Chapter 10 Encountering Diversity
Drama as a Democratic Pedagogy to Prepare Inclusive-Minded Teachers
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Abstract
The Encountering Diversity Project places people with disabilities at the center of professional practice knowledge and the teaching and learning process. The centerpiece of this project is the Teaching for Diversity Workshop (Diversity Workshop). This university-based workshop, co-facilitated by actors with disabilities from Fusion, http://www.fusiontheatre.com.au, a Victorian Theatre company, enables pre-service teachers to experience a range of drama and applied theatre arts-based activities focused on educational inclusion. In this chapter, we position the Encountering Diversity project theoretically in the discipline of disability studies in education and consider how the lived experience of disability enables the actors to work effectively in the Diversity Workshop. The theoretical resources of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas are deployed to frame the Diversity Workshop as an ethical encounter of the face-to-face, highlighting both the pedagogical and ontological dimensions of this iteration of the research program. Through the willing participation of the actors with disabilities as teachers and co-researchers, the project embraces the right for people with disabilities to have a voice not only in teacher education but in the broader program of research for inclusion.