Session Information
29 SES 13 B, Parallel Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
How do school students interpret plays featuring a character with a disability? Plays which feature characters with disability are often studied in school. Is the awareness of young people widened by this experience, or narrowed by stereotypes?
Teachers of literature do not set out to reinforce stereotypes. Their objectives in teaching may be seen in terms of semiotics, using concepts such as metaphor and metonymy, and also in terms of ways of reading, such as reader response theory. However, a social constructionist theory of disability finds that characters with impairments are portrayed less as individuals and more as categories or symbols of something other than the impairment itself. It is possible that capability theory offers a middle ground between these two different positions.
But what do school students actually say? Although inflected by teaching and by test question, students’ examination scripts may fairly be taken to be their considered and extended views on the character in the play they have studied. A scrutiny of a sample of such work reveals some possible answers to the above questions.
In order to address this question students’ work on a particular set text is considered. The text is Brian Clark’s play Whose life is it anyway?, first performed in 1978 and famously revived inLondon in 2005. The play concerns Ken Harrison, a sculptor who is paralysed from the neck down after an accident, and who wishes not to be kept alive. Thus the disability is acute and the representation of disability is a central interpretative issue.
The representation of disability is an ongoing and international concern. Using examination essays not to grade but to hear what young people are actually saying is an innovative research method.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Warner, L. (2011) ‘ “Disabled” characters in plays’ Changing English 18: 4: 371-382 Warner, L. (2012) ‘Damaging mythology’ in Kempe, A. Drama, Disability and Education, London: Routledge 37-47
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