Creative Synergy: Using Community Theatre and Appreciative Inquiry for Young People's Critical Participation in HIV Prevention and Education

Abstract

This article positions community theatre as an agency for development and education based on the educational principles of Freire and Boal's theatre for development. The article argues that appreciative inquiry can enrich the practice of community theatre by approaching HIV and AIDS education as an asset-based, participatory, inclusive, learner-centered approach. The article hypothesizes that the infusion of the four-D process of appreciative inquiry into community theatre processes aimed at HIV and AIDS education will enhance young people's agency as active participants and agents of change in their communities beyond the didactic notions inherent in ABC education approaches to HIV prevention. The article argues that this approach can encourage meaningful participation and critical consciousness among young people in the HIV prevention response.

Notes

¹The World Health Organization (WHO) definition for young people applies and refers to a combination of youth and adolescents, namely the age group ten to twenty-four years old. The WHO considers adolescence to be between the ages of ten and nineteen and youth to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four (WHO Technical Report Series 938 2006, 1).

²Human development, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), is “… first and foremost about allowing people to lead a life that they value and enabling them to realize their full potential as human beings” (UNDP 2006, 5). Development takes into consideration all aspects of an individual's well-being, which includes their health status, educational achievement and access, and economic and political freedom (Soubbotina & Sheram, 2000).

³As reflected in the South African national strategic plan (Department of Health 2007).

⁴Meaningful participation is the process of engaging young people as partners for the purposes of strengthening their commitment to education, community, and democracy; it continuously acknowledges the diversity of young people (students) by validating and authorizing them to represent their own ideas, opinions, knowledge, and experiences throughout education to improve their communities (Fletcher 2005, 7).

⁵Following Anderson (1991, 6–7), “community” can range from a geographical, temporal, and spatial entity to a conceptual and cultural unit, which is maintained by and constituted through narrative. Imaginings of homogenous and unified communities present binaries of belonging around inclusion and exclusion. For the purposes of this article, “community” is seen as a “symbolic construct” around which stories of collective identity and collective repositories of meaning are created.

⁶The current focus on community-based participatory research on HIV and AIDS highlights the need for partnership building and power sharing between researchers and communities, thus highlighting the need to remove outsider-driven interventions and knowledge building. Although a community-based participatory research approach may assist in identifying needs and priorities in a community, it does not necessarily identify or explore the assets within communities that move beyond priority setting and a “shopping list” of needs that has to be negotiated within existing structures to address these issues.

⁷The work of pedagogue Paulo Freire and theatre practitioner Augusto Boal is rooted in the education movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

⁸Although oral and practical evidence suggests otherwise (Kidd 2008; Samba 2009), available printed sources seem to suggest that appreciative inquiry has not yet been applied to community theatre practice.

⁹In essence, the Socratic dialogue is a commitment to inquiry, to further learning and discovering rather than accepting the truth as it is perceived (Romney 2005, 4).

¹⁰In forum theatre, the Joker performs a play about an identified challenge with no solution. The play is then performed a second time, and here, the spect-actors have the opportunity to decisively intervene in the performance and change it. Boal (2000, 141) asserts that although it is not theatre's place to illustrate what could be considered the correct course of action, it can offer a means by which all possible actions may be explored and considered. Through this process, real action becomes possible because the spect-actor is left with a sense of incompleteness that can only be addressed once real action is taken or, in other words, they act on these challenges in real life (Boal 2000, 142).

¹¹Image theatre is the exploration of abstract concepts such as emotions and relationships (and real situations) through the creation of still images. Participants use their own bodies to “sculpt” or express attitudes and emotions (Boal 2006b, 15).