Kathleen Gallagher – författare

This thought-provoking book challenges the way research is planned and undertaken and equips researchers with a variety of creative and imaginative solutions to the dilemmas of method and representation that plague qualitative research.Fascinating and inspiring reading for any researcher in the Social Sciences this comprehensive collection encourages the reader to imagine the world in evermore complex and interesting ways and discover new routes to understanding. Some of the most influential figures in educational research consider questions such as:How does a socio-political context change the course of our research? What counts as a ‘truthful account’ in qualitative research?How do the voices of theory and the voices of ‘research subjects’ struggle to be heard in our research narratives?How can qualitative researchers ethically navigate the difficult terrain of research relationships?How is the material body rendered in qualitative research?Each chapter reveals a range of troubling dilemmas related to the critical aspects of research methodology in the Social Sciences and uses an illustrative case to elucidate the issues encountered by the researcher. Each writer brings a fierce philosophical spirit to her work, showing how methods or techniques of data-gathering grow from the theory and analysis of how research proceeds. A range of topics are addressed in a cross-disciplinary approach which will appeal to all scholars of qualitative research, undergraduate students in education programs and graduate students in a range of disciplines

This thought-provoking book challenges the way research is planned and undertaken and equips researchers with a variety of creative and imaginative solutions to the dilemmas of method and representation that plague qualitative research.Fascinating and inspiring reading for any researcher in the Social Sciences this comprehensive collection encourages the reader to imagine the world in evermore complex and interesting ways and discover new routes to understanding. Some of the most influential figures in educational research consider questions such as:How does a socio-political context change the course of our research? What counts as a ‘truthful account’ in qualitative research?How do the voices of theory and the voices of ‘research subjects’ struggle to be heard in our research narratives?How can qualitative researchers ethically navigate the difficult terrain of research relationships?How is the material body rendered in qualitative research?Each chapter reveals a range of troubling dilemmas related to the critical aspects of research methodology in the Social Sciences and uses an illustrative case to elucidate the issues encountered by the researcher. Each writer brings a fierce philosophical spirit to her work, showing how methods or techniques of data-gathering grow from the theory and analysis of how research proceeds. A range of topics are addressed in a cross-disciplinary approach which will appeal to all scholars of qualitative research, undergraduate students in education programs and graduate students in a range of disciplines

Urban theatre can be described as theatre made with or by those whose lives are marked by the urban landscape and its social limits and possibilities. At the heart of this text lies the question of how theatre can illuminate the urban and how theatre is illuminated by the urban. The city, like a play, is a space where everything adopts multiple meanings. It is an objective thought and a subjective experience, a charged and symbolic thing, as well as a real, material, lived reality. The chapters in this book illustrate the theatre’s uncanny ability to narrate and symbolize the physical and psychic space of the city. Running through all of the pieces presented are the themes of power and of young people’s sense of agency within the structures they dwell in and are shaped by. Through drama education and applied theatre practices, the affinity between the urban and its theatres is radically replaced by marginal spaces, boulevards and schools. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña suggests, the theatre has gone to the people to serve their local and immediate need for a means of holding the urban and the self so that both can be interrogated and re-imagined; so that the various dystopias of urban existence can be envisaged as places of urban solidarity and as utopias, at least, of the mind. This book was originally published as a special issue of Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.

In this book, Kathleen Gallagher presents a multi-case study of adolescent girls who are learning through drama about their particular sexual, cultural, ethnic, and class-based identities in relation to the broader world around them. By examining the power and possibility of drama in schools to animate the processes of learning, Gallagher's research offers hope for meaningful reflection on pedagogy in what she sees as an increasingly mechanistic and disempowering period in education. This work is a unique contribution to the fields of equity studies and the arts in education, as it provides a new lens through which to examine gender, diversity, and schooling. Experiencing the drama curriculum as a process and method, the students learn by taking on different roles. This re-positioning of the learner generates new and rich experiences in the dialectic of life and art and the discourse of the "world as a stage" metaphor. Combining research and classroom practice in a public Catholic girls' school over an eighteen-month period, the author illustrates how drama provides a fertile ground for the intellectual and emotional development of girls, as they draw on their own lives and experiences in order to create their fictional worlds. She demonstrates how the collective action of drama in the classroom can support girls in becoming the authors of their own experiences. This compelling book reveals the liberatory possibilities of drama education for the vastly diverse and complex group, adolescent girls. The doctoral research on which Drama Education in the Lives of Girls was based received the American Alliance of Theatre and Education's most distinguished scholarly research award for 1999.

Canada boasts a remarkable number of talented theatre artists, scholars, and educators. How Theatre Educates brings together essays and other contributions from members of these diverse communities to advocate for a broader and more inclusive understanding of theatre as an educative force.Organized to reflect the variety of contexts in which professionals are making, researching, and teaching drama, this anthology presents a wide range of articles, essays, reminiscences, songs, poems, plays, and interviews to elucidate the relationship between theatre practice and pedagogy, and to highlight the overriding theme: namely, that keeping 'education' – with its curriculum components of dramatic literature and theatre studies in formal school settings – separate from 'theatre' outside of the classroom, greatly diminishes both enterprises.In this volume, award-winning playwrights, directors, actors, and scholars reflect on the many ways in which those working in theatre studios, school classrooms, and on stages throughout the country are engaged in teaching and learning processes that are particular to the arts and especially genres of theatre. Situating theatre practitioners as actors in a larger socio-cultural enterprise, How Theatre Educates is a fascinating and lively inquiry into pedagogy and practice that will be relevant to teachers and students of drama, educators, artists working in theatre, and the theatre-going public.ContributorsMaja ArdalDavid BoothPatricia CanoDiane FlacksKathleen GallagherJohn GilbertSky GilbertJim GilesLinda GriffithsTomson HighwayJanice HladkiCornelia HooglandAnn-Marie MacDonaldLori McDougallJohn MurrellDomenico PietropaoloWalter PitmanRichard RoseJason ShermanLynn SlotkinLarry SwartzJudith ThompsonGuillermo VerdecchiaBelarie Zatzman

Because of its powerful socializing effects, the school has always been a site of cultural, political, and academic conflict. In an age where terms such as 'hard-to-teach,' and 'at-risk' beset our pedagogical discourses, where students have grown up in systems plagued by anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, 'zero-tolerance' rhetoric, how we frame and understand the dynamics of classrooms has serious ethical implications and powerful consequences.Using theatre and drama education as a special window into school life in four urban secondary schools in Toronto and New York City, The Theatre of Urban examines the ways in which these schools reflect the cultural and political shifts in big city North American schooling policies, politics, and practices of the early twenty-first century.The Theatre of Urban not only explores the very notion of performance in a novel and interesting way, it also provides new insights into the conflicts that often erupt in these highly charged school spaces.

This innovative and practical book offers pedagogical tools to show how drama can be used in educational settings to advance a relational, action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and creative climate education attuned to the social and emotional effects of the climate emergency. Based on a six-year ethnographic research study taking place with teachers, artists, community leaders, and young people globally, and taking its lead from the following provocation – can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? – the book explores the unique conceptual and pedagogical ‘discontents’ of climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. It also examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being.The book is divided into two sections. The first part of the book, Local engagements and encounters, consists of chapters that conduct an in-depth appraisal of the local artistic work from each site, examining how matters of socio-ecological justice are given fresh urgency and complexity through the application of performance as pedagogy. The second part of the book, Pedagogical and artistic innovations, offers substantive praxis chapters on the drama-based pedagogical methods employed in the research. In these chapters, the world-building capacities of theatre-making offer up new, performative pedagogical orientations to the climate emergency beyond those of critique.Global Climate Education and Its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way is valuable reading for scholars interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency, especially within and across the following fields: drama, theatre and performance studies, applied theatre and drama education, educational research, and children/childhood and youth studies. The book also invites a readership of teachers and teacher-educators who are interested in applying drama pedagogies in the classroom to explore matters of socio-ecological justice and the climate crisis.

This innovative and practical book offers pedagogical tools to show how drama can be used in educational settings to advance a relational, action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and creative climate education attuned to the social and emotional effects of the climate emergency. Based on a six-year ethnographic research study taking place with teachers, artists, community leaders, and young people globally, and taking its lead from the following provocation – can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? – the book explores the unique conceptual and pedagogical ‘discontents’ of climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. It also examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being.The book is divided into two sections. The first part of the book, Local engagements and encounters, consists of chapters that conduct an in-depth appraisal of the local artistic work from each site, examining how matters of socio-ecological justice are given fresh urgency and complexity through the application of performance as pedagogy. The second part of the book, Pedagogical and artistic innovations, offers substantive praxis chapters on the drama-based pedagogical methods employed in the research. In these chapters, the world-building capacities of theatre-making offer up new, performative pedagogical orientations to the climate emergency beyond those of critique.Global Climate Education and Its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way is valuable reading for scholars interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency, especially within and across the following fields: drama, theatre and performance studies, applied theatre and drama education, educational research, and children/childhood and youth studies. The book also invites a readership of teachers and teacher-educators who are interested in applying drama pedagogies in the classroom to explore matters of socio-ecological justice and the climate crisis.

Urban theatre can be described as theatre made with or by those whose lives are marked by the urban landscape and its social limits and possibilities. At the heart of this text lies the question of how theatre can illuminate the urban and how theatre is illuminated by the urban. The city, like a play, is a space where everything adopts multiple meanings. It is an objective thought and a subjective experience, a charged and symbolic thing, as well as a real, material, lived reality. The chapters in this book illustrate the theatre’s uncanny ability to narrate and symbolize the physical and psychic space of the city. Running through all of the pieces presented are the themes of power and of young people’s sense of agency within the structures they dwell in and are shaped by. Through drama education and applied theatre practices, the affinity between the urban and its theatres is radically replaced by marginal spaces, boulevards and schools. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña suggests, the theatre has gone to the people to serve their local and immediate need for a means of holding the urban and the self so that both can be interrogated and re-imagined; so that the various dystopias of urban existence can be envisaged as places of urban solidarity and as utopias, at least, of the mind. This book was originally published as a special issue of Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.

In The Methodological Dilemma Revisited, authors examine what in their research processes has given pause, thwarted the process of seamless productivity, or stalled the easy research output but has, instead, insisted upon a deeper analysis. This resistance of the expedient explanation has consequences both for the research topics under study and the ways in which qualitative research is conducted in a globalized era of deepening social inequality.The book is pedagogical in its orientation and reflects upon the politics of knowledge construction. Working with queer and minoritized youth communities, and other precarious publics, the authors convey their relationships to groups they are inside or outside of, or allied with—posing ethical questions about research designs and worldviews. Themes such as representation, refusal, and resistance of hegemonies are nuanced by investigations into the ethical, practical, and scholarly dimensions of the turn toward collaboration in qualitative inquiry. Other chapters examine the place, value, and concerns of aesthetic representation of qualitative research. Finally, the authors consider issues of criticality in research, and the concepts of compassion and humility.This book contains contributions from some of the most imaginative qualitative researchers, making the most of their research dilemmas in order to reflect upon the challenges and resistances they encounter in the work of qualitative research.

In The Methodological Dilemma Revisited, authors examine what in their research processes has given pause, thwarted the process of seamless productivity, or stalled the easy research output but has, instead, insisted upon a deeper analysis. This resistance of the expedient explanation has consequences both for the research topics under study and the ways in which qualitative research is conducted in a globalized era of deepening social inequality.The book is pedagogical in its orientation and reflects upon the politics of knowledge construction. Working with queer and minoritized youth communities, and other precarious publics, the authors convey their relationships to groups they are inside or outside of, or allied with—posing ethical questions about research designs and worldviews. Themes such as representation, refusal, and resistance of hegemonies are nuanced by investigations into the ethical, practical, and scholarly dimensions of the turn toward collaboration in qualitative inquiry. Other chapters examine the place, value, and concerns of aesthetic representation of qualitative research. Finally, the authors consider issues of criticality in research, and the concepts of compassion and humility.This book contains contributions from some of the most imaginative qualitative researchers, making the most of their research dilemmas in order to reflect upon the challenges and resistances they encounter in the work of qualitative research.

What makes young people care about themselves, others, their communities, and their futures? In Why Theatre Matters, Kathleen Gallagher uses the drama classroom as a window into the daily challenges of marginalized youth in Toronto, Boston, Taipei, and Lucknow. An ethnographic study which mixes quantitative and qualitative methodology in an international multi-site project, Why Theatre Matters ties together the issues of urban and arts education through the lens of student engagement. Gallagher’s research presents a framework for understanding student involvement at school in the context of students’ families and communities, as well as changing social, political, and economic realities around the world.Taking the reader into the classroom through the voices of the students themselves, Gallagher illustrates how creative expression through theatre can act as a rehearsal space for real, material struggles and for democratic participation. Why Theatre Matters is an invigorating challenge to the myths that surround urban youth and an impressive study of theatre’s transformative potential.

Why theatre now? Reflecting on the mix of challenges and opportunities that face theatre in communities that are necessarily becoming global in scope and technologically driven, In Defence of Theatre offers a range of passionate reflections on this important question.Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman bring together nineteen playwrights, actors, directors, scholars, and educators who discuss the role that theatre can – and must – play in professional, community, and educational venues. Stepping back from their daily work, they offer scholarly research, artists’ reflections, interviews, and creative texts that argue for theatre as a response to the political and cultural challenges emerging in the twenty-first century. Contributors address theatre’s contribution to local and global politics of place, its power as an antidote to various modern social ailments, and its pursuit of equality. Of equal concern are the systematic and practical challenges that confront those involved in realizing theatre’s full potential.

Why theatre now? Reflecting on the mix of challenges and opportunities that face theatre in communities that are necessarily becoming global in scope and technologically driven, In Defence of Theatre offers a range of passionate reflections on this important question.Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman bring together nineteen playwrights, actors, directors, scholars, and educators who discuss the role that theatre can – and must – play in professional, community, and educational venues. Stepping back from their daily work, they offer scholarly research, artists’ reflections, interviews, and creative texts that argue for theatre as a response to the political and cultural challenges emerging in the twenty-first century. Contributors address theatre’s contribution to local and global politics of place, its power as an antidote to various modern social ailments, and its pursuit of equality. Of equal concern are the systematic and practical challenges that confront those involved in realizing theatre’s full potential.

For young people, the space of the drama classroom can be a space for deep learning as they struggle across difference to create something together with common purpose. Collaborating across institutions, theatres, and community spaces, the research in Hope in a Collapsing World mobilizes theatre to build its methodology and create new data with young people as they seek the language of performance to communicate their worries, fears, and dreams to a global network of researchers and a wider public.A collaboration between a social scientist and a playwright and using both ethnographic study and playwriting, Hope in a Collapsing World represents a groundbreaking hybrid format of research text and original script – titled Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope – for reading, experimentation, and performance.

This book explores the affective and relational lives of young people in diverse urban spaces. By following the trajectories of diverse young people as they creatively work through multiple and unfolding global crises, it asks how arts-based methodologies might answer the question: How do we stand in relation to others, those nearby and those at great distances?The research draws on knowledges, research traditions, and artistic practices that span the Global North and Global South, including Athens (Greece), Coventry (England), Lucknow (India), Tainan (Taiwan), and Toronto (Canada) and curates a way of thinking about global research that departs from the comparative model and moves towards a new analytic model of thinking multiple research sites alongside one another as an approach to sustaining dialogue between local contexts and wider global concerns.