Paradoxes in Community-Based Pedagogy: Decentering Students through Oral History Performance

Artists are trained to think of themselves as "free," and the challenge of public art lies in dealing with other people's freedom as well.

--Lucy Lippard (264)

In spring 1999, I helped to create and directed a community-based, oral history play at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. One ninety-one-year-old community member, a former principal and schoolteacher, responded to the performance and its process with the comment, "It smells like good education to me." At the time, I had been most concerned with the political implications of our performance and how it might provoke social change within the Williamsburg community. I had lost sight of the dramatic transformation that my students had been undergoing throughout the project. After this remark, I began to reflect on the pedagogical significance of community-based theatre, assessing my experience in relationship to others who have incorporated community-based methodologies into their university teaching. For Bruce McConachie, whose project preceded mine at William and Mary, the emotional response of the audience plays a key role, allowing students to construct "an ethical community for the future" (41). Similarly, in my project, the emotional connection between the students and the community members allowed the students to enter into this imagined community, assuming weighty responsibilities as both artists and citizens. For other practitioners, like Sonja Kuftinec, community-based theatre requires participants to renegotiate identities through pedagogical strategies that can be transferred into classroom situations. Clearly, community-based theatre creates a multifaceted network of exchange that qualifies as both good education and an effective vehicle for social change.

The student facilitators in my project were outsiders entering into a community to create theatre with and for that community. They were transformed even as they strove to transform the community. These transformations occurred at several stages of the process: as we gathered oral history, as we wrote scenes based on the collected stories, as we discovered ways of presenting and staging these stories, and, finally, as we processed the community's feedback to our performance. Three significant shifts occurred: 1) students came to understand their own political agendas in relationship to the community; 2) students began to assess the complex operations of history and to critique claims about "knowledge" and "truth" (thus coming to see themselves as historical subjects); and 3) students developed an ethical and political vision that fostered an understanding of what it means to be responsible toward others. As Henry Giroux might put it, students crossed several borders as they expanded and remapped the community's identity, their own identities, and their perceptions of the world (Hope 147).

Several fundamental paradoxes make community-based, oral history theatre challenging and provocative from a pedagogical standpoint. For example, how can students be introduced to ideas about radical social change without becoming overwhelmed by a totalizing worldview? Can one's vision for the future be specific enough to remain progressive yet open enough to maintain inclusiveness? Roger I. Simon explains:

While the image of learning within a critical pedagogy may be characterized as occurring within a structured provocation and challenge, it must remain open and indeterminate. Required is practice rooted in a ethical-political vision that attempts to take people beyond the world they already know but in a way that does not insist on a fixed set of altered meanings. (47)

As Giroux points out, multicultural approaches to education and community-based theatre respond to this challenge by expanding discursive knowledge and finding ways to be inclusive and progressive without reverting to a liberalizing discourse of tolerance or modes of ethical relativism ("Multiculturalism" 190). In community-based theatre, this contradiction requires that students and facilitators approach a community without judgment and prepare to embrace diverse voices. Sometimes this means suspending one's own agenda as facilitator in order to allow the community to articulate its concerns. At the same time, in order to avert...