This paper presents preliminary findings from a research reflecting on some ways in which a critical approach to shaping learning environments affects the production of inclusive learning spaces and facilitates young people's (re-)engagements with learning. The research took place in an urban secondary school outside London, in which a science teacher carved out a stretch of time within the curriculum to apply elements of critical pedagogies. It is set in the context of high exclusion rates in UK secondary schools of students from marginalised communities or with non-typical learning behaviours. According to Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011) in an inclusive classroom, all students are able to participate on their own accord, and hooks (1994) stresses the need for dominant discourses to be diversified for all students to come to voice. Critical pedagogies, derived from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1993 [1970]), see learning as an emancipatory process, based on the students' needs to empower themselves by reflecting critically on their surroundings. To understand how to apply this framework in the above context, and to explore how it can support an inclusive classroom, it is crucial to analyse the power dynamics in question (see Ellsworth 1989). Equally it is exploring what the concept of emancipatory transformation means in contemporary and diverse European classrooms, marked by trajectories of migration, economic and social disparity amongst both, teacher and students, and a marketization of schooling, which produce complex power dynamics within the classrooms. Reflecting on the teachers intervention applying critical pedagogies in this context, I am drawing on a critical spatial lens, “understanding “space as constituted out of social relations, that the spatial is social relations, 'stretched out’” (Massey 1994, p2). Methodologically, I applied Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), a theatre form based on critical pedagogies (Boal 1979), as an intervention within my participatory observation, in order to reflect together with the research participants on what inclusion means to them. Based on critical pedagogies, TO engages with power dynamics within the creative space of theatre, whilst using the creative form to reflect on and explore these; In order to explore the complex and shifting power structures in classrooms, “non-linear and narrative modes of drama education might, indeed, productively interrupt our traditional qualitative accounts of classrooms and theatre studios, and of the actors/people who enliven them” (Gallagher 2007, p.58).

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