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Listening to Children and Hearing Them too: Potency of Forum Theatre as Critical-Pedagogical Inquiry into Children's Views

Children’s views, the core of the international political and legal frameworks for children’s rights, and a fundamental requirement of research on childhood, are conventionally inquired into by predominantly language-based research methods such as questionnaires and interviews. These kinds of methods, in addition to approaching children not as research subjects – partners in research and experts on their own perspectives and unique life experiences – but as objects of diligent scientific examination (which is a paradox in itself considering that children’s voice is by definition an autonomy right), pose considerable obstacles to children with speech and language difficulties as well as cognitive disabilities. Therefore, if children in research are not only to be listened to but heard as well, new, more inclusive and more respectful research methods are to be developed and used. Utilizing the theoretical framework of critical pedagogy, the paper proposes forum theatre as a tool of inquiry into children’s views and discusses forum theatre as a participatory, child-friendly and transformative research method, which is reflected in its conceptualization. Conceptualized as the “poetics of the oppressed” (Boal, 1985), forum theatre serves as a theatrical form and pedagogical process in which oppression within everyday lives is first identified, then reflected upon and analyzed, after which ideas of possible solutions are considered, discussed and tried out as theatrical performance and in dialogue with all participants: creators of the play and actors, and spect-actors, who are both spectators and actors who intervene into the play. So, in addition to being appropriate for research with children, forum theatre also provides, and enables the analysis of, a wide variety of empirical material for conveying children’s views, such as personal experience, introspection, life stories, cultural and ideological productions that “describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in individuals’ lives” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011, 4). In this paper, available research on forum theatre, with special emphasis on research in which forum theatre is used as a research method, is reviewed and analyzed in line with other similar critical-pedagogical research methods (performance ethnography, critical arts-based inquiry, visual methodology, performative autoethnography, etc.), with the aim of describing and arguing for forum theatre’s potency for eliciting children’s views.

Forum theatre, children’s views, qualitative research methods, speech and language difficulties, cognitive disabilities

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