Annette Henry

This feminist doctoral research was designed to develop theory, innovative pedagogy, and to advance knowledge by contributing to a lack of research on teaching and learning about sexual assault narratives, rape culture, and Tarana Burke’s Me Too movement, feminist approaches that center intersectionality in teacher education, and employing feminist and critical discourse analysis and poetic inquiry. This study explored secondary English teacher candidates’ responses to learning about teaching assault narratives and demonstrates how assembling a diverse selection of such stories together in a trauma text set – not to compare them, but to create an atmosphere of considered confrontation – engenders promising new ways for educators to consider how they might reframe the secondary English classroom as a site for dynamic solidarity and enacting resistance(s) against rape culture.Future educators will go on to cultivate dynamic literacy learning and as such, a central goal of this project was to create space for exploring the difficult or radical knowledge(s) that emerge from sexual assault narratives, and to consider how literature can function as a vehicle for interrogating rape culture. Additionally, this project offered modeling and space for candidates to tackle intense subject matter such as sexual trauma in the English literature classroom. To do this work, I first joined two sections of a UBC Bachelor of Education course as a guest, then a guest lecturer to run workshops on teaching sexual assault narratives. Next, I recruited 23 teacher candidate participants to conduct individual interviews and focus groups to explore their responses to the pedagogy and texts. I then employed a two-pronged methodological approach with both feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist critical poetic inquiry for data analysis. The findings show that teacher candidates can have complex responses to sexual assault narratives and the challenges of teaching them. However, they overwhelmingly demonstrated commitments to anti-rape efforts by showcasing readiness and willingness to engage future students in social justice work generally and more specifically, teach about rape culture. Overall, participants were excited to create and facilitate secondary English classrooms as hopeful places for necessary paradigm shifts and resistance to violence of all kinds.

View record

This dissertation explores discourses of difference used by students throughout one year in a Francophone minority language school. This ethnography was conducted in the students’ social studies classes, where drama was used as a (post)critical pedagogy to teach and explore differences embedded in the curriculum. Drawing on critical, Indigenous, and poststructural theories this project explores how the students used discourses of difference in their interactions in and out of the classroom and during dramatic work. This study reveals that the participating youth used categories of difference, like race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and youth, in ways marked by ambiguity, humour, irony, and dissatisfaction, as well as attempts to govern and discipline the boundaries of these constructed categories. Discourses of race consistently emerged in informal educational spaces, such as school hallways; however, the students avoided them in the formal classroom space, a practice linked to the dominance of whiteness in the Canadian educational context. Drama activities created liminal spaces that disrupted the discursive distinction between informal and formal educational spaces, allowing limited access to the students’ informal discourses of race during instructional time. Overarching schooling structures made seizing such moments difficult, in order to disrupt and unpack categories of difference. Furthermore, the students’ problematic racial humour and representational practices surfaced during and immediately following classroom drama activities in ways that reinforced colonial ideas about belonging and unbelonging in Canadian schools. This study fills gaps in existing research on Francophone minority language schooling by exploring how race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and gender intersected in the identifications and discourses of participating youth. These findings trouble the myth of seamless integration in minority language Francophone schools and suggest that linguistic affiliation is an insufficient basis for inclusion and that schools must work to address the significant impact that differences of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and gender have on youth’s lives. Furthermore, this study complicates literature in drama-in-education by examining the possibilities and limitations applied theatre affords for unpacking categories of difference in the classroom. It proposes that pedagogical approaches that are explicitly anti-racist and decolonizing are needed in order to achieve such results.

View record