Live theatre: a dynamic medium for engaging with intercultural education research

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss live theatre as a highly effective and dynamic medium for facilitating meaningful engagement with research on intercultural education. I make the case that ethnographic, or research-based, theatre can productively showcase challenging social issues and the sometimes confusing, poignant and humorous complexities of grappling with culturally unfamiliar and ambiguous situations. The paper features examples from the creation, performance and audience reception of my play ‘Queer as a Second Language’, which was created from classroom, interview and focus-group transcripts of over 100 English language learners and teachers from around the world.

Keywords:

• multicultural education
• intercultural communication
• performance ethnography
• research-based theatre
• documentary theatre
• audience reception
• gay education

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to those who kindly agreed to participate in the larger research project that I am conducting on audience responses to research-based theatre. I also thank those who have contributed to the development and/or performances of the play that I discussed in this article.

Notes

1. The comments were obtained with written informed consent, in accordance with the research ethics requirements of my (then) university.

2. This exaggerated pronunciation of ‘lesbian’ harks back to an earlier scene in which the teacher stressed the voiced ‘z’ in the word because some students were pronouncing it as an unvoiced ‘s’. Again, this derives from the research.

3. Being based on empirical research does not make the play compelling for everyone though. During the same week that my play was presented at the US university mentioned previously, I was invited to watch a pre-service teacher education class read and discuss my play. I later learned that a few students had refused to attend class that day because they objected to speaking about gay/queer perspectives in an education context (see DePalma and Jennett 2010; Gorski 2009). I think reactions like this underscore the need for more such events, not fewer.

4. For an in-depth analysis of the pedagogic implications of these students’ views, see chapter 6 of Nelson (2009). For a detailed analysis of the writing process through which I created this particular scene by splicing together transcript material from student and teacher interviews, see Nelson (2013).