Drama, Media Advertising, and Inner-city Youth

Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method

“…A postmodern attitude toward "truth" and the production of knowledge has legitimized an abundance of alternative approaches to doing research and new forms of representing research in the social sciences 6 . Amongst these, arts-based researchers have written performative texts, performed their research and used performance to gather participant responses and interpret them (Conrad, 2002;Norris, 2000;Saldaña, 2003). Denzin calls ethnodrama "the single most powerful way for ethnography to recover yet interrogate the meanings of lived experience" (1997, p. 94) and elsewhere calls for research that is pedagogical, political and performative (2003).…”

“…To talk about the Popular Theatre process, I needed to describe instances of our performance. I found an appropriate way of doing this through writing a series of scripted descriptions or "ethnodramatic" vignettes, sixteen in all, depicting salient moments of our work together (Conrad, 2002;Saldaña, 2003). Based on the audio and videotapes we made throughout the process, my journal and field notes, and students" journals, the scripts depict instances of performative interaction, discussion, the devising process, the scenes that students created, the animation of these scenes, responses to our performances and the interview I conducted with students.…”

Keeping the Kids in School: What the drama class tells us

“…The turn of the twenty-first century produced a number of teacher-as-researcher accounts of secondary school drama/theatre pedagogy (e.g., Gallagher, 2000;Conrad, 2002Conrad, , 2004Gonzalez, Cantu, & Gonzalez, 2006;Hatton, 2001Hatton, , 2003Hatton, , 2004Judge, 2002;McLauchlan, 2000;Owens, 2000;Young, 2000). Few researchers, however, have investigated secondary drama education from a non-participant perspective (e.g., McDonald, 2000;Nicholson, 2003;Sallis, 2003Sallis, , 2004, and almost none have compared findings across settings while focusing on student perceptions (McCammon, 2010).…”

Research-Based Theater in Schools: Ethical Challenges, Conundrums, and Choices

“…For Conrad (2002), her ethnographic performance texts "are not, nor could ever claim to be, precise replications of what took place" and instead she views them as being constructions "not transcriptions [nor] works of fiction, but something in between" and that they convey the "spirit of, if not always the precise details of what occurred" (p. 10). In contrast, when reporting on his ethnodramas, Saldaña (1998Saldaña ( , 2005Saldaña ( , 2008 stresses that he tends to quote verbatim from the data because this is an effective method for ensuring that the perspectives of the participants are respected.…”