of the dynamics typical of worker–owner conflicts in the past, and moved into present-day labor situations. The process drama experience was part of a larger research project designed to facilitate students' understandings of the ways in which their own experiences of discrimination are reflected in pervasive inequity at the societal level, and to facilitate the acquisition of skills that would allow them to become agents of social change in those dynamics. Outcomes discussed include the effect of the process on students' emerging understanding of unequal power dynamics as they relate to immigrant status in the past and present, the role of collective action in fostering social change, and the effect of community on the engagement and academic performance of the students.