Backyards and Borderlands: Some reflections on researching the travels of Adolescent Girls doing Drama

Abstract

This paper reflects upon an international research study that explores the way adolescent girls manage ‘girl-friendly’ drama processes in single sex school settings. This research suggests that narrative-based drama methods can offer girls the enactive space to explore their lives and to play with the workings of culture, gender and identity. Such methods in the drama classroom can affirm and celebrate the particularities of participants' lives, so that the drama classroom becomes an important site for renewal and transformation, where the boundaries between the lived and the possible are blurred as stories are staged. This paper argues for gender-sensitive drama practices in girls' education. The research at the centre of this paper highlights the way dramatic processes can give us the space to play in our own backyards and known worlds, whilst venturing to new lands with new vistas and possibilities.

Keywords:

• GENDER
• NARRATIVE INQUIRY
• PLAYBUILDING
• IDENTITY
• TRANSFORMATION
• QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Hatton

Chris Hatton is an experienced drama educator with research interests in girls' education, narrative inquiry and feminist approaches to drama pedagogy. She has recently returned to her own backyard, Australia, after a time lecturing in Drama Education at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of Sydney. Her practice-based research involves tracing the way girls learn in drama in two school performance-oriented case studies in London and Sydney.