How does theatre educate? OISE’s Kathleen Gallagher, author Anne-Marie MacDonald to lecture this week
September 19, 2011
Literature, Theatre, and Performance: A Conversation with Ann-Marie MacDonald and Kathleen Gallagher will be the topic of tomorrow’s public lecture at McMaster University. The lecture will address the role/place of theatre and performance and to respond to the question: how does theatre educate?
Professor Kathleen Gallagher holds the Canada Research Chair in Theatre, Youth, and Research in Urban Schools, and is the academic director of the Centre for Urban Schooling at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto. Kathleen will share what she discovers about students' interest in performance and literature within the context of her urban school research. Ann-Marie will discuss her learning within the context of working as a writer/actor of theatre, a novelist, a librettist, and a television host.
Seventy-five arts and science students from McMaster University who have read Belle Moral, a play by Anne-Marie with an introduction by Kathleen that premiered at the Shaw Festival, are expected to attend workshops and participate in theatre work prior to the lecture on Tuesday, September 20 at 7:00 p.m. The students will work with scenes from the play and discuss the embedded themes of secrecy, Darwinism, Freud, women and hysteria.
Kathleen Gallagher's award-winning books include Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times and Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities. She has also edited two collections: How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates and The Methodological Dilemma: Creative, Critical and Collaborative Approaches to Qualitative Research. She is the author of many articles on theatre, urban youth, pedagogy, methodology and gender, Dr. Gallagher continues to focus her research on questions of student engagement and artistic practice, as well as the pedagogical and methodological possibilities of learning through the arts.
Ann-Marie MacDonald is an acclaimed actor and internationally-renowned writer of plays, lyrics, and works of fiction. She is best known for her plays, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Belle Moral: A Natural History, as well as her novels Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies, she also enjoys a career on stage and in television and film. For many years Ms. MacDonald hosted the CBC premier biography series Life and Times, and she currently hosts CBC’s flagship documentary program Doc Zone. Her work as a screen actor has earned her a Gemini Award (Where the Spirit Lives) and a Genie nomination (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing), while her writing, translated into more than twenty languages, has been honoured with the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Fiction, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, the Chalmers Award for Outstanding Play, the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama, and the Governor General’s Award for Drama.