Creating Space: Making Room for Identity Politics in English Language
Arts Class.
Lessons
from a Community Theatre Project
Connie Morrison, Memorial University
Author’s Note
Connie Morrison https://orcid.org/0009-0000-6138-2741
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Connie Morrison at conniem@mun.ca
Abstract
Keywords: autoethnography, cultural studies, critical literacy, identity,
arts-based pedagogy, English language arts
Creating Space: Making Room for Identity Politics in English
Language Arts Class. Lessons From a Community Theatre Project
Introduction: Encountering Blackout after the Fact
Being
invited to join the ECHO Lab’s Blackout theatre project after it had
been staged felt akin to getting on a westward transcontinental train ride
midway through the prairies, where much of the Canadian landscape had passed
before the other passengers. The invitation was to jump on board and not only
collect the experiences of those closest to this project but also contribute to
its forward trajectory. The opportunity was exciting, but also riddled with
questions: what did I have to contribute? What could I learn from a
community-based theatre project about an act of student resistance? What
lessons could I pass on to my own students in their preservice education as I
attempt to prepare them for classrooms where neurodivergent and queer students
might not embrace the world’s gestures and well-intended discourses of
inclusion? This sense of arriving late, after the applause, after the story had
been told, provoked a sense of humility and curiosity in me. It invited me to
listen differently, to attend closely to the traces of dialogue, emotion, and
transformation as I wonder what might come next.
Blackout was a community-based theatre project in Eastern Canada that
explored youth stories of queer pride and resistance. Drawing from experiences
of the youth participating in the musical production, the project portrayed how
some youth chose to wear black armbands during Pride events in their community
as a compelling act of resistance against increasingly commodified and
normative displays of rainbow and trans flags that fly during community Pride
events. The project illuminates complex and nuanced relationships with
identity, expectation, bias and acceptance in ways that were funny,
heart-wrenching and poignant all at once.
Adding
to the complexity of this project was that its actors and contributors were
also neurodivergent individuals, each navigating their own ways of being and
knowing. Seminal work by
Edmund O’Sullivan (2004) reminds us that transformative learning often requires
a ‘structural shift’ in the way thoughts, feelings, and actions are
conceptualized, a shift that is at once conscious, dramatic, and lasting. Such
a transformation offers an opportunity to change the very way we are in the
world. Yet, as O’Sullivan has noted, movement toward transformation rarely
occurs without struggle. As Berlak
(2004) notes, transformative learning demands a negotiation between
“confrontation and reflection” that results from such discomforts. And it is
here, in the space between confrontation and reflection, that the opportunity
for change resides. Sadly, despite movements to create safer, more inclusive
democratic spaces, our world is still a place where racist and sexist comments
continue to cause violence (McGough & Dunkley, 2025).
Before
systemic change can occur, O’Sullivan advises that we attend to our
self-locations and our relationships with others as a form of critical
discourse. Autoethnography becomes my vehicle for self-reflection and
reflective judgement (Mezirow, 2003) in order to gain
perspective on the sources and structures that frame my knowing. As part of attending to my relationships with
others, especially my students, I draw from Hagood (2002), who calls educators to both recognize and honour
the dual relationship between identity and (critical) literacy. Hagood explains
that students enter classrooms carrying rich ‘funds of knowledge’ from their
familial culture, their peer influence, life experiences, and formal schooling.
And as educators, we must “consider both students’ perceptions of their own
identities and the subjective perceptions of others … in relation to reading
the world when examining critical literacy” (as cited in Hsieh &
Cridland-Hughes, 2022, p. 63). In this way, Blackout
can be understood as both performance and pedagogy; a collaborative act of
storytelling through which youth reimagined how pride, identity, and resistance
might coexist within communities that often struggle to accommodate difference.
Having
spent the better part of two decades teaching courses in diversity and
inclusion to undergraduate and graduate students in a faculty of education, I
am continuously reminded of Hsieh & Cridland-Hughes’ (2022) call
that “teachers must vigilantly counter hegemonic norms of schooling that may
silence students and instead establish contexts that allow for students to be
heard” (p. 64). However, attending to counter hegemonic norms is not
relegated to only social justice education; this falls easily into the
discipline of English language arts education (Houston, 2004). They argue that
preservice and veteran teachers must seek “multivocal engagement with community
issues grounded in power” (p. 64) and that critical literacies offer an avenue
for such work. With this in mind, I also position this
work within the context of the teaching I do with intermediate and secondary
English language arts preservice teachers. Unlike others contributing to this
special issue, I am not one of the creators of the Blackout project.
Instead, I came after the curtain had fallen, the applause had faded, and the
bodies had left the building. My engagement with Blackout
is interpretive rather than participatory—an attempt to learn from the
project’s pedagogical resonances and to consider how its acts of creative
resistance might inform teacher education more broadly. My role
is to reflect on what this project, and others like it, offer to English
language arts teachers and those in teacher education programs in a time when
curriculum is being revised and reimagined. This inquiry is shaped by my
own positionality as both practitioner and researcher, guided by questions of
belonging, agency, and how educators might cultivate spaces where difference is
not merely included but affirmed as generative. This is a time
when the world urgently needs to create space for multiple intersectional
identities of belonging. In this reflection, I draw upon my own experiences as
a classroom teacher and as a teacher educator to navigate a way forward. I will
begin by situating myself within this work.
In the context of Blackout, the youth’s creative acts of
resistance—refusing normative gestures of inclusion while asserting their own
symbols of pride—embody this kind of productive struggle. The Blackout
project, in this sense, extends an invitation to educators: to take part in a similar process of transformative
reflection to interrogate how our own assumptions about inclusion, pride, and
belonging shape the pedagogical spaces we create and inhabit. Such reflection also calls for a willingness to engage with
discomfort, uncertainty, and contradiction, conditions that, as Boler (2004)
and Berlak (2004) remind us, are essential to the
practice of critical pedagogy. Within Blackout, the moments of tension and ambivalence become sites of
possibility rather than obstacles to understanding.
Grounded in this framework, the article explores how arts-based and
community-driven pedagogies can illuminate the tensions between resistance and
inclusion in contemporary classrooms (Ellis et al., 2019; Fine, 2018). First, I
situate myself within this work, reflecting on my own pedagogical assumptions
and positionality. Then I situate this work within a framework of cultural
studies, autoethnography and next, I consider Blackout as a site of
transformative learning for both its youth participants and for educators
encountering the project after its performance. Finally, I examine how
discomfort, reflection, and the willingness to dwell between confrontation and
reflection (Berlak, 2004) can move educators toward more ethical, responsive,
and inclusive practices in English language arts classrooms. Through this
exploration, I aim to contribute to ongoing conversations about how arts-based
inquiry, cultural studies, and critical literacy can work together to reimagine
teacher education as a site of transformation grounded in listening,
relationality, and creative resistance.
Identity, Belonging and Standing Out
As a
competitive figure skater in the 1980s, the opinions and approval of others
shaped how I constructed my appearance and my self-perception. On the ice, originality and individuality
were rewarded, but only within strict parameters. Off the ice, however, the commercial youth
market was beginning to explode (Mazerella, 2005;
Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, 2008), and it was important to fit in with the
crowd. I share this autobiographical fragment as a way of positioning my
subjectivity as a narrator. In my youth, notions of appearance and attention
affected my sense of belonging, and it also influenced my early understanding
of what was valued in society and by my peers. These experiences were also
situated within the dominant, patriarchal, humanist discourse that grounded my
early education. I recall my experience as part of positioning my bias as a
teacher and scholar, and ask how these insights reveal
the way power has operated, and continues to operate, on the construction of
subjectivity. As a white, middle-class, cisgender woman, I am an ally for my
students and colleagues within the LGBTQ2SIA+ community. I don’t remember a
pivotal moment when this became my truth, but maybe it has to do with having
family connections to this community. I have been teaching at a faculty of
education at a university in Atlantic Canada for almost two decades. Preparing
students to become teachers, I am acutely aware of the power structure that
frames our classes. I regularly question if I am the right person to be
teaching a course in social justice education when I reside comfortably in
nearly all the dominant class categories. I am constantly reminded of how
“society is structured in ways that make us all complicit in systems of
inequality; there is no neutral ground” (Sensoy &
DiAngelo, 2017, p. 4). I recognize the privileges and the limits of my
positionality, and I’ve even suggested that my role as instructor of this
course might be perpetuating colonial and dominant discourses.
In the past, I’ve written about how my experiences of negotiating
appearance and belonging allow me to understand, though never fully inhabit,
the pressures faced by youth whose identities fall outside dominant norms.
(Morrison, 2007, 2010, 2016). Though I have deliberately positioned myself as
an ally, within the academy, in the community and with the students I teach, I
recall Britzman’s (2000) caution as I struggle with the perceived omnipotence
that a position of authority affords. “I positioned myself behind their backs
to point out what they could not see, would not do, and could not have said
even as I struggled against such omnipotence” (p. 32). When attempting to
consider my connection to youth who are (and have been) truly marginalized by
hegemonic and homophobic acts, my attempted connection is frail at best.
Within the Blackout project -a student student-inspired
theatre project that portrayed the struggle of queer youth who wore black as an
act of resistance to mainstream pride events, my role as an ally is to create
pedagogical spaces that amplify their voices while acknowledging how power
circulates through culture, education, and performance. My reflexive stance,
grounded in feminist poststructuralism, foregrounds the partiality of my
perspective while affirming a commitment to allyship and critical pedagogy.
Working as an ally within social institutions with the goal of social
transformation requires deep reflection about the complex nature of power
dynamics, not only in the classroom but also through the social and cultural
experiences that inform identity—especially as they reproduce or disrupt
dominant culture (Bishop, 2015; Sensoy &
DiAngelo, 2017; Shelton, 2019; Yep, 2021).
I have been teaching students who are insiders and outsiders to
recognize, consider and work against systems of oppression (DiStefano et al.,
2000). While allyship could easily have dominated my reflection as it relates
to literacy practices, identity, and English Language Arts, I also acknowledge
this thread has been taken up more eloquently in another article in this issue.
Instead, I have chosen to use my allyship as a springboard to question
identity, culture, power and belonging through the lens of a teacher educator+-
Through this lens, I examine what we have been doing in the
discipline of English Language Arts and how our failure, even amid the best of
attentions, can help turn us around to help create space for all student
voices. How do we make space for texts (or projects like Blackout) that
disrupt the discourses that those of us in the dominant groups assume want to
be voiced by those in the marginalized groups? Allies have learned that it’s
politically and socially correct to support Pride events, so what do we do when
queer youth resist that performative acceptance?
Before proceeding to a theoretical framing of this work, it is
important to acknowledge how situating this work within the present social
context is nearly impossible. Every single day brings another announcement,
another crisis, another rupture of what felt like decades of progress toward
inclusion and balancing the scales of equality. Next, I will highlight my
theoretical framing for this paper.
Theoretical Framing
At my core, I’m an English teacher;
as such, my theoretical position assumes pedagogy from within a cultural
studies framework. It also requires a positioning of knowledge within social,
historical and economic contexts (Hall, 1999). As far back as the 1930s and
1940s in Britain, Leavis and the Cambridge school suggested that social harmony
could be achieved through literature in English, and in particular, through the
establishment of a literary canon with a moral vision that could help the
working class determine good from bad in art, literature and cinema (Ball et
al., 1990). As a practical and educational project, Leavisite
English remained through the moral panics of both World Wars, and some argue
that it continued to thrive in places well into the 1990s (Morgan, 2000; Pirie,
1993). By the 1960s, Leavisite English was being
critiqued for its instance that literature must reflect a high seriousness and
serve a moral purpose and its refusal to budge from the literary canon, while
for the learner, first-hand meaning and the daily life of the authentic child
were becoming important as an educational project.
Within
the shift toward English within a cultural studies frame, texts are chosen not
for their cultural value or worth, but more importantly for how they contribute
to individual and collective identity and meaning-making
within the culture. By contrast, traditionally, texts from popular culture have
been ignored, marginalized or even shunned from the classroom for their
association with a low culture (Coiro et al., 2008; Currie & Kelly, 2022;
Hall, 1996; Fine, 2018; Furman et al., 2019; Lankshear
& Knobel, 2003, 2006). Even when marginalized voices began to gain
acceptance in English language arts curricula, they were legitimized
voices—recognized and validated as important enough to be included. But as
traditional pedagogy around literacy practices in the classroom often ignores
everyday literacy practices and popular texts, it does even less to value texts
that are produced in the community outside of regulated institutions. If
traditional pedagogy around literacy practices in the classroom often ignores everyday
literacy practices and popular texts, it also attempts to view the terms ‘text’
and ‘reading’ through a progressive lens, as demonstrated in the expansive
definition of ‘text’ within the Foundation for the Atlantic Canada English
Language Arts Curriculum (APEF) document (1996), where it is defined as:
any language event, whether written,
oral, or visual. In this sense, a conversation, a poem, a novel, a poster, a
music video, a television program, and a multimedia production, for example,
are all texts. The term is an economical way of suggesting the similarity among
many of the skills involved in ‘reading’ a film, interpreting a speech, or
responding to an advertisement or a piece of journalism. The expanded concept
of text takes into account the diverse range of texts
with which we interact and from which we construct meaning. (p. 11)
It is this expanded and diverse
range of ‘text’ that requires challenging. In Newfoundland and Labrador,
despite repeated improvements and updates to the English Language Arts
curriculum, targets and indicators remain tied to this foundational document, which
acknowledges multimodal forms of text. It stops short of engaging with the
understanding that literacy is inseparable from culture, identity, and
subjectivity.
In
Eastern Canada, the APEF document remains, to this day, the definitive
guiding text for selecting supplementary reading as it provides the guidelines
for selecting books in the Annotated Bibliographies for junior and senior high
schools in Newfoundland and Labrador. Where this selection process becomes
problematic is in its lack of inclusivity. A search for books with a
description of a character who is part of the LGBTQ2SIA+ community reveals only
one book in the junior high list. King and the Dragonflies (Callender,
2020) is a realistic fiction about a tween boy, King, who is convinced that his
dead brother has come back as a dragonfly. The annotated bibliography describes
a gay character in the novel, who is King’s friend, who goes missing, prompting
him to question his own sexual identity. Similarly, there is only one title to
be found in the senior high school annotated bibliography with
a keyword search (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, sexuality). Absolutely,
Positively Not (Larochelle, 2009)
is a realistic fiction recommended for students in lower secondary school. A
sixteen-year-old tries several tactics to convince himself and those around him
that he isn’t gay. Together, these texts come nowhere close to offering
representational voice to students who identify (openly or not) as
LGBTQ2SIA+. This lack of representation
limits visibility and inclusion for all students.
By
relegating popular and performative literacies to the margins, such curricula
risk overlooking the pedagogical force of cultural practices like youth
theatre. This omission sustains humanist and patriarchal traditions that
disconnect text from power, bypassing opportunities to examine how culture,
identity, and desire intersect in lived experience. Within this framework,
literacy ought to be understood as more than alphabetic decoding; it is a
social practice deeply embedded in cultural, historical, and political contexts
(Luke, 2007; Luke & Freebody, 1997; Street, 2003, 2005). The Blackout project
exemplifies how student-led drama serves as a literacy practice that mobilizes
performance, collaboration, and storytelling as modes of meaning-making, which
also highlight the instability and multiplicity of subjectivity and foreground
the shifting, relational nature of knowledge production.
A
critical literacy perspective (Currie & Kelly, 2022; Hsieh, 2022; Kachani et al., 2020; Luke, 2007) provides a framework for interrogating
the cultural and institutional power structures that sustain hegemonic
practices in Western discourse. Building on Freire’s (1970) conception of
reading both the word and the world, critical literacy emphasizes the politics
of representation and the ways cultural texts construct subjectivity. Popular
literacy practices, such as those embedded in the Blackout performance,
are inherently pedagogical, shaping how truth claims and identities are
represented and contested.
Gee’s (2001) concept of Discourses underscores how language
practices are tied to identity, belonging, and power relations, and how they
are acquired through social participation rather than formal instruction.
Applied to the Blackout theatre project, this suggests that students are
not only performing scripts but negotiating discourses of queerness and gender
as they construct and contest identities. Critical pedagogy, therefore,
requires educators to recognize how literacy practices in such settings both reproduce
and resist dominant ideologies, and to create spaces where diverse voices are
valued (Davis & Francis, 2022; Davis et al., 2015). Teachers, as the final
arbiters of curriculum, play a crucial role in either sanctioning or silencing
the discourses that circulate through cultural texts. If we know how
and why the game is played, then we can build strategies to protect ourselves
from its harmful effects and take advantage of its useful effects (Kashani et
al., 2020).
Against this backdrop, the Blackout project illustrates the
transformative potential of expanded notions of literacy. It positions
community theatre as a site where students read, write, and perform cultural
texts while simultaneously interrogating the power relations those texts
encode. In line with Luke’s (2007) vision of literacy as intrinsic to social
justice, such projects provide young people with the agency to resist and
reimagine dominant discourses. For English language arts teacher education,
this signals the necessity of reframing literacy to include multimodal,
performative, and critical practices that acknowledge the cultural politics of
representation and open possibilities for more equitable pedagogy. Next, I turn
to a brief discussion of the methodology that grounds this autoethnography as I
consider how the production of Blackout became an opportunity for
transformative learning for both its youth participants and for educators
encountering the project after its performance.
Methodological Grounding
Methodologically,
this work is situated broadly within the paradigm of cultural studies and
incorporates autoethnography as both a mode of inquiry and a stance of
self-reflexivity. Together, these approaches enable an understanding of Blackout
that is attentive to context, relationality, and ways that meaning is
constructed through narrative and performance. An analysis of my attempts to
offer critical perspectives on existing pedagogies and conventions within
teacher education. As a field of study, cultural studies has
a history of qualitative and empirical research that has focused on the social,
historical and economic context of lived experience, texts or discourses
(During, 1996; Saukko, 2003). Cultural studies has
historically resisted positivist “objectivism” in favour
of approaches that recognize the situated, relational, and contested character
of meaning (Foucault, 1999; Hall, 1999; McRobbie, 2005). Emerging from adult
literacy movements and working-class education in mid-20th-century Britain, the
tradition developed as a critical pedagogy committed to examining how cultural
constructs both constrain and enable possibilities for identity, agency, and
social transformation (Hoggart, 1957; Williams, 1958,
1983). Research in cultural studies attends to the relationship between lived
experience, discourse, and the broader social, historical, and political
context. Seminal works, including Willis’s Learning to Labor (1977),
Hall and Jefferson’s Resistance through Rituals (1976), and McRobbie and
Garbner’s (1976) analysis of girlhood subcultures,
modelled how cultural studies sites such as schools, media and leisure spaces
function as locations of both resistance and regulation.
These studies positioned culture as ordinary, negotiated, and
polysemous, while also highlighting the way it is bound up in structures of
power and inequality (Hall, 1980; Morley, 1981). In a kind of stitching
together of research intentions, cultural studies created a location that joins
together divergent philosophical perspectives in order to
(Saukko, 2003):
articulate
a mediating space between right wing optimism and left wing
pessimism that allowed the paradigm to examine how people’s everyday life was
strife with creative and critical potential, while their lives and imagination
were also constrained by problematic cultural ideologies as well as structures
of social inequity. (p. 13)
Methodologically,
cultural studies embraces Freebody et al.’s (1991)
term, ‘disciplined multiplicity,’ and insists that inquiry remains reflexive,
partial, and open to contradictory truths. This stance resists essentialist
claims to stable meaning while recognizing the generative tensions between
humanist, structuralist, and poststructuralist traditions. Within this frame,
questions are conjectural rather than definitive, foregrounding process and
interpretation over claims of empirical certainty. This orientation provides a
fitting methodological frame for analyzing Blackout as a cultural text, one
that emerges from community and youth resistance while inviting educators to
reimagine their own pedagogical and ethical frameworks. In doing so, it
positions Blackout
not simply as a performance but as a living archive of transformative
possibility.
Autoethnography offers a particularly appropriate methodology
within this frame. Like ethnography, it examines lived experience as both a
site of meaning-making and a text for interpretation, but it does so by
centering the researcher’s own subjectivity and situated knowledge. By
challenging conventions, autoethnography expands conventional academic methods
to contest theory and lived experience. Informed by poststructuralist
critiques, autoethnography acknowledges that experience is always mediated by discourse,
representation, and power (Bochner, 2012, 2020; Bochner and Ellis, 2016; Ellis,
2004; Britzman, 2000; Pickering, 2008). It involves writing about and with the
self in order to glean insight and knowledge, yet it
does not present experiences as transparent or singular but as fractured,
partial, and constitutive of broader cultural logics. Bringing a
poststructuralist sensibility to bear on ethnographic questions, modernist expectations
of such holistic representations and “reads the absent against the present”
(Britzman, 2000, p. 28). It puts
representation in crisis and makes knowledge constitutive of power.
Positioning myself as a researcher and subject requires that I draw
from personal experience, uncovering layers of discomfort in
order to arrive at a location framed by critical hope. As Britzman (2000) does, I struggle with the
authority I possess as a narrator, and with my inability to represent a
community of youth as they would represent themselves. So, I must be clear that my intent is not to
capture a truth that is already out there—that would be impossible. I will
recall my cultural studies frame in order to question
the power structures behind how meanings and knowledge get naturalized in these
everyday cultural texts. My position is interpretative, and as such it is
political. My interpretations cannot be
removed completely from my values or subjectivities. While ethnographic research attempts to open
a space where “experience could not speak for itself” (Britzman, 2000, p. 32),
I also confront politics present in recounting, just as there is a politics
present in the desire to be accountable. We may be constituted by discourse,
but I confront the poststructural reality that
although representations of identity/subjectivity may be constituted by
discourse, language fails to capture these representations fully. In fact, there is no way to completely
represent the real within the limits of language. Instead, there are several layers of
interpretative loss to acknowledge in this work.
I consider Blackout as a site of
transformative learning for both its youth participants and for educators
encountering the project after its performance. The project itself invited
audiences to reimagine what inclusion and resistance might look like when the
expected symbols of pride were replaced by gestures that unsettled the norm.
For the youth involved, this was a creative reclamation of narrative power and
a refusal to be spoken for, even by those who would claim to be allies. For
educators like myself, it also posed an ethical
challenge: what happens when our own inclusive intentions reproduce the very
hierarchies we seek to dismantle?
Recently, we have become increasingly familiar
with rising nationalist and anti-DEI agendas that seek to silence conversations
about equity and justice, while liberal and democratic voices answer back with
renewed commitments to inclusion. Yet these counter-movements often risk
reinstating old hierarchies in new forms. The Blackout project reminds us that
even gestures of inclusion can be complicit in the silencing of difference. The
act of wearing black armbands during Pride events was not a rejection of visibility,
but a demand for more honest representation and an insistence that inclusion
without complexity can easily slide into tokenism. This form of artistic
resistance called me to question how well-intended, ally educators, myself included, participate in similar dynamics within our
own classrooms and curricula.
A decade and a half ago, when I taught a
graduate course in teaching and learning, one of the assignments invited
students to explore the trope of the ‘teacher as saviour’
in popular culture. I often used films
such as Freedom
Writers (LaGravenese,
2007) and Dangerous Minds (Smith, 1995) to critique
how popular culture positions teachers from dominant groups as rescuers of
marginalized students. Over time, I grew uneasy with perpetuating this binary
and stopped using such examples. Yet, a few years ago,
a student from Turkey asked if I had seen Freedom Writers, insisting it was a
deeply inspiring film about teachers who help immigrant youth succeed. When I
explained that I had stopped using it to avoid reinforcing the white saviour trope, she looked genuinely puzzled, explaining
that communities like hers needed the advocacy and mentorship
of teachers from the dominant culture. Her comment caught me off guard. It was
a moment of productive discomfort or what Mezirow (2003) might call a
disorienting dilemma. The moment deeply unsettled my confidence in what I thought
I knew about representation, privilege, and pedagogy. Working against a white saviour trope seemed to align with an allied stance. I had
genuinely wanted to create safe and welcoming spaces for my students. Where
had I gone wrong? What had I missed?
While the conditions of race and gender
representation are not the same, that exchange stayed with me because it echoed
the same questions that Blackout raises: Who gets to speak,
and on whose behalf? What responsibilities do we bear when we take up stories
that are not our own? As Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017)
remind us, allies within dominant groups must engage in the ongoing work of
critical self-reflection, risk-taking, and accountability. This involves
letting go of control, listening differently, and being willing to make and
take responsibility for mistakes. Sensoy and DiAngelo
also share a narrative about suffragist women who succeeded because they had
members of the dominant class on their side to promote their cause. This added
layer of consideration, when applied to my Turkish student’s film
recommendation and the Blackout project’s theme of resisting well-intended
discourses, all collide. In the context of teacher education, these practices
are not simply acts of personal humility; they are pedagogical commitments that
shape how we select texts, frame classroom dialogue, and respond to the
discomforts that emerge when equity and power collide.
In my undergraduate course on diversity and
social justice education, we use Sensoy and
DiAngelo’s (2017) definition of an ally as “a member of the dominant group who
acts to end oppression in all aspects of social life by consistently seeking to
advocate alongside the group who is oppressed in relation to them” (p. 211).
This definition reframes allyship not as benevolent advocacy but as a
continuous practice of self-interrogation. To act alongside rather than for
others demands humility, vigilance, and a willingness to work collaboratively
with other educators to challenge the structural inequities that shape our
schools. It means validating and supporting those who are institutionally
marginalized, engaging in perpetual self-reflection to expose our socialized
privileges, and taking responsibility for the harm we may cause—even when our
intentions are good.
These imperatives extend into the curricular
decisions we make. As educators, we are constantly navigating the ethics of
representation: which stories we bring into the classroom, which discourses
rise to the top, and which are left out. The question of inclusion is never
neutral. Even as we strive to “diversify” reading lists or highlight counter-narratives, we risk constructing new moral
hierarchies, or what I have elsewhere referred to as a “neo-Leavisite”
impulse, where texts are deemed “good for” students in ways that reproduce
another form of paternalism. As noted above, the claim of inclusion is not born
out in book choices when sanctioned annotated bibliographies only reference two
LGBTQSIA+
titles. Rather, a site of representation exists by going outside the school
walls to a community theatre project like Blackout that invites us to resist
this impulse. Its refusal to conform to institutional expectations of what
pride or inclusion should look like reminds us that truly transformative texts
must hold multiplicity and tension rather than offering closure or comfort.
This struggle to make space for stories that
disrupt rather than soothe sits at the heart of critical literacy and
transformative pedagogy. As Sensoy and DiAngelo
(2017) point out, even institutions that claim to be safe and caring often
reproduce inequity by design. For those of us who teach, safety cannot mean
insulation from discomfort; it must mean cultivating the conditions under which
discomfort leads to insight. In this sense, the Blackout youth’s black armbands
become a metaphor for what education at its best might do: draw attention to
what is missing, to what inclusion has failed to include.
Kashani et al.’s (2020) work on counter-conduct
adds urgency to this reflection. Drawing on Foucault, he argues that “forces of
counter-conduct must have a bias toward social justice and cannot sit on both
sides of the fence” (p. 13). The call is not only to reflect but to act—to take
ethical stances that risk discomfort and dissent. Citing Hedges (2013), Kashani
reminds us that “objectivity banishes empathy, passion, and a quest for
justice” (as cited in Kashani, 2020, p. 13). For educators, this means that
transformation cannot remain theoretical or abstract. To practice
counter-conduct is to speak and teach from a place of engaged ethics, where
neutrality is replaced by responsibility, and where education becomes a living,
moral project.
Blackout models this
stance. It refuses the comfort of easy narratives and insists on the necessity
of tension as a condition for growth. In doing so, it extends an invitation to
educators—to reimagine allyship not as mastery over difference but as a
willingness to be changed by it. Finally, I examine how discomfort, reflection,
and the willingness to dwell between confrontation and reflection (Berlak,
2004) can move educators toward more ethical, responsive, and inclusive
practices in English language arts classrooms.
Dwelling
Between Confrontation and Reflection
As Boler (1999) reminds us, emotions are not
peripheral to learning but integral to how we come to know and unlearn. They
mark the friction between what we believe and what we are being called to
reconsider. Blackout offered precisely this
kind of emotional and intellectual provocation. Its refusal of easy inclusion
unsettled audiences, especially educators, by revealing how well-intentioned
gestures of equity can still reinscribe hierarchy. To dwell between confrontation
and reflection is to sit with that discomfort, to resist closure, and to allow
uncertainty to do its transformative work.
Returning to the train ride analogy from my
opening, I am reminded that entering a project already in motion requires more
than observation. It demands a willingness to feel unmoored, to listen rather
than lead, to notice what has already passed outside the window. Blackout
became that kind of journey: both destination and vehicle. It invited those of
us who teach to question our assumptions about direction, speed, and who is
invited aboard. Pushing boundaries and
crossing borders, on both conceptual and practical
levels, has become essential to my understanding of transformative pedagogy.
Within classroom practice, there are abundant opportunities to justify the
inclusion of alternative or community-based texts, even when sanctioned lists
are limited in scope. Drawing from Riley & Crawford-Garrett (2015) Hsieh
& Cridland-Hughes (2022) encourage teacher educators, like myself, to implore preservice teachers to “consider texts,
the culture of schooling, and assessments through critical frameworks and
supporting candidates to relate these experiences to their own literacies and
learning, as spaces from which to challenge dominant practices” (p. 62). Their
call includes a moral imperative—one that moves beyond grounding critical
literacy theory intellectually, to one that includes moving “beyond our own
classrooms and candidates to look for openings and partnerships within broader
teacher education contexts” (p. 68). By moving our critical literacy practices
“toward collective enactment” (p. 68) and seeking extended partnerships and
teacher learning opportunities that reside beyond the halls of the academy, we
can fill the gaps in current teacher education programs. If we are meant to
prepare students for the future in the real world, then this begins by empowering
teacher candidates to include texts such as the real-world, community-based Blackout
project into our teacher education programs.
This is not a call to abandon the official
curriculum but to read it differently and to use its existing language of
inclusion as a platform for deeper, more critical engagement. For example, the
newly revised curriculum documents in Newfoundland and Labrador articulate key
competencies for all students that closely align with the goals of
transformative literacy. These include respecting diversity of perspectives,
networking with communities and groups, navigating disagreements
constructively, and practicing social wellbeing, inclusivity, and belonging for
themselves and others (Newfoundland and
Labrador Department of Education, 2025). More specifically, within the English Language
Arts curriculum, the essential speaking and listening strand identifies
‘interacting with sensitivity and respect’ as a core target. Taken further, a
transformative intention would challenge students and, by extension, educators
to reflect critically on the normative discourses embedded in sanctioned texts,
to consider how identities are positioned by others, and to ask what such
positioning means for how we represent ourselves in the world (Hall, 1996; Pomerantz,
2006).
Transformative literacy must therefore be
understood as both always in progress and deeply
relational. In earlier work (Morrison, 2010, 2016), I found that performances
of identity rely on the discourses made available to them. The youth of Blackout
enacted precisely this awareness. By choosing to wear black armbands rather
than donning pride pins or other conventional symbols, they refused the
stability of sanctioned narratives. Whether their actions are read as social
resistance or youthful rebellion matters less than their insistence on
multiplicity and complexity. A project of transforming schooled literacies is
both broad and specific as it calls for structural shifts in educational
discourse and, simultaneously, for micro-level acts of pedagogical courage.
When educators limit what counts as ‘text,’ community-based arts projects like Blackout
fill the voids, making the lived intersections of identity, language, and power
visible.
To engage such work, educators must be willing
to embrace what Britzman (2000) calls “a more complicated reading process,” one
that moves “beyond the myth of literal representations and the deceptive
promise that ‘the real’ is transparent [and] stable” (p. 39). Blackout
stands as evidence of what happens when learning itself becomes performance
when emotion, resistance, and inquiry coexist in the same space. By creating
room for texts and performances that exist outside traditional and sanctioned
lists, English language arts education might be reimagined “not so much as
helping people know that they don’t know, but noticing
what they haven’t noticed” (Davis et al., 2015, p. 35).
Like boarding a train already in motion,
transformative teaching asks us to surrender mastery, to be startled by new
vistas, and to listen to the rhythms of stories not our own and to be open to
critically reading the power structures that reside within. The Blackout
project reminds us that such journeys are not linear; they loop, pause, and
diverge. Yet it is in these moments of uncertainty that learning and ethical
transformation take root. The work of teaching, then, is not to chart a fixed
route toward inclusion, but to remain attuned to the landscapes of discomfort
and possibility that pass before us, inviting us to look again, and
differently, each time.
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