91ֱ��

When you ask Kathleen Gallagher to describe her approach to research to someone she just met, one word comes to mind – collaborative.

Gallagher, Distinguished Professor and Director, Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies (CDTPS), is widely respected for her research on youth civic engagement and artistic practice, and engaging with young people across disciplines to gain insight into the pedagogical and methodological possibilities of theatre. Previously, she worked with artist Andrew Kushnir to develop an original theatre script reflecting research about hope and relationships.

With the publication of a recent collection she has co-edited, Global Climate Education and Its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way with OISE/CDTPS postdoctoral Fellow Christine Balt, collaboration is once again front and centre. The collection, just published, explores the unique conceptual and pedagogical “discontents” of climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. It also examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being.

“Through my most recent research project, we have collaborated with researchers, artists, drama teachers, and drama students in secondary and tertiary contexts in geographically different places to study young people’s relationships to the climate emergency through their theatre-making practices,” says Gallagher, speaking to folks across Canada, and in India, Taiwan, Colombia, England, and Greece.

“Our project is about socio-ecological justice, all the ways in which forms of social and ecological justice are at stake to one another,” she adds.

We spoke with Professor Gallagher recently about this collection, her own pedagogy, and the work ahead.

With your research thus far, how has drama been an effective means to learn and research?

Drama is everything! For us it is a particular qualitative research methodology, a set of innovative creative practices, a mode of building something with research participants, of embodying our ideas not only voicing them, and of finding metaphoric expression for thoughts that may be beyond words. It is also a community-building activity, a way of translating knowledge but, importantly, a way of building different kinds of knowledges and building relationships through a paradigm of shared purpose in artmaking.

How did you begin to venture to bring this edited collection to be? Why do this now and in this format?

We wanted to create a book that represented all the diverse experiences of all the researchers, teachers, and youth across our different sites after working collaboratively over the last 6 years on our shared interest in understanding how young people are thinking about and responding to the climate crisis from their very differently-situated social, geographic, and cultural locations.

All researchers across sites have contributed a chapter about their local contexts, theatre practices, and discoveries in Part I of the book to offer a more global perspective on the climate crisis, as it is experienced differently across sites in the Global South and Global North. In Part II of the book, we imagined chapters for teachers who wish to think differently about the role of education in the climate crisis; these chapters were written by all of the graduate students and artists who engaged with the project and fieldwork. And the learnings from these writers are directly addressing the challenges teachers in schools and universities may be facing in doing committed, creative, and hopeful work with young people in a context of climate fatalism and intersecting global crises.

What goes into editing a volume of different voices? What did you want to lend your expertise to?

So much collaborative work goes into an edited volume, especially when every contributor is reflecting on their own engagement with the same piece of research in vastly different cultural, geographic, and linguistic contexts. As editors, my co-editor and postdoctoral fellow Christine Balt and I had to help each chapter writer/writers understand how they were contributing to the whole. You might say we ‘dramaturged’ the book into existence.

As the book is published in English, we also invited our Indian, Greek, Spanish, and Taiwanese writers to preserve some of the vernacular of their own language within the chapters. Our desire for a more culturally and linguistically diverse edited collection meant that Christine and I had to have a really solid concept of the whole, to impart to writers over multiple drafts, so that the experience of our imagined future readers would be coherent and enjoyable on the ride through all of these wildly different contexts.

Who did you want to speak to the most with this collection?

Well, we really want ethnographers, new and seasoned, and youth studies scholars to delve into this multi-year, multi-sited, creative, and collaborative output. But we also really wanted to create a text for teachers and teacher-educators, those who have expertise in theatre and those who may not, to appreciate how the creative, affective, and alternative modes of exploring and understanding through the arts may lead to more sustainable forms of climate education. So, it is for scholars interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency, especially within and across the fields of drama, theatre and performance studies, applied theatre and drama education, educational research, and childhood and youth studies. But it also invites a readership of practicing teachers and teacher-educators who are interested in applying drama pedagogies in the classroom to explore matters of socio-ecological justice and the climate crisis.

How did you work with the contributors on their works? Which works resonated with you, and why?

Across the various chapters, the world-building capacities of theatre-making offer up new, performative and pedagogical orientations to the climate emergency beyond those of critique. So, we worked in very local ways. Because we are not just editors but also long-time collaborators with every one of these contributors, it meant that we were working from shared understandings. Because the work was being published in English, we also had our eye on how to help those diverse local contexts be appreciable to anglo readers.

All of the chapters resonated with me, in their own ways. Being a ‘hands-on’ editor means you are deeply invested and deeply in the work alongside the authors. Don’t ask me to choose my favourite child! 

How should the reader approach this collection if they want to better equip themselves about climate change education?

I think edited collections are often approached by readers via the most relevant and/or attractive titles in the table of contents! In this case, what is unique, is that each chapter is situated in radically different contexts, but we are pursuing the same question: can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? So, readers should choose what sounds most interesting to them. Follow your impulses!

How and where can this collection make an impact?

Far from being a ‘blueprint’ or ‘how to’ guide for performance in the climate crisis, this book takes ‘discontent’ – restlessness, vexation, unease – as a productive disposition for troubling accepted, simple, and ‘solutions-oriented’ climate narratives. I truly hope readers come away with new learning from the wisdom, stories, and creative practices of globally diverse communities and their engagement with a crisis that can seem unmovable, unsolvable, existential, and overwhelming. I really hope it inspires teachers and young people to lean in, to find inspiration through creativity, and to better understand our global interdependence on the inescapable question of the climate crisis and our shared fate.

What do you hope for the state of climate change education? Can climate change education be a force for change (is that the intent)?

We want this book, and all of our other scholarly and creative outputs related to this project, to advance a more relational, action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and creative climate education attuned to the social and emotional impacts of the climate emergency. We have expressly explored the unique conceptual and pedagogical ‘discontents’ of current climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. We hope that in examining the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency through a creative and practical in-depth analysis of how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being, that teachers, students, artists- all of us- can better resist the familiar forms of climate fatalism and climate education exhaustion that are affecting our ability to respond, to wonder, and to act.

We also know that such practical, creative, and more democratic modes of engagement with the climate crisis can open up the possibility of broader engagement with climate activism to more communities, especially those that have been historically marginalized from mainstream forms of activism or drowned out by Global North and Western modes of activism. And by directly facing the manifest relationship between forms of social and climate injustice, we are better positioned to reckon with assymetical global, political relations and invent new and more differentiated ways forward in collaboration with others.

The Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies will host a reception for the launch of Global Climate Education and Its Discontents Using Drama to Forge a New Way.

Friday, January 24, 2025 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Performance Studio, Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse
79 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 2E5

Visit for more information.