Using literature and drama to understand social justice

Abstract

Enlisting pre‐service teachers to engage in critical thought about diversity, equity, democracy, and power relationships is a challenging responsibility. The authors’ work at a large urban community’s metropolitan university in the mid‐Atlantic region of the United States is designed to help pre‐service teachers understand these concepts at a deeper level, thereby initiating (re)conceptualizations of the complex dimensions of multicultural education. The authors encourage beginning educators to rethink their interpretation of words and images used to construct their thinking about these issues. This essay explores a series of workshops that combined children’s literature and drama to help pre‐service teachers understand the parts they play in inequality, oppression, and racism and to recognize their role in larger societal constructs. The authors suggest, supporting Freire’s notion that ‘reading the word = reading the world,’ that reinforcing children’s literature with Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed techniques helps transform pedagogy in ways that empower both students and teachers.

Keywords:

• children’s literature
• drama pedagogy
• Theater of the Oppressed
• multicultural education
• teacher education