The Educational Forum

ISSN: 0013-1725 (Print) 1938-8098 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utef20

Pairing Verbatim Theatre and Theatre of the

Oppressed to Provoke Startling Empathy

Pamela Baer, Jenny Salisbury & Tara Goldstein

To cite this article: Pamela Baer, Jenny Salisbury & Tara Goldstein (2019) Pairing Verbatim
Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed to Provoke Startling Empathy, The Educational Forum, 83:4,
418-431, DOI: 10.1080/00131725.2019.1626961

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2019.1626961

Published online: 03 Sep 2019.

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 The Educational Forum, 83: 418–431, 2019
Copyright © Kappa Delta Pi
ISSN: 0013-1725 print/1938-8098 online
DOI: 10.1080/00131725.2019.1626961

THE EDUCATIONAL Pairing Verbatim Theatre

FORUM and Theatre of the
Oppressed to Provoke
Startling Empathy
Pamela Baer
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE),
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Jenny Salisbury
Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies,
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Tara Goldstein
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE),
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Abstract

In this article, we reflect on the way our verbatim theatre script Out at School was
paired with Theatre of the Oppressed work in an undergraduate applied theatre
class. Through an engagement with the complex lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
trans, and queer (LGBTQ) families at school, students moved from a response of
what Jenny Salisbury calls “startling empathy” to a discussion of the ways they
might act to challenge heteronormativity and cis-sexism in school.

Key words: anti-oppression education, applied theatre, documentary theatre,

Image Theatre, LGBTQ families, performed ethnography, research-informed
theatre, startling empathy, Theatre of the Oppressed, verbatim theatre.

In this article, we reflect on the way that “startling empathy” (Goldstein, Salisbury,
Hicks, et al., 2018) as a form of liberatory praxis can engage students’ emotions and provoke
critical reflection and action. To do so we will discuss the way that one of our team members
and authors, Pam Baer, paired a reading of our verbatim theatre piece called Out at School
(Goldstein, Salisbury, & Baer, 2018) with Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in her under-
graduate applied theatre course. We begin by describing the play Out at School and some

Address correspondence to Pamela Baer, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

(OISE), University of Toronto, 192 Oakmount Rd., Toronto, ON M6P 2M9, Canada.
E-mail: pamela.baer@mail.utoronto.ca
 Startling Empathy
of the research findings that have fed into our creation of the play. Then we discuss Jenny
Salisbury’s notion of startling empathy (Goldstein et al., 2018) and how it can create a dia-
logic encounter between artists and audiences. Finally, we describe how Pam added Theatre
of the Oppressed activities to her students’ reading of Out at School to extend the experience
of startling empathy toward action. The article concludes with some thoughts on the rela-
tionship between startling empathy and working toward change in school.

Out at School and Verbatim Theatre

Out at School is a work-in-progress, a verbatim play with original songs and visual
images created to share experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ)
families in Ontario schools. We use the initialism LGBTQ with the intention of including
people who identify as transgender, transsexual, Two-Spirit, questioning, intersex, asexual,
ally, pansexual, agender, gender queer, gender variant, and/or pangender. We understand
the names people use to describe their gender and sexual identities are always evolving
and that the most important thing is to be respectful and to use names that people prefer.
Out at School is a work-in-progress based on current research and community involvement.
Pam believed it to be a rich source to bring to her first-year applied theatre students. It is
currently based on findings from a selection of 36 video interviews the team undertook with
LGBTQ families about their experiences in the Ontario public school system. The play is
part of a research project entitled LGBTQ Families Speak Out and excerpts from each of the
interviews we have conducted have been uploaded onto our website, www.lgbtqfamilies-
speakout.ca. The families we interviewed for the project reside in five different cities in
Ontario, Canada, as well as in the suburbs and rural communities that surround them. Our
goal was to interview LGBTQ families who identify in a variety of ways. We interviewed
parents who themselves identified as lesbian, butch, gay, queer, transgender, and Two-Spirit.
Some parents also identified as White, others identified as Black, Chicana, Indigenous,
Filipina, and South Asian. Findings from these interviews revealed a variety of important
issues for teachers and school administrators to consider. For example,

• Despite the passing of the Ontario Safe School Act in 2012, several LGBTQ families
in communities both within and outside of the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury,
London, and St. Thomas report their schools are still not addressing incidents of
homophobic and transphobic bullying;
• One family has chosen to homeschool their transgender child until they find a safer
school for them;
• While many (but not all) schools discussed in the interviews have Gay Straight
Alliances, participate in Pink Shirt Day (an annual day to raise awareness about
bullying), and have books about LGBTQ families in their classrooms, only one school
that was discussed in the 36 interviews has created and delivered LGBTQ-positive
classroom curriculum;
• Multiple and simultaneous identities that LGBTQ families bring to school can impact
their experiences at school. For example,
º a Chicana lesbian mother talked about how her masculine gender performance
outed her 4-year-old daughter as a child from a LGBTQ family;

The Educational Forum • Volume 83 • 2019 • 419

Baer et al.

º a Black parent talked about the racial marginalisation her daughter was experi-
encing at school and how her daughter had asked her not to come out at school
because she was worried about being further marginalised;
º a White Catholic lesbian mother, working as a teacher in a Catholic secondary
high school, discussed the preparation that had been undertaken with her daugh-
ter’s religion teacher to ensure her daughter would not feel marginalised by
having two mothers;
º two families with members who identify as Indigenous and Two-Spirit talked
about how the lack of teacher knowledge in the legacy of residential schooling
and other current Indigenous issues alienates their children and requires them
as parents to teach this history at home.
Families also had some advice for teachers and school administrators. For example,

• one recurring piece of advice from parents and students for teachers was to “just
listen” to what students and families tell teachers about their lives. Listening to the
ways that students talk about their gender identities was identified as particularly
important. Several families wanted teachers to know that
º gender is fluid;
º “there are no rules” to gender identity (Reiff Hill & Mays, 2013, p. 13);
º sometimes students’ gender identities change;
º sometimes students may shift between different pronouns;
º teachers need to provide students with the space to try on different identities
without facing judgment.
These are some of the findings we present in the play, Out at School.

The verbatim monologues in Out at School draw on the practice of verbatim theatre,
which has roots as far back as the drama of late 18th-century Germany (Garde, Mumford,
& Wake, 2010). The term “verbatim” refers to the origins of the words spoken in the mono-
logues. In a verbatim monologue, the words of people who are interviewed are transcribed,
edited, arranged, and re-contextualized so that they can be performed on stage by actors
(Hammond & Steward, 2008, p. 9). The decision to turn our interview research into verbatim
monologues was made by the research project’s principal investigator, Tara Goldstein (the
third author). Over the past 19 years, Tara has developed several performed ethnographies,
which she uses to support and enrich the work she does with teachers and school admin-
istrators in preparing them to work in diverse classrooms across Canada and internationally
(Goldstein, 2003, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2019). Tara’s body of work sits among the work of inter-
national researchers and artists who use performance as a way to analyse and disseminate
research findings (e.g., Gray, 2011, 2017; Jackson, 2015; Kaufman & the Members of the
Tectonic Theater, 2001; Reynolds, 1990) .

One reason researchers and artists are drawn to verbatim theatre is because they want to
share stories from marginalised communities and invite audiences to bear witness to testimonies
they might not otherwise hear or encounter. This bearing witness is a naming of the world by

420 • The Educational Forum • Volume 83 • 2019

 Startling Empathy
both artists and audiences tied to the belief that by naming the world we are coming to know
the world and therefore can work toward changing it. This is a process Freire (1996, p. 17) referred
to as “conscientization.” In the last 2 years, Out at School has been presented at education
conferences, a middle school, and in graduate education classes at Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education to invite teachers and school administrators to learn about a variety of issues
facing LGBTQ families and students at school. As discussed below, invitations to bear witness
are not simple. Monologues created from interview stories shared by LGBTQ families are
often characterised by ambiguity and messiness. Salverson (2008) wrote, “theatre is a danger-
ous witness, challenged with multiple responsibilities of integrity, imagination, inspiration
and craft” (p. 245). However, the opportunity for audiences to engage with testimony from
communities they do not know can be very important because through critical consciousness-
raising it is possible that artists and audiences can collectively work toward change. For
example, Tara has found that many teachers and school administrators she has worked with
over the years claim to have never spoken with LGBTQ families and have very little under-
standing of the issues they face in school. The overall goal of Out at School is to provide audi-
ences of teachers, teacher candidates, and administrators with the opportunity to hear
testimony from LGBTQ families and then reflect on their own school practices. Freire (1996)
believed that: “Cultural action is always a systematic and deliberate form of action which
operates upon the social structure, either with the objective of preserving that structure or of
transforming it” (p. 160). In the case of Out at School it is our hope the cultural action of work-
ing with testimony from LGBTQ families about their experiences at school will lead educators
to create more inclusive spaces for LGBTQ children, youth, and families at school. To be
specific, by reading the script or watching a performance of Out at School, we hope audiences
will examine their taken-for-granted assumptions, as well as their ideas and emotional beliefs
around family, gender, and sexuality. Emotional beliefs are understandings that feel “true” to
an individual as a result of personal memories, ideas, hurts, hopes, and experiences (Hicks,
2017a). Un-interrogated, these emotional beliefs can negatively influence the ways that people
interact with and/or interpret the actions and intentions of others.

To help the research team explore what it might mean to invite audiences to connect
with and reflect on their ideas and emotional beliefs, team member and co-author Jenny
Salisbury introduced us to the ideas of theatre revolutionary Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was part
of a 20th-century movement that broke away from traditional dramatic performance that
capitalised on emotional equivalency, assuming that the way one person feels an emotion
is the way everyone feels that emotion. In his now famous passage on the experiences of
audiences, Brecht (1964) suggested that in order to provoke social change, theatre must
move spectators from a space of passive empathy to startling revelation:

The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too—Just like
me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change—The sufferings of this man appall me,
because they are inescapable—That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing
in the world. […]

The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it—That’s not the way—That’s
extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop—The sufferings of this man appall me,
because they are unnecessary—That’s great art: nothing obvious in it. (p. 71)

The Educational Forum • Volume 83 • 2019 • 421

Baer et al.
Jenny proposed that Out at School, with its verbatim monologues, images, and song,
works to find a space between passive empathy and startling revelation: “startling empathy.”
The idea of startling empathy has become both an aspiration and a framework through
which we understand the goal of Out at School. We endeavour to create performance
moments where our audiences might be startled and awakened by the empathy they are
experiencing. This understanding of empathy is dialogic, co-intentional, and hopes to engage
audiences toward liberatory praxis through informed emotional action (Freire, 1996). In the
next section, Jenny sets the groundwork for a discussion of startling empathy with a review
of the origins of the idea of empathy.

Origins of Empathy
Empathy holds a deeply conflicted theoretical space in performance writing. The work
empathy does in performance is fluid and often met with suspicion. It is not a clear or
delineated space; empathy is closely related to sympathy, affect, intuition, and sentiment.
Because of this, it is a slippery term, and yet our research team finds it useful because of its
relationship to action, effort, and understanding.

With Brecht’s 1964 dismissal of empathy (noted above) as a lazy theatre goal, “empathy”
came to represent all that was cheap and suspect in the modern, commercial theatre. It was
used to dismiss White, middle-class audiences as sentimental and unsophisticated, yearning
for art that made them laugh or cry, rather than think. Lehmann (2006) and postdramatic
theatre scholarship continues the Brechtian resistance to empathy, arguing that all dramatic,
or story/fable/narrative-based performance, calls for the inconsequential experience of
“empathy, sympathy, commiseration, and compassion with the simulated fate of the simulate
figure embodied by the actor” (p. 118). Postdramatic theatre warns that in our over-mediated
experience, all emotionally charged storytelling becomes cheap or reiterative to the point
of useless exhaustion. Therefore, any project claiming goals of social change through empa-
thy is immediately suspect through Brechtian and postdramatic lenses.

Contemporary arguments against empathy equate empathy with colonialism, false pos-
session, or sentimental short cuts that erase complex, contextual experience. For a spectator
to imagine that they feel the same way as a character holds the potential to collapse significant
differences between self and other. This may allow the consumptive body of the spectator
to colonise the exposed subject of the performed character. This is a particular risk in per-
formed ethnographies that use verbatim text, for the text is built from a living individual’s
testimony, and that individual is physically absent in the moment of performance.

This concern is deeply considered by Lather (2009) who critiqued the violence of “impe-
rial sameness,” calling for a kind of knowledge creation based on “interpretation, interrup-
tion, and mutuality” (p. 17). She provokes readers to write against empathy, “to trouble the
possibilities of understanding as premised on structures that all people share” (p. 19). Lather
writes against a false settling of ideas and a rush to conclusions and generalisation, insisting
that difficulties should remain difficult, and the unknowable be left as such, rather than
being violently reduced until it is falsely understandable. For Lather, the violence of empathy
is the demand that the other be knowable, and that “I feel” collapses into “I understand” or
“I know.”

422 • The Educational Forum • Volume 83 • 2019

 Startling Empathy
Dolan (2005), in her work Utopia in Performance, counters this, arguing that the absences
within verbatim theatre are made visible through performance. Perhaps in an unsophisti-
cated spectator there is a real risk of collapsing the space between self and other and erasing
the individual (the character) into the majority (the audiences). However, within education
and Theatre of the Oppressed circles, areas that often have anti-oppression goals based on
consciousness raising and truth-telling, the emotions and the intellect of the student or the
spectator are deeply valued and considered. Here, empathy frameworks, as a reflexive
praxis, can be championed and charged with both ethical power and artistic acumen.

Dolan (2005) came to the defence of the feelings of the spectator. Acknowledging that
it is easy to dismiss the feminising space of emotion, Dolan persisted, defending the space
performance creates within spectators as “fragile, beautiful potential of what we can hold
in our hearts for just a moment” (p. 170). She wrote, “to share the complexity of hope in the
presence of absence and know that those around me, too, are moved, keeps me returning
to the theatre” (p. 170). Taking up her argument, our research team believes it is unwise to
dismiss the meaning-making potential of empathy, for the emotion of artist researchers,
audiences, and students opens up real potential for liberatory work. Freire (1996) stated
that: “Reflection—true reflection—leads to action” (p. 48). It is through an emotional reflec-
tion that empathy can startle audiences toward new ways of being and doing, of action. If
we, in our case, want to improve the lives of LGBTQ families in Ontario schools through a
wider understanding of their experience, it is precisely in these fragile spaces of complexity
where spectators can shift their worldview, expanding on already existing knowledge to
include another perspective. This work asks spectators to imagine the world they live in
anew, not as a rehearsal for a future revolution (Boal, 1979) but as a present concern that
needs immediate action. This empathetic reflection and emotional action is the liberatory
praxis of startling empathy.

From Empathy to Startling Empathy

It is important to note that in most investigations of empathy in theatre, the labour
of empathy has been placed solely on the spectator. Even in Theatre of the Oppressed
the labour to create change, be it emotional, physical, or cognitive, belongs predomi-
nantly to the spect-actor. What we argue here is that the labour of empathy in Out at
School is first done by the artist researchers who develop the verbatim theatre piece,
opening up useful material for students to extend their experience of empathy to action.
We differentiate between “affective empathy,” an undisciplined, immediate reaction to
the emotions of others or the feeling of another’s feelings, and “cognitive empathy,” the
skill of imagining another’s reality and emotional landscape complexly. As Cummings
(2016) noted, cognitive labour is “the cognitive process of imagining the other’s experi-
ence and emotional state and how it impacts her experience and perspective on the
world, as well as comparing what we assess intellectually to what we are sensing affec-
tively” (p. 23).

Our Out at School team has thought deeply about our goals and experience of sharing
the play in relation to Lather’s (2009) anti-colonialism critique. We have asked: “Are we
being mindful enough of the anti-oppressive and queer space our work is founded on, when
discussing the role of empathy in Out at School?” To this end, the LGBTQ Families Speak

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Baer et al.
Out team gathered on February 2, 2018, to engage with this question. In this discussion,
Tara reflected on the presentation of Out at School at a teacher conference earlier that year,
and in particular, the audiences’ responses to the song “Pushing the Envelope,” a song
composed for and performed during Out at School by team member Kate Reid. Tara spoke
about the tears provoked by the song and the play for many of the spectators and the LGBTQ
Families Speak Out presenters. Encouraged by Lather’s (2009, p. 211) “validity of tears,”
we spoke further about this reaction during our team meeting. Tara said she thought it was
because the queer and allied teachers in the audience were feeling “expected” (Hicks, 2017b,
p. 1), seen, heard and understood through Kate’s song. The audience members were not
simply empathising with Kate. Her song, “Pushing the Envelope,” and its performance
were empathising with the spectators, singing out the struggle of LGBTQ people and allies
in the room. From there, our team spoke about empathy being dialogic and co-intentional,
a reciprocal exchange between artist researchers and audiences. The tears that Kate’s song
and performance provoked demonstrated that, as an artist research team, we had heard
and understood the experiences of LGBTQ families in school. The audiences’ responses let
us know, “yes, you have seen me and my community and understood.”

The idea of a dialogical exchange between audiences and creators is a key feature of
startling empathy, which can be described as fragmented moments of recognition and under-
standing, prompted by an aesthetic intervention into the complex life of another. Startling
empathy begins with the specific work done by artist researchers to demonstrate through
their creative work that they have understood the testimony grounding the verbatim theatre
piece. That understanding and knowing can then be further extended to audiences, who
may have similar experiences or positions. Audience members may then reciprocate in
several ways.

• They may validate the work of the play by agreeing and feeling understood and
seen. This validation may come through tears but also laughter, nods, or internal
reactions.
• They may disagree, knowing that their lived experience contradicts the demonstra-
tion of the performance.
• They may find themselves empathising with the testimony and the artistic responses,
experiencing feelings along with the characters and reflections presented in the ver-
batim theatre piece.
• They may learn something new by hearing a perspective they had never before
heard.

All of these reactions, we believe, are part of the dialogue of startling empathy, the
labour of imagining and understanding, in this specific case, the lives of LGBTQ families
in Ontario schools. Through this labour the groundwork is set to extend audience par-
ticipation from feeling as a liberatory praxis of naming our worlds into embodied action
of changing our worlds. The next question that arose for the team was: “How can we
build from the validating or horizon-expanding emotional experience of witnessing Out
at School, to the concrete work of improving the experiences of LGBTQ families in
school?”

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 Startling Empathy

Layering Out at School With Theatre of the Oppressed

Boal’s (2002) Theatre of the Oppressed provided a space for Pam to explore this ques-
tion with a group of students at Brock University in a course entitled, Creative Play for
Education and Development. It is a first-year course that introduces students to the theories
and practices of drama in education and applied theatre. It is a required course for all stu-
dents in the Department of Dramatic Arts and an elective course open to students in other
areas of the university. In practice, this means that often students register for the course
from the concurrent education programme, the child and youth studies programme, and
many others. The course is a 4-hour studio class and much of the work is experiential learn-
ing—creating, playing, and learning through action. Students are expected to participate in
weekly dramas and activities and this studio-based work accompanies the theoretical read-
ings assigned to students. In taking up Documentary Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed
as key practices of applied theatre (Prendergast, & Saxton, 2016), the Out at School script
was used as an exemplar. The class began by doing a collective reading of the monologues.
Students took turns reading out loud while also engaging with the visual images created
by benjamin lee hicks and the songs written by Kate Reid. The students’ reactions to the
work affirmed the emotional labour of the artistic team that created the play. Out LGBTQ
students expressed a recognition and validation of their experiences through the stories
they heard, while other students revealed new awareness—a startling empathy—about the
heteronormativity and cis-sexism that exists in our public school system. For many students,
their assumptions about the world they live in and the spaces they occupy had been upended
through their co-intentional dialogue with the script. Their experience of startling empathy
created an emotional shift and a movement toward a liberatory praxis. Students spent time
reflecting on their own experiences as they connected to the themes and ideas in the script.
This reflective engagement was more than simply identifying their reactions to the play. It
involved discussing how the emotional layers and intensities present in the monologues,
visual images, and songs reached out beyond the framing of the play and demanded that
students engage in the labour of making sense of their empathetic responses.

Drawing on the work of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (1979), and working
specifically with Image Theatre techniques and activities (Boal, 2002), students got into
small groups and identified one injustice from the script by creating a tableau image of that
injustice. Using this technique, students were able to explore a specific moment of oppres-
sion through an embodied sculpture. Boal (1979) believed that Image Theatre has an
“extraordinary ability for making thought visible. This happens because the use of the lan-
guage idiom is avoided” (pp. 137–138, emphasis in original). Image Theatre can be a very
powerful way of engaging in theatrical expression because a simple embodied depiction or
image provides a layered analysis of a situation, moment, or idea. Boal (2002) explained
embodied imagery as emotional analysis when he said:

Dealing with images we should not try to “understand” the meaning of each image,
to apprehend its precise meaning, but to feel those images, to let our memories and
imaginations wander: the meaning of the image is the image itself. All images are
surfaces and, as such, they reflect what is projected on it. As objects reflect the light
that strikes them, so images in an organized ensemble reflect the emotions of the
observer, her ideas, memories, imagination, desires … (p. 175)

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Baer et al.
With this embodied and relational understanding of image-based language, students
were encouraged to use their bodies to explore the incident through abstract imagery, but
as this was still early in the semester, and many of the students did not have a theatre back-
ground, most groups created a literal interpretation of the event in the script. This did not
limit the ability for the image to be projected and understood through multiple emotional
engagements, but it did present a direct connection to a single story from the script. For
example, in response to the Out at School monologue excerpt below, which the LGBTQ
Families Speak Out team created from an interview with a participant named Dawn, one
group of students created a sculpture that had a teacher and two lines of students who held
their genitals to identify that they were lined up according to gender. Included in that
sculpture was one student who was left looking confused about which line to join. Here is
an excerpt from the monologue on which this sculpture was based:

DAWN: I was on a field trip and it’s like okay, “Boys line up here and girls line up
here” and then my child was, like, literally standing in between the two lines with
this frantic look, and then stood in the girls’ line. … [T]his was the first year of her
transition, when she was only six, and everyone kinda laughed, like, they didn’t
laugh at her, but they laughed thinking that she was just being funny. But I think
that’s a difficult situation because not everybody identifies as a boy or a girl, so divide
people in groups in different ways. … [A]lso talk about these things, have the books
in the classroom. … [S]omebody may feel safe talking to you if you make a safe envi-
ronment. (Scene 9, When it’s unsafe for trans kids to be out)

Another sculpture included an embarrassed-looking student, visibly upset same-sex

parents, and a teacher sending home a permission slip to discuss “alternative families.”
This sculpture was created in response to the following Out at School monologue excerpts:

MARY: There was a letter that came home about, that you know, they would be dis-
cussing different sexualities and family and relational, relationship issues, and that
kind of thing, just to get our permission to proceed. And you know, my daughter like
a typical pubescent 12-year-old was like, “I don’t wanna talk about it! Just sign it! I
don’t wanna—you know” um, which was kind of funny (Scene 3, So Far So Good)

VICTORIA: You know, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of our children to set up

[Gay Straight Alliances] and do the work for the teachers. And we can’t depend on
individual wonderful teachers who still have to send home permission slips to talk
about us. We really need to create a space where LGBTQ people and families are nor-
malized. … (With increasing passion) That means that it’s talked about. It’s not that
thing that we don’t talk about. … It’s part of the curriculum, it’s part of the fabric
of, of the school, just like the straight families are. You know what I mean? … I think
there has to be some intentionality. (Scene 12, There has to be Some Intentionality)

Finally, a third sculpture a group of students created depicted a student coming home
from school to their two dads with only one Father’s Day card. This sculpture was an inter-
pretation of this scene from Out at School:

MICHAEL MANCINI: Mother’s Day and Father’s Day was really interesting
because early on, the teachers would feel they were supporting us by having our chil-

426 • The Educational Forum • Volume 83 • 2019

 Startling Empathy
dren make Mother’s Day presents for us. But our daughters have birth mothers and
they have a relationship with them.

ERNST HUPEL: We are in touch with their birth mothers. So, early on [our eldest
daughter] would go and say, “My teacher said I don’t have a mom, but I do, her
name is Heather.” So, you know, the teachers were doing it to actually support us
but after [our daughters] said, “No I actually have a mother” … they began to make
Mother’s Day cards for their birth mothers and we send the cards to them and yeah
so … We get double Father’s Day cards.

MICHAEL MANCINI: It’s a big day.

ERNST HUPEL: It is! It’s like Christmas here.

JESS SWANCE-SMITH: [Teachers should not] assume what a child’s family may
look like … take their word for it. I mean if they say they have multiple people in
their family, let them make those, you know, ten Mother’s Day cards that they need
to make. (Evan and Jess laugh). Or whatever, five Father’s Day cards because maybe
there’s, you know, … maybe an aunt or an uncle who’s like a father or a mother to
them (Scene 8, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day)

These examples are just a few of the images that students created in relation to scenes
from Out at School. They represent the kinds of interpretations of injustice that the student
groups first created with their embodied sculptures.

Pam’s students then created a second set of images in response to the question, “What
would this same scenario look like in an ideal world?” This question challenged students
to think through the problem they had presented, and invited them to imagine what our
world could look like without homophobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, and cis-sexism.
This second image was harder for students to create: it required them to think through the
situation in a new light, to move toward a vision of inclusion for LGBTQ + people. They no
longer were expected to simply recreate an injustice and to feel empathy for the protagonist
who had been wronged, but now they were expected to engage in creating a startling reality
by imagining new possibilities. This shifted the activity from one of reflection and response
to one of active possibilities: the labour required of students in coming to understand and
interpret the script was no longer only emotionally and intellectually driven, but it was also
positioned within their bodies. The answers were amazingly simple in nature. For example,
students proposed that schools have only one line for all students; others proposed there
should be no permission slips sent home asking permission to discuss LGBTQ families,
genders, and/or sexualities; still others suggested that students could create two cards for
Father’s Day. Through the arrival at new possibilities an opening was being created. That
opening was an embodied call for living differently and for schools that were inclusive and
supportive of diverse identities.

Finally, each group created a third transitional sculpture, this time guided by the ques-
tion, “What do we need to do to get from our current world (image 1) to the imagined ideal
(image 2)?” This was the most difficult of the three images because it was the most active:

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Baer et al.
the solutions that were outlined in the second set of sculptures as students’ imagined pos-
sibilities now had to become achievable goals and they had to find ways to take action in
order to create movement toward change. Students repeatedly brought up notions of parent
advocacy, education, communication, and empathy as pathways to change. Across all
groups, the students came to describe their transition images as working together to create
understanding, build resiliency, and facilitate dialogue. These ideas were grounded in the
real world: they were actions that students could actively engage in their own lives. Students
moved from a new understanding of the world based on the reading of the play, to under-
standing their role in changing that world. The activity continued as Pam and the student
groups presented the sculptures to the class, spoke characters’ inner monologues from
within the sculptures, brought the sculptures to life, built dialogue, and worked through
possible solutions to the injustices identified in the Out at School script. Pam and the students
explored the intentions, ideas, and motivation for all characters, which provided a deeper
insight into why these moments of injustice occur, how they impact individuals, and how
power dynamics play out in school settings. This process unsettled the binary identities of
an “oppressor” and an “oppressed.” Pam and the students situated the characters within
systemic understandings of homophobia, transphobia, and cis-sexism.

Pam’s use of Theatre of the Oppressed techniques initiated a conversation about anti-
oppression education, inclusive schooling practices, and the experiences of LGBTQ families.
While the initial reading of Out at School provoked startling empathy in the students, the
subsequent Image Theatre activities extended the revelatory and emotive work of the play
and positioned students’ bodies as active participants in the unfolding of the drama. This
process invited students to determine what might come next: to not only work through a
call for change, but also to imagine, concretely, what needs to change and how they (and
society) might go about doing that.

Limitations of Theatre of the Oppressed and Image Theatre

It is worth mentioning here that there were limitations to the dialogic and empathetic
space Pam created with Image Theatre. The solutions that came out of the transition images
the students created focussed on individual behaviour change, rather than addressing issues
of institutional or systemic oppression. This is a widespread criticism of Theatre of the
Oppressed and applied theatre in general (Prendergast & Saxton, 2016; Thompson, 2009),
and one that Pam brought up in class when she asked students to think about the context
in which these stories were told, read, repeated, and analysed. In a political moment when
transgender individuals are seeing their existence being questioned by government officials,
and LGBTQ identities are being systematically removed from formal curriculum documents
(Alphonso, 2018; Green, Benner, & Pear, 2018), to not position these conversations within
this larger context minimises the potential impact of activism through education, dialogue,
and advocacy. Thompson (2009) suggested that this type of applied theatre develops tactics
rather than strategies for change because it remains within a private realm of individual
stories, and that in order to create strategies of lasting change we need to include the sys-
temic context in artistic conversations. In this sense tactics create change on a personal level
and exist within a private sphere, while strategies deal with systemic change through public
dialogue and discourse. While we agree with Thompson, we also think it important to note
that, in this instance, those tactics did do something. Pam’s students were deeply moved

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by the work they did with Out at School: they were inspired to write about this work in their
assignments and to build upon it outside of the classroom. Students approached Pam indi-
vidually to ask about taking these conversations back to their families and their communities
in their countries of origin, which demonstrated that the work had moved them into action.
In a few hours, Pam and her students extended the individual experience of startling empa-
thy and began to move toward collective action. The possibilities for this action could be
endless, and those tactics and ideas about individual advocacy and behaviour change have
the potential to influence larger strategies for change as Out at School continues to engage
audiences across a number of different contexts.

Conclusion
Curating the stories of Out at School has been an active site of emotional labour for our
team as we work toward startling empathy with the belief that building critical conscious-
ness requires an empathetic engagement by both the creators of the play as well as the
audience to build toward effective liberatory praxis. The research findings outlined in the
opening section of this article indicate a wide variety of experiences LGBTQ families are
currently navigating in schools. Those experiences provide insight into what needs to change
in our schooling systems while also providing an opportunity to engage with beautiful and
unique stories of the individual people navigating those systems. In extending startling
empathy through Theatre of the Oppressed’s Image Theatre, Pam’s students were able to
engage their bodies as sites of possibility, by navigating, critiquing, and (re)imaging the
world in which they live. Through the stories they had been entrusted during their reading
of Out at School Pam’s students came to know themselves, their classmates, and their world
in a new light. They were first startled into empathy for the characters in the play, but they
then turned inward, coming to understand their own role in reproducing heteronormative
and cis-sexist spaces as students and teachers, before finally working toward imaging the
possibilities for a different future. Through this process their emotional and critical bodies
worked in unison, creating space for action, reflection, and empathy to build on one another
toward change. Creating change in school for LGBTQ families, children, and youth is the
reason why the team designed the research study and the reason why so many families
agreed to share stories about their lives in schools. It is exciting to witness how their stories
are being taken up by educators currently working in schools as well as the next generation
of educators who will bring new insights and practices to their relationships with children,
youth, and families.

Funding
Funding was provided by The Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

ORCID
Pamela Baer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5399-5038

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