Navigating Whiteness to Re/Voice a Transculturate Call-and-Response Pedagogy for Actor Training in Higher Education: An Autoethnography

There has been scant research undertaken that considers the student’s culture as an invaluable source of imagination and creativity in UK Higher Education actor training courses. Instead, there is an assumption that acting teaching practices are universal. This privileged assumption propagates hegemonic teaching practices driven by cultural racism and protected by neoliberalism, which has an impact on the authenticity of an acting student’s embodied learning and knowledge. In my thesis I challenge the established norm, to explore how we can practically action inclusivity by finding space and time for an equitable platform of embodied learning and embodied knowledge. I used an autoethnographic methodology underpinned with Critical Race Theory to Re/Voice a counternarrative, disrupting and navigating the Whiteness that permeates educational research. Lorde (1984) states “poetry coins the language to express and charter a radical demand” (1984:38), therefore throughout the thesis I invite the reader into the experience of a Black researching professional’s decolonising journey as I Re/Voice my double consciousness to theoretically and practically interconnect African oral tradition with Transculturation to offer an alternative way to how we teach actor training. This approach opened up a transformative space, specifically rooted in time: historic specificity and artistic originality, to Re/Voice the lived experience and perceptions of thirty-three BA Acting students who self-identify 58% diversity in relation to their cultural backgrounds and heritages. Over their first year of training, questionnaires, observations during my teaching sessions and semi-structured interviews were interpreted verbatim as Re/Voiced poetic calls, ready for the student response to explicitly stimulate a creative cultural awareness through an innovative pedagogy I have termed Transculturate Call-and-Response. The findings indicate that if actor training is about 5 students bringing themselves to the work to embody the training, then the cultural particularities, cultural references and cultural knowledge embedded within all students must be authentically and explicitly acknowledged as the dialogical starting point in reimagining what contemporary, inclusive actor training can be.