| During the fall semester of 1994 seventeen night school students from Detroit's Henry Ford High School collaborated with six college students from The University of Michigan in a theater workshop. "Theater and Social Change" is a university English course based on a Freirean model of pedagogy. The students documented their interactions on videotape, in project journals, and final essays. This dissertation addresses the conflicts that arose between the high school and college students in the practice of critical theory as it informed their interests, discourses, and competing interpretations of theater and agency.; Through a critical discourse analysis of the project discourse, I focus on the use of questions by the college students as a locus of control. Their questions locate and make visible the unproblematized assumptions of the collaborators about theater and about one another. The discourse of questions facilitates the development of theories of agency and resistance taking into account the lives of collaborating partners and their conflicting interpretations of the project's goals and methods. A critical analysis of discourse shows how the high school students resist ideological influences they judge not to be in their best interest. This contradicts the assumptions of the college students, who in their attempt to employ a Freirean pedagogy, find themselves unprepared and confused by the resistance of the high school students.; Variant constructions of agency develop among the participants. The college students conceptualize theater as a form of social change. In their interpretations of the project, the high school students resist liberatory theater by insisting on performing scenes they imagine rather than scenes from their lived experience. Writing from the perspective of a teacher at the high school, I ground my argument in the theory and practice of critical pedagogies. I argue for more contextualized applications of critical theory in order that the conflicts in the students' interactions generate productive tensions and negotiated outcomes. |
