My Views: Teaching, Learning and Research in Creative Arts education

My colleague Angus Fraser asked me to fill out a questionnaire for a paper he is writing.  As I like to recycle and re-connect content, I’ve pasted my answers below.  All the views are my own and not my employers or departments. ============= QUESTIONNAIRE BY ANGUS FRASER NAME: Dr Shawn Sobers         …

Post-action theorizing in community media (Laws vs Tools)

A large tendency in community media analysis is to post-theorize, for example attaching Paulo Freire’s theories of Dialogic Pedagogy to activity that has already happened, even if the facilitator had never heard of Freire and his ideas.  I feel that is still useful as it helps us understand the dynamics of what is happening better, and it is…

Classroom power dynamics: Analogy of the solar system

Anyone used to working with young people in teaching/facilitation type roles, will know the experience of the butterflies in the stomach that arises when faced with the challenge of trying to encourage a group to be motivated in the task at hand.    All eyes staring at you, waiting for you to say something meaningful and worthy of…

Augusto Boal – Theatre of the Oppressed has no end

Here are some quotes by Augusto Boal about his notion of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’, taken from his 1992 book ‘Games for Actors and Non-Actors’.   Agusto sadly died last week. Inspired by Paulo Freire‘s Pedagogy of the Oppressed he understood the activist and emancipation role of culture for individuals and communities living in societies where power is in the hands…

THE CLASS: The Critical Pedagogy of Teacher/Student relationships, and systems as oppression in schools

To download this paper as a pdf click here.   An analysis of the film ‘The Class’, (Entre les murs) from the perspective of critical pedagogy.  I will be extending this article into a chapter for my PhD, where I will use data from interviews I conducted with participants of community media education activity to…