Navigating diversity: Identity in the drama and dance classroom

Brooke Charlebois, Rochelle Matthews, Kim Sider, Stephen Wei, and host Jessie Kennedy 

In recent years, growing understanding of cultural appropriation, trauma-informed pedagogy, and diversity in the classroom has  influenced education in important ways. This learning has particular implications for literacy and drama education as subject areas that examine identity and lived experience through writing and performance. Considerations surrounding how to explore social issues and texts in ways that amplify diverse voices, yet avoid appropriation or undue emotional effort on the part of students from marginalized groups, are an ongoing focus of classroom educators, and require a reevaluation of traditional drama conventions, such as roleplay, writing in role, and devising.

Increasing awareness of social and economic disparities coupled with magnified political division and online presence underscores the importance of educating students to observe nuance, think critically, grapple thoughtfully with difference, and demonstrate empathy. As Rudine Sims Bishop has written, literature can “help us to understand each other better by helping to change our attitudes towards difference” (Bishop, R.S., 1990, p. xi). The examination of text, role, and ideas through drama and dance provides this same opportunity, affording students the chance to explore complex realities that clarify what is known to them, and illuminate what is not (Style, 1988, as published on Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity – SEED - website). How educators navigate this meaningful work is also complex and highlights the need for dialogue around pedagogical practice. 

This article presents a conversation with educators on these topics and delves into how they are shaping teachers' pedagogical choices in urgent ways. The difference between intent and consequence, activating curiosity over judgement, and the need for representation and relationship building arise in this discussion, as well as how teachers’ intersectionality impacts their experience as educators. 

Intent and consequence

 Jessie, Q1: How can some approaches to drama and theatre in education be problematic and in what ways can current drama praxis improve upon past practice?

Stephen: I think the thing that's most difficult for people is that this idea of misappropriation really has to do with the idea that students should not be embodying and portraying characters who are not of their background or their identity. But by that token, are we also implying that they are able to embody the experiences of middle-aged men? 

What concerns me is that by saying that kids can’t play characters that don’t reflect their backgrounds but can play straight/cis/white characters, the default becomes straight/cis/white. So suddenly, we are centering whiteness. That, to me, brings up issues of what's “universal.” So often, you see cis white men complaining that “I couldn't identify with the character because they were white, because they were gay, because they were black, because they were a woman.” Meanwhile, those of us from marginalized communities constantly have been expected to identify with the white characters in the movies, television, and plays we watch, or the books that we read, and also what characters we play.

Furthermore, if we say that kids can only play characters who are like themselves, then queer kids who are in the closet can't play queer characters, because they don't want to out themselves. If I was told, oh, you can't play that character unless you're gay, I would never have done the monologue that changed my life in drama class. I wasn't out. I wasn't ready to do that. But this was a chance for me to play and explore an identity that I didn't understand yet, that I couldn't embody yet, because it “wasn't me” yet. Also, the lack of nuance implies that playing a Chinese immigrant is fine, when that experience is going to be completely different from my experience as someone who was born and raised in Canada. Yet, somehow playing white characters is neutral. I struggle with the lack of nuance and intersectionality in this discussion because once you drill down the rules become untenably strict. We are putting ourselves in boxes deeper and deeper and deeper instead of thinking about intent and consequence. 

When we ask, or allow kids to play characters that aren't themselves, the intent is for them to learn to understand - to try to empathize and understand an experience that is completely different from theirs. At the same time, we should also ask what is different from them and this other character? Why do they think they could never fully understand who this person is and what this experience is? That's also part of the learning. We say all the time that stories about people of colour are universal, and yet students are told they cannot play those characters because they are too specific. Students should be allowed to try to tell stories and through those stories understand other people better. Those stories will never perfectly align with ours. But what's the consequence when we say that they cannot play these other roles? The consequence is Eurocentrism. Heteronormativity. The consequence is the centering of dominant culture as ‘normal’.

Rochelle: I agree with Stephen completely when it comes to the harm of making whiteness the center. Of making whiteness the default. But I ask the drama specialists here in the room - do the conditions change when you're experimenting and playing with characters that are not of your ethnicity, or not your experience, in a closed classroom, versus casting on stage for a production?

Brooke: Yes, I say the short answer is yes, it does. Because it's that intent and consequence, right? Like, the intent of what you do in your classroom for the purpose of learning is hugely different than, perhaps, taking a part away from a working actor or misrepresenting to a wider audience that might not be privy to those conversations and all of that. 

Stephen: I would absolutely say that I agree with that, because in a closed classroom, the intent is to learn. On a stage, the intent is to perform for an audience. They weren't part of the audience and didn't get to see the entire rehearsal process, and they're not part of that whole experience of learning, if it was in a classroom.

Kim: I would just add a caveat that we're assuming that the teacher doing that work in the classroom is having those conversations with students, and maybe they're not. I've had conversations where I say, “This play features characters with backgrounds we don't necessarily have in the room. How do we feel as a group about doing that scene?” You can have those conversations in the classroom, and that's great, but I'm not sure all drama teachers are confident about having those conversations. And so I think part of it is about how we help teachers, because the alternative is they may cause harm or not do it at all. And that centres whiteness, as Rochelle and Stephen have pointed out.

Courageous conversations, relationships, and empathy

Jessie, Q2: What supports are needed to move educators and students along the continuum of awareness, knowledge, and application concerning appropriation and diversity in the context of the classroom?

Rochelle: It's courageous conversations. I don't like to use the word sensitive. They're courageous. How do we set up the conditions for these? For these experiences and conversations to flourish in a way that doesn't cause harm or re-traumatize students? The first thing is sharing the importance of setting up community agreements that can be co-constructed with your students. Taking a co-learning stance with your students when you're having conversations about inequity and oppression. Students need to understand, to trust the intent, but to name the impact. Teachers don’t go into the classroom intending to cause harm, but there's always a misstep that can happen. How do we allow our students to name the impact without attacking the person who said it? How do we give them the skills and the phrases to express the harms and minimize damage to relationships while also embracing discomfort, and to expect and accept non-closure? We're not solving the problems of colonialism in the half hour class, or addressing racism and nipping it in the bud within a semester. Understanding that more wounds may be opened than healed in drama exploration is important to name for students. And that non-closure is part of equity work. The big thing I want to focus on is to accept that we work and live in spaces with inequitable dynamics. For example, someone's race and intersectionalities may make them more vulnerable in spaces when we're asking them to share lived experiences. So, my question to teachers is, what does vulnerability and courage look like when you are already part of a community that is vulnerable? For your Black students, for your 2SLGBTQ students, for your students who are living in the margins because they were put there. When we ask them to risk more, we’re setting up more inequity in the classroom. Not all groups move in a space that is equal. Some people are asked to give up more of themselves than others and that ends up re-traumatizing them.

How do you manage content warnings and triggers with your students in class? Do they have access and choice to materials that won't re-traumatize them? So, you're giving them a variety of themes. Is there a right to pass or a right to engage with material that feels safer? And is there a process for them to advocate for that, with you, the teacher, in a confidential way? And do you have a transition activity in place to de-role? To shake off the intense character work that might be happening in a class so they can exit the drama room with a healthier mindset?

Brooke: One of the things that I think we really need, and I think my answer to this question speaks to where my frame of mind right now with our current broken system. We need an [arts] curriculum refresh. I think there were lots of great things about the curriculum when it came out, but it's just super dated, and I think we know more, and we're in a different place as drama practitioners and as people and as a society. I would love to see some of these things actually make it into the curriculum, right? This stuff around dealing with content and de-role-ing. I would love to see that actually built into our curriculum because I feel right now, as a new teacher, where do you go? I think teachers are really stuck, because we have a dated curriculum, and they don't want to get things wrong, So they either just keep doing what they've always been doing, or they don't do anything. There is real censorship and pushback in terms of what teachers are told we can and cannot address in the classroom, period, let alone through drama. And so, I think the larger social-political piece of what's going on in teaching and what's going on in the world right now cannot be ignored. I'd love to see more of that identity-affirming stuff in the curriculum.

Stephen: Right now, we live in a climate in which empathy is seen as being woke, or weak, or dangerous, or problematic. As soon as empathy is under attack, all of the arts, most especially drama, which requires a great deal of empathy, is going to be stifled, and then we are no longer teaching drama, we're teaching performance. [With] culturally responsive practice, the big thing is your relationship with the students. I think the difficulty of decolonizing is that we really need to change our mindsets as teachers. We are not the center of all knowledge. We are fellow investigators. We are all learning together. And that's difficult for many teachers - to surrender that power and that position within that room, to allow students to question us, to allow them to call us out when we're wrong, when they think we're wrong. And acknowledging when we're wrong. And that accountability matters in our relationships, and then how can we be vulnerable? I feel like Rochelle's talking about this accountability, this ability to be, like, “I don't know. I don't understand this. We're all figuring it out together. Thank you for putting that out to me.” And I think that's the element missing within our teaching practice is this ability to be accountable and to recognize that we are not the fountain of all knowledge. 

Rochelle: Drama to me, is the antithesis to the banking model that Freire talks about, right? We have to really lean into that engaged pedagogy, and that means knowing our students, like, really knowing them. So, you don't have as many question marks where you're like, what play should I introduce to them? Or what monologue should I give them access to? What type of devised theatre should we be engaging with? Because you already know what your kids will connect to, because you've had those conversations. Having a syllabus of drama lessons or texts that you want them to engage with before you've met them is problematic. You can have ideas of what you want to do, but until you've met them and seen them and talked to them and done all the drama games and built that sense of community, can you really decide what sort of texts you can introduce to the class that will not put everyone so much at risk? To be vulnerable and to have courage, and to play.

Fictional framing and leading with curiosity

Jessie, Q3: How do teachers or students preserve boundaries within this type of work, and how do we use our own positionality to cultivate caring, safe, brave spaces to approach this work?

Kim: I'm just thinking about working with lived experience and the idea of a fictional frame. If we're working with lived experience, how do we use role as a distancing technique to make it feel safe for students? I think there still is a lot of benefit in doing that, because in my experience, real lived experiences kind of bleed through. I'm really interested in how lived experience doesn't need to be realistic in theatre– it can be played with, fictionalized, and exaggerated, and by looking at each other's stories, we may recognize our own. 

Brooke: Could there be something in this in-between that students pickup that might resonate with them? And I think, Kim, what you were saying about when students see things in other people's performance that really resonate with them, I think that's so powerful. And I guess the tension for me, and the thing that I'm still really struggling with is the piece that Stephen was talking a little bit about earlier about empathy. There is tremendous potential to develop empathy through drama, and to have students see parts of themselves and other people, or feel camaraderie with other people, or get a glimpse into the window of someone else's experience. But the tension that I always have in my practice is I don't want anybody walking away from it thinking they know what it's like to be that other person, and that's the harmful stuff that I've really seen or done myself. I guess it goes back to what supports do we need so that teachers can have these amazing conversations with students to say, we’re using role as a window in, and it's not “you've done the runaway drama, you now know what it's like to be a runaway.” I think it's hard to find that balance, and I think people are afraid of it, and I think people don't know how to have those conversations. How can we have those moments of real recognition and not walk away feeling like “now I know what it's like to have that experience,” when obviously that's never truly fully possible.

Stephen: Empathy is important, but not just because we are arrogant enough to believe we can understand what it's like to be someone else, but to be curious. “Don't be judgmental, be curious.” My experience with trauma and traumatized people [has taught me] it's so easy to judge. “Why? What kind of person would do these things? Why would they make these choices?” It's only after taking a decade learning about trauma to truly understand people don't want to do horrible things. They don't want to be that person, but their experiences have literally changed their brains, so they react in a specific way when they are not able to be centered and calm and feel safe. And most people will never understand those things, because they will never have that experience of your brain being transformed like that, that one’s reactions aren't something that can be controlled in the same way that other people can. I think that's the big thing - recognizing the why instead of just judging people, judging the situation, or thinking that you can know. There has to be a reason, and so it’s about being curious about it and recognizing that we will probably never fully understand the reason.

Diverse identities in the classroom: The spotlight of representation and avoiding the single story

Jessie, Q4: What concerns recur in your thinking about navigating diversity in the classroom? 

Rochelle: I think with drama, it's so easy for kids to fall victim to thinking that an entry point is a window, and it can be the only story, the danger of a single story, or treating one group like a monolith.

Stephen: Yeah, which comes back to respecting the drama room, right? Respecting what happens there, the investigation, the play. The risk-taking that happens in a drama room, and do students understand that and recognize that is sacred. Like, it shouldn't be moved out of that space, right?

Rochelle: But, I just wanted to acknowledge that teachers need to acknowledge there is no gray area when it comes to acknowledging your positionality, because no decision that we make in the classroom is neutral. We want to think that we're being neutral beings in there, but I believe that we teach who we are. So, how do your social identities, your experiences, your beliefs, your biases, infiltrate your practice and the resources that you provide to your students? And, you know, I'll pose this last question of, are you willing to exercise the cultural humility, which we talked about before? To admit what topics make you uncomfortable, and therefore you never address in the classroom? Or are you able to unlearn the colonial mindset that restricts the type of texts you expose your students to? So I'll just put that out there.

Stephen: A systemic barrier is the need for more diversity among teaching staff. And more diversity, particularly [with] drama teachers. I devised a play about racial gaslighting, and I asked the students of colour involved how they would have felt if it was a white teacher doing this project with them. They said they wouldn't have felt as comfortable because they would have had to be more careful to make sure the teacher was on their side before they could say any of the things that they actually believed. Whereas with me [a teacher of colour], they know I know what it's like, and I’m doing this play, so therefore I obviously understand what it's like. Diversity in a school and in the classroom is so important because it allows kids to feel like they have other people who will understand their experience, especially when we're having these kinds of conversations. You have one kid of colour in a room full of white kids and a white teacher and then a majority white staff in a school, it's going to be much more difficult for that student to speak about their actual experiences and not feel like they have to represent all people of colour. And I don't think that's solvable. But I think that's an important thing to recognize that when you are a minority you want to speak about it, but at the same time, it is a lot of emotional labour because you often feel alone.

Rochelle: I will agree with you that the stakes are higher for kids who are the person of colour in the room, because, again, people look at them like, the whole energy shifts. They feel that heat, and they feel that pressure to represent an entire group of people. They may not even know their own histories, and we're just assuming that they do. Hey, what are your thoughts on this? Like, that's not my culture. The problem of representation in education is huge. Like, how do you solve it? I'm working really closely with OISE’s Black Future Educator Pathways program, trying to increase Black mentorship for Black teachers. But, you know, when I see a student in my classroom, I'm like, “You! You would be a great teacher!” We have to tap them. They have to see themselves in this profession, or else they won't even try it. And that goes for  the arts as well, “you would be fantastic in drama! You would be fantastic in lighting!” … they don't know what they don't know, because they're not surrounded in those circles.

But what we can do as the teachers in the room is to let students see themselves in this space, let them know that they belong and tap those who we feel could be in the next generation of drama teachers and dance teachers and arts teachers, and just teachers in general. In twenty five years of schooling in Toronto, I had two Black teachers. And so I didn't go into education thinking, I'm going to be a mirror, it was just a calling to me. But twenty years in, I see what it means. I see that my presence does have an impact. I see that I can do a little bit more things in drama than a teacher who's white just can't. That's what Stephen said, we can push the boundaries because we have a lived experience that kids can connect with, especially in a room that is more ethnically and culturally diverse. So the drama, the play I get to do with those students is a little bit more authentic, and that there isn't that risk of appropriation.

We look forward to engaging in further conversation and will carry on this discussion in a panel discussion at the Children, Youth, and Performance Conference hosted by York University and the Young People's Theatre in Toronto on July 18th and 19th, 2026. 

Works Cited

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Oak Knoll School monograph, Summit, NJ. https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/curriculum-as-window-and-mirror

Recommended reading and resources

Council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators. (2026). Addressing Oppressions through 

Drama and Dance. https://www.code.on.ca/resource/addressing-oppressions-through-drama-and-dance

* This comprehensive resource contains reading and lesson plans for K-12. 

hooks, b. (1994). Engaged pedagogy. In Teaching to transgress: Education 

as the practice of freedom. Routledge. 

Holyoke, E., & Fletcher, L. (2024). Cultivating Diverse Environmental 

Children’s Picturebooks Using Rudine Sim Bishop’s Framework for Multicultural Texts. The Reading Teacher, 

78(1), 46–55. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2346

McNair, J. C., & Edwards, P. A. (2021). The Lasting Legacy of Rudine Sims Bishop: Mirrors, Windows, Sliding Glass    

     Doors, and More. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 202-212. 

     https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211028256 (Original work published 2021)