CARNEGIE CHRONICLE:
Theatre of the Oppressed as Pedagogy
Suzanne Burgoyne, Karen Cockrell, Helen Neville, Sharon Welch, Peggy Placier,
Meghan Davidson, Tamara Share, and Brock Fisher

A recent project bringing together students from the Theater and Education departments underscores the problems and powerful potential embedded in some familiar themes frequently appearing in discussions of what we should be doing in college teaching. Such discussions almost always touch on the importance of teaching the skills of reflection, "critical thinking," or problem solving. They also touch, not infrequently, on the matter of different disciplinary cultures—how the sciences look at phenomena versus how the humanities look at them, for example. And we almost always speak of the importance of "active learning," getting students out of their comfortable mental and emotional seats and engaging them with the material. In our course on the Theatre of the Oppressed, we encountered these issues in action. On the one hand we were teaching a theater technique. On the other we were running a seminar on "oppression," but at the same time we were conducting a workshop in new and active and experiential ways of learning. And that's where cultural differences came into play. But first, some background.

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) was developed by Brazilian director/playwright Augusto Boal, drawing upon fellow Brazilian Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. TO engages participants, called spect-actors, in theater exercises intended to investigate power relationships and ultimately empower people to overcome oppression. Theatre of the Oppressed has become a widely used interactive theater form in the U.S. and around the world. However, little empirical research has been done on the effect of TO experiences on participants.

In the fall of 2000, one of us (Suzanne Burgoyne) taught a course in Theatre of the Oppressed, and students in that class engaged in collaborative projects with students in an Education course taught by Peggy Placier. In order to assess the effects, we administered a guided inquiry questionnaire to members of both classes; we also analyzed the transcripts of two focus groups, as well as student journals assigned for each class. Our findings from this preliminary research suggest that TO can be an effective pedagogical tool to assist students in recognizing and responding to social oppression.

Applying TO in Class

The TO "arsenal" of techniques includes basic theater games which have the aim of creating a sense of trust and community among the participants and freeing the imagination. Major TO forms include Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, and Rainbow of Desire. Through an introductory discussion, topics developed in Image and Forum Theatre are chosen by a group of participants to address social issues relevant to them. In Image Theatre, spect-actors create living statues with other participants, sculpting an image of an oppressive situation, then an "ideal" version, then means of moving from oppression to liberation. For instance, the TO and Education students did an Image Theatre project addressing "the oppressive classroom." Their negative images depicted teacher-centered classes, which they then transformed into ideal images of student-centered classes.

In Forum Theatre, a scene depicting an oppression is performed, and the spect-actors enter into the play to try out solutions. The Education and TO students developed Forum Theatre pieces dealing with multicultural issues in education. One piece, for example, depicted a mandatory standardized test which oppressed students: the Latino student who does not speak English, the African-American student who finds the material irrelevant to her life, the student who objects to questions on evolution for religious reasons, etc. After an embattled teacher protagonist failed to solve the problem, the play was repeated, with spect-actors calling out, "stop!" and taking over the teacher's role. One spect-actor tried (unsuccessfully) to convince the school principal that the test was unfair; another tried to persuade the students to take the test since it wouldn't affect their own grades; a third suggested that students should go ahead and take this test but write a letter protesting the test's unfairness afterwards.

 In the basic Rainbow exercise, a spect-actor re-enacts a real-life conflict and identifies a variety of different "desires" experienced during the conflict. The protagonist dialogues with his or her own desires (embodied by other members of the group) and negotiates what role he or she wishes each desire to play in the conflict. For instance, an aggressive "desire" might stand shaking a fist at the antagonist, while a fearful "desire" cowers, pleading for understanding. The protagonist first arranges the desires around the antagonist in a configuration representing his or her impression of how prominent a role each desire played in the actual conflict. After exploring the role of each desire in the conflict, the protagonist then rearranges them to represent the roles he or she would like the desires to play (sometimes pushing a particular desire almost out of the room).

One of the most moving moments in this TO class involved a protagonist who, as a teaching assistant, engaged in a conflict with a student who consistently missed class. He identified as one of his "desires" his own pride in himself as a teacher; in dialogue with his pride, he realized that he did not want that part of himself interfering with his relationship with the student as he tried to solve the problem.

Assessment & Findings

The guided inquiry survey asked students whether their thoughts about oppression changed since taking the class, and if so, in what ways. Twelve Theatre students and thirteen Education students completed the survey. Responses to the guided inquiry survey suggest that TO had an impact on most students' understanding of oppression. The overwhelming majority stated that their understanding of oppression had changed to some degree: 20% of all students indicated that their thoughts had changed outright and another 64% indicated that they gained a deeper understanding of oppression by participating in the class. For example, one student said, "I am more aware of how people get oppressed and of how often it is taking place in everyday life," and another responded, "I understand that oppression is often tied in with other oppression." A number of students also identified an increase in personal awareness, for example: "I now know that oppression occurs to me and I have oppressed others not knowing I was." Five of the six students who indicated that their thoughts about oppression had changed outright were enrolled in the Theatre course. All four of the students who said their understanding of oppression remained the same were enrolled in the Education course (discussed below).

Analysis of the focus groups and journals used grounded theory as a method. This is a qualitative approach which examines a phenomenon from the point of view of the participants. Recurring dimensions in the data are coded and matrixed to generate a theory statement which fills in the blanks in the grounded theory paradigm: what central problems, actions, or strategies occur; under what conditions; with what consequences; and for whom?

The grounded theory analysis of the focus groups supports and expands upon data from the survey. Students discussed having obtained a new framework and vocabulary with which to interpret oppression. For instance, a student commented that she had "noticed I was using the term oppression where I would not have before," and probably would not previously have realized that oppression was occurring. For this student, her new understanding of oppression was transformative: "I had a big change in thinking about oppression just for the fact that . . . I thought of oppression and I thought, starving people, and guns and soldiers marching down the streets, and people started talking about it and my first feeling was, what do you know about oppression? You know, you're white, you live in America, what do you know about oppression? But then I started understanding the real definition of oppression and how personal it can be. . . . my understanding of oppression changed, my thinking about oppression changed, my understanding grew and I'm certainly a lot more aware of oppressions, not [just out] in the world but in my world."

An additional theme that emerged from the focus groups is that some students came away from their experience with the sense that TO provides individuals with more options in oppressive situations. Another student, for instance, noted "the way it has made a change for me as far as oppression and injustice on a smaller level of my small world, so that when I am in a situation where I am feeling oppressed or I feel like there is some injustice going on in my life, I have caught myself now stopping and thinking . . . there are solutions, there are things that I can try, there are things that I can say, tactics I can take." To the degree that their TO experience made students aware of the possibility of alternative strategies in the face of oppression, it fulfilled the TO goal of empowering participants.

Challenges

Whereas the Theatre students enrolled in the course because they wanted to learn TO, the Education students initially resisted the idea of doing theater activities at all. Analysis of their journals from their early exposure to TO games and Image Theatre suggests that the students at first saw no practical value for them in TO, and practical value was their priority. Another source of resistance arose from some students' fear of acting. A third factor related to students' preference for "traditional" teaching and learning methods (i.e., reading, lecture, discussion), which they saw as more time-efficient than experiential approaches.

After doing TO games and Image Theatre, the Education class moved on to the joint Forum Theatre project with the TO class. At this point, we noted a major attitude shift in the journals. The Education students recognized the effectiveness of Forum Theatre as a method for learning problem-solving and thus its value to them as teachers. Perhaps this change can best be illustrated by the student whose journal entry for Image Theatre was the flat statement, "I hated the theater project and every aspect of it," but who subsequently considered the possibility of using Forum Theatre herself as a teacher: "I think that a forum theater type format could actually be used effectively within my classroom as a means to deal with issues of intolerance and lack of perspective." Another student, whose first exposure to TO games had evoked anxiety about performing, reported after the Forum Theatre project, "having had this experience I can see the thrill [of acting] . . . I have definitely benefited from this." The project also stimulated new insights for some students: "When we were asked to create a situation that was oppressive culturally, I did not know the results would be so far reaching and prevalent in modern day education. The forum theater really opened my eyes to the phenomenon of several types of cultural bias in the classroom."

Our first experience with introducing TO to Education students thus helped us to recognize the challenge of motivating students from a non-theater field to engage in interactive theater techniques. We need to explore further strategies for helping such students understand from the outset the practical value of experiential learning approaches such as TO for their own education. We also must recognize that, although TO work is designed for "non-actors" and includes exercises intended to build trust and comfort with performing, we need to be more sensitive to just how frightening the idea of performing can be to students who consider themselves, as one of the Education students put it, "acting illiterate." Since our research also showed that the majority of the Education students ultimately found the TO experience enlightening, addressing the challenges is clearly a worthwhile endeavor.  

Contact:
Professor of Theatre
University of Missouri/Columbia
129 Fine Arts
Columbia MO 65211
Telephone: (573) 882-0528
Fax: (573) 884-4034
E-mail: BurgoyneS@missouri.edu

Table of Contents | Issues | Credits |
NTLF.com Home

© Copyright 1996-2003. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc.
(ISSN 1057-2880) All rights reserved worldwide.
Web Weaving™ By InfoStreet, Inc.
Email the webmaster

---