—Using Blackout Poetry & Theatre of the Oppressed for user engagement with research—

Last year, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to teach a group of trainee teachers at the language faculty of a public university in Oaxaca, Mexico. The objective of our course was to introduce the students to the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ and how it can be used in language learning contexts. I took the opportunity to co-create a piece of forum theatre with the group, whose script would later be used as the basis of a graphic novel. My research themes at the time were English language assessment and their impact on Indigenous-rooted students. Below is a step-by-step walkthrough of the creative process, followed by a series of images illustrating each stage of the process. 

Blackout poetry

An initial step towards broaching my research area was to present students with illustrated key quotations from my literature review. Students were then invited to create ‘blackout poems’ using a black marker (John, Mighty and Winiarska-Pringle, 2023).

Example of blackout poetry

Trainee with blackout poem

Image Theatre

These blackout poems were used as a basis for ‘image theatre’, whereby participants take it in turns to try to represent the poem using their own bodies. The other students in the group analyse the resulting ‘statues’ following Freire’s (1971) five-step approach to problem-posing. The ‘statues’ are then arranged into ‘tableaux’, before being brought to life with background music and subsequently developed into coherent narratives containing discourses and language that spring from the lived experience of participants (Alfandari, 2019).

 Example of ‘statue’

Example of ‘tableau’

Forum Theatre

These narratives were rehearsed into a script by the students who subsequently performed their story for the entire faculty as a ‘theatre forum’ (Boal, 1974). After the initial performance, trainee teachers debated the issues arising from the play, had the opportunity to interrogate characters, and then replay specific scenes and stage ‘interventions’ (Borda, 2006) to alter the course of events. This process suggested multiple possible courses of action, including technical assessment-based solutions and consciousness-raising.

Poster for ‘False Friends’ Theatre Forum

Excerpt from a Scene

Excerpt from Theatre Forum

Impact

These technical solutions informed recent policy changes regulating language assessment in 19 public universities in the state of Oaxaca (SUNEO, 2024). Consciousness-raising was achieved through a large-scale workshop at a conference for trainee language teachers in Guadalajara where the theatre practice was presented by students who subsequently distributed 100 free copies of the graphic novel they produced based on the play’s script (Black, 2023). This process will also inform directions for subsequent cycles of action research in the region… so stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

Workshop at MEXTESOL teacher training conference

Interactive comic book distributed at teacher training conference

 

 

 

 

 

First edition of comic book with La Social printing press

References

Alfandari, N. (2019). ACT ESOL: Language, Resistance, Theatre. London: Monoskop. Available at: https://serpentine-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/05/act_esol-_language_resistance_theatre_2019_0.pdf.

Black, A. (2023). ‘False Friends – Exploring the impact of standardised language assessment on relationality in Indigenous-rooted contexts’. Imagined Competencies. Available at: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/alexander-black-blog/2023/06/05/false-friends/ (Accessed: 16 November 2023).

Boal, A. (1974). Theatre of the Oppressed. Abingdon: Routledge.

Borda, O. F. (2006). ‘Participatory (action) research in social theory: Origins and challenges’. Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Sage London, pp. 27–37.

Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

John, T., Mighty, L. and Winiarska-Pringle, I. (2023). ‘Becoming Socially Just Educators: A Trioethnographic Study Exploring Professional Identity Through Dialogue, Ethics of Care and Creativity (Tensions and Revelations)’.