Rethinking ‘at-risk’ in drama education
Beyond prescribed roles
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15081753 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Conrad (0000-0002-4471-2961, North-West State Technical University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 27-41 |
| Publication date | 2005-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in Drama Education The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1356-9783 • E-ISSN: 1470-112X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13569780500053114 |
| OpenAlex | W2069144771 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 19 |
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
Drama · Pedagogy · Performative utterance · Political science · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking · Children's Rights and Participation · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Social Psychology
At the end of the course, where is their progression’ ? The paradox of progression for former so-called not in education, employment, and training youth
Gendering the Neet category
Exclusion by design
Between the Rhetoric of Employability and the Reality of Youth (Under)Employment
Young people on the margins
Learning to Labour
Education and Power
On the importance of peer influence for adolescent drug use
Discourse and social change
Learning to Labor
Domination and the Arts of Resistance
Freire and a Feminist Pedagogy of Difference
Edgework, Media Practices, and the Elongation of Meaning
Fractured Transitions from School to Work
Performing Ethnography
Between Theater and Anthropology
The Educational Researcher as Artist Working Within
Urban Graffiti
Edgework
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.31 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2023 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |