A Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), theatrical inquiry into whiteness

Abstract

The project was a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), theatrical investigation into whiteness. During the 2012-2013 school year, nearly 40 mostly white 9th-12th Grade students in a first-ring, suburban high school outside of St. Paul investigated whiteness. They researched whiteness in the fall, wrote a play in the winter, and produced it as the school's spring play.Using YPAR (Appadurai, 2006; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Guishard, 2009; Morrell 2008) in concert with playbuilding pedagogies (Boal, 1979; Mandell & Wolf, 2003; Norris, 2009; Sawyer, 2003; Zipes, 2004), the students used data they generated in their research to inform their play.This project was designed from a critical whiteness perspective. Instead of using traditional white privilege pedagogy, white high school students participated in a teaching project that both acknowledged privilege and inquired into organizing logics of white supremacy. Students worked towards anti-racist action through the collaborative construction of a theatrical text.This dissertation presents the possibility and limitations of centering whiteness as a category of analysis in a high school context, the nature of sharing power between a high school teacher and a YPAR collective, and the implications of white people using a critical whiteness perspective to make sense of whiteness. It will argue that Thadeka's (1999) theorization of white shame should caution educators to approach whiteness work with nuance and care.