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Teachers Act Up!: creating multicultural learning communities through theatre

In this useful book, education professors Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Mariana Souto-Manning make a case and provide a model for incorporating Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in teacher preparation. Within the context of a grant to increase the number of bilingual teachers, especially Spanish English, in the state of Georgia, the authors used TO with various groups of preand in-service teachers. They aimed to counter traditional forms of ‘solution-oriented’ education (17) with an embodied, problem-posing approach and to empower teachers. The book that ensued brings together the scholarly literature on multicultural education with the practice of TO, showcasing concrete exercises from the authors’ workshops. It offers an accessible and rousing teacher-based approach to applied theatre that will be of value not only to educators and education scholars but also to theatre practitioners and community activists working in various multicultural contexts. The book is divided into two parts: the first providing the critical framework, and the second, in-depth descriptions of the theatre workshops. True to the legacy of Boal, Cahnmann-Taylor and Souto-Manning begin with a social problem. Too often, teachers are treated as ‘passive recipients of ideological scripts regarding what they [can and cannot] do in their roles as educators’ (13). These protocols tend to presume culture-blindness, ignoring the academic and emotional needs of diverse students. Consequently, teachers do not see themselves as agents for change, a problem that is exacerbated by external constraints. In the USA, teachers are faced with larger class sizes, limited resources, ‘English only’ mandates and the pressures stemming from the system of testing and accountability instituted by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Chapter one contextualises this problem within a clearly written review of the literature on multicultural education, through which the authors highlight the importance of diverse, personal knowledge and call attention to the complex ways in which power and ideology are operative in schools. They conclude that while much of the literature argues that change to our educational status quo is possible, the practical question of how that change should happen has gone largely unaddressed (22). By way of an answer, Chapter 2 delivers a wonderful introduction to the life and work of Augusto Boal, emphasising his connection to the critical pedagogy developed by his mentor and friend Paulo Freire. This chapter does not attempt to make a contribution to the scholarly literature on Boal and community-based performance, but rather seems intended for educators and education scholars unfamiliar with TO. While both chapters in part one are strong, I would have liked to see a better integration of the two. Reference