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Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the Real. By Kathleen Gallagher. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014; pp. 320.
In Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the Real, Kathleen Gallagher presents a five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study examining the nature of student engagement in urban schools and theatre classrooms. Currently a professor and the Canada Research Chair in Theatre, Youth, and Research in Urban Schools at the University of Toronto, Gallagher amplifies the lived experiences of high school students and drama teachers, framing their wisdom with her own expertise as a researcher and pedagogue.
Why Theatre Matters is most immediately applicable to K-12 drama teachers in urban school contexts; however, Gallagher's reflections and analysis invite educators in all disciplines and contexts to understand how theatre creates and maintains spaces of engaged learning for marginalized youth. The invitation, however, is not a simple one; this expansive text is full of theses and tangents loosely organized into six chapters, requiring the reader to use personal relevancy to navigate the research. However, even without experience in a K-12 drama classroom, I found Why Theatre Matters consistently useful, inspiring, and enlightening; I finally hid my highlighter to prevent each page from saturation in fluorescent ink.
In chapter 1, "The Complexity of People, Conversation, and Space as Data," Gallagher describes the high schools in the multi-site ethnographic study, including three international (India, Taiwan, United States) and two local (Toronto) schools. In chapter...