Theatre in my toolbox: Using Forum Theatre to explore notions of identity, belonging and culture with francophone secondary students in a context of diversity.

This thesis explores the use of theatre as a pedagogical tool for exploring how a group of secondary students, particularly those of refugee background, in a minority (francophone) language school negotiate their educational needs and interests and sense of identity, belonging, cultural community and country. I argue that a particular form of theatre, Forum Theatre, a branch of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) that emerged from liberatory pedagogy advanced by Paulo Freire, can be useful for engaging students and help them negotiate and navigate the school system. The data from a secondary school in Western Canada gathered through a combination of ethnographic, participatory action research and practice-based research methods, reveals that the students' experiences--being streamed into subjects unrelated to their interests and aspirations, difficulties with peers, and discrimination--were heavily influenced by their identities as French speakers and refugees (a label they avoided) as well as their race, class and gender. This study demonstrates that Theatre of the Oppressed techniques were useful for enabling students' to express their varying identities and be situated through their experiences to begin to address some of the problems they encounter in their school.