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Participatory action research reveals story drama's role in challenging gender norms in a Francophone school, indicating the importance of diverse narratives.
This article examines the potential of arts education, specifically story drama, for addressing gender and sexual diversity with elementary students in a Francophone minority-language community. Adopting a participatory action research (PAR) methodology, two university-researchers and two teacher-researchers collaborated to use story drama as a pedagogical approach for teaching French in two Grade 5 classrooms in Saskatchewan. Drawing on queer critiques of cis-heteronormativity, this article illustrates how the use of story drama provided opportunities for students to trouble the gender binary and cis-heterosexist discourses circulating in their community. While spaces were created to trouble cis-heteronormativity, the students’ tableaux revealed that trauma narratives dominate the ways that gender creativity and difference are represented in children’s literature and their education. Interviews with participating youth also revealed that the gender binary is easily reasserted even when the pedagogical objective is to trouble it. The authors argue that engaging with Francophone art that positively depicts gender and sexual diversity is vital for students in Francophone minority-language schools to imagine other futures.
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Schroeter et al. (2025) studied this question.
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