Identities and intersectionalities: performance, power and the possibilities for multicultural education

This paper presents some of the emergent findings from my Ph.D. research, which is connected to the large-scale, federally-funded research project on which I am an assistant. This project investigates how drama education highlights the intersections between students’ school and personal lives, and the influence of those intersections on the formation of social identities that are consistent with academic success. Taking this as a point of departure, my dissertation research asks the following question: how can drama education be used to facilitate a different understanding of social identities, in order to foster a more critical approach to multicultural curriculum and policy initiatives? In order to explore the possible answers to this question, an ethnographic case study of a Grade 9 high school drama classroom was conducted in the autumn of 2004. Given the history of ‘official’ multiculturalism in Canadian schools, and the particular colonial history and location of the study site, I was interested in whether or not those factors affected the way this school—as a social institution—influenced students’ identity-construction processes. It is my belief that the ways in which students participate in a drama class can inform our understandings of those processes (particularly because students embody multiple social identity categories, which intersect with each other in multiple ways), and that this, in turn, can better inform our approach to multicultural education. Notes 1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Australian and International Feminisms: where we've been and where we're going (12–14 December 2004; University of Sydney, Australia) and at Empire and Education: the challenge of teaching and learning in a time of war (28–31 May 2005; University of Western Ontario, Canada). 2. For the purposes of my M.A. study, I defined ‘ethnic’ as a first-generation Canadian of non-Western European or British descent, or as a person who had immigrated to Canada, from a non-Western European or British country, within the last 10 years. ‘First-generation’ was defined as someone who was born in Canada, but whose parents were not. 3. Mr. M. had once informed me that, one year, about six or seven of his students were accepted into theatre schools; whereas, only two or three drama students from the region's specialised performing arts high school were accepted. He was very proud of this fact. 4. Shania (aged 14; describes herself as ‘Irish, English, Jamaican, Thai, Canadian’) was also part of this focus group; however, she was absent for the first few weeks of interviews, due to a family emergency. All the names in this paper are pseudonyms. 5. ‘Brown’ is how many Canadian adolescents with Southeast Asian (e.g. Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, etc.) or, in some cases, West Indian (e.g. Trinidadian, Guyanese), heritage identify themselves.