Funded by: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant, Winner of the 2006 SSHRC Aurora Prize; Funded by the University of Alberta Faculty of Education, Support for the Advancement of Scholarship & Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences Research Operating Grants.
Youth crime has serious consequences for society and for young people engaged in crime, yet education can offer means of directing youth away from crime. This arts-based study involving drama in all stages of the research process explored the question: How can drama contribute to the education of incarcerated youth to avoid future negative outcomes of their behaviours? What are the educational needs of incarcerated youth to help them make positive change in their lives? What drama practices can best contribute to meeting these needs? How can spaces be created within institutions such as prisons and schools for transformative processes to occur? How can we assess the benefits of drama intervention in this context?
Incarceration conflicts with education for personal development and social change, particularly in light of Foucault’s assessment that prisons serve to reinscribe a criminal mentality more effectively than they deter crime or reform offenders. Statistics confirm a high rate of recidivism amongst young offenders. Adaptations of popular education methods, taken up by applied theatre approaches, offer possibilities for transformation through drama. Drama as an art form allows participants to represent, explore and reflect on their thoughts and emotions, with resulting benefits. Participants may become more aware of the motivation behind their behaviours. Interpretation of their life experiences allows opportunities for self-knowledge. Taking on roles develops empathy and interpersonal sensitivity. Acting out roles allows exposure to situations and viewpoints beyond their immediate experience. As a performative process, drama develops a network of skills and attitudes that can be useful outside of drama contexts. Participation in drama helps to consolidate a sense of self-worth and purpose. It strengthens commitments to aspirations for the future and aids in the reconstruction of identities as other than criminal or deviant.
The research process involved a series of drama workshops with incarcerated youth at a young offender facility in Alberta as part of the centre’s Native Program. Various participatory drama activities and other popular arts forms engaged the youth in expressing their experiences prior to and their experiences of incarceration; in examining their understandings and the consequences of their offending behaviours within a social context; and in searching for options for change in their lives through enacting their visions for the future.
Performance also served as a medium for public dissemination of the research. Based on the work with the incarcerated youth, the researcher wrote a script and assembled a cast to perform for academic and community audiences. Theatrical performance served as a powerful way to recover participants’ lived experiences, to interrogate the meanings that emerge from the research, and provided an alternative way of engaging diverse audiences with the research in ways that are emotional, experiential, embodied and intellectual – engendering more empathic understandings of the experiences of incarcerated youth leading to more constructive attitudes regarding their needs and positive social change
This research built on research into prison-based theatre programs, including theatre with young offenders. With its educational focus, this research with youth in prisons has implications for education of “at-risk youth in schools, for arts education and for teacher preparation. The critical drama process offered insights into the experiences and needs of incarcerated youth in search of appropriate educational practices. The study also addressed an Aboriginal youth population given the high percentage of Aboriginal youth incarcerated or “at-risk” of involvement with the criminal justice system. Ultimately this study strove to find ways of working with youth through drama towards the reduction of harm to both society and to the youth – to transform the socially transmitted patterns of behaviour that commonly contribute to and result from offending youth behaviour.
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Theatre Alberta News, Summer 2007, see pg. 10
Conrad, D. (2007). Drama, role theory & youth: Implications for teacher education. Theatre Research in Canada, 28(2), 1-10.
Available: http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/TRIC/article/view/11118/11812