Rethinking ‘at-risk’ in drama education: beyond prescribed roles

Concern over students deemed ‘at-risk’ constructs youth as deficient and deviant without considering the experiences of youth themselves. My interest in ‘at-risk’ grows out of my previous work with youth, in various drama education contexts and the fact that youth have told me they found the label offensive. My research re-thinks ‘at-risk’ to include youths’ perceptions. My doctoral study involved doing a popular theatre project with a group of high school drama students in a rural Alberta community as a participatory, performative research method. Our process explored issues students identified as relevant to their lives, giving them an opportunity to represent and re-examine their experiences, including experiences that might deem them ‘at-risk’, and giving me insight into their perceptions. We entitled our project ‘Life in the Sticks’, based on students’ initial claim that the issues they faced were determined by their rural environment. Towards the end of our process students denied being victims of their environment, rejecting the notion ‘at-risk’, claiming instead that their risky behaviour was a matter of choice, giving them back a sense of agency and control over their lives. I wrote a series of scripted descriptions of our process and engaged in a discourse analysis of some of these scripts to help me rethink ‘at-risk’. The moments under analysis explored students’ perceptions of the motivation for their risky activities, their peer relations, their perspectives on rule-breaking, their relationship to the authority of the school and their sense of justice. Research that includes youths’ perceptions of their behaviour deemed ‘at-risk’ presents a counter-narrative that interrupts the taken-for-granted understandings of the label, allowing the possibility for things to be otherwise.