"We Become Brave by Doing Brave Acts": Teaching Moral Courage through the Theater of the Oppressed

Kate Brown and Diane Gillespie introduce a performative text, created in the ethics classroom, that they argue has the power to transform participants. Relying on the work of Paulo Friere and Augusto Boal, Brown and Gillespie bring improvisational theater exercises to their occupational therapy students in an attempt to make students' experiences the center of the syllabus and to represent the turmoil of ethical decision making in a classroom turned laboratory. Multi-authored and multi-read, the dramatic text embodies its authors and readers in its protagonists, as the boundaries among reading and writing and decision making dissolve.