Avoiding the White Gaze for Assessment in Drama
By Jonathan P. Jones
In the vignette presented at the opening of my new book, Assessment in the Drama Classroom: A Culturally Responsive and Student-Centered Approach, a veteran classroom teacher poses a question to pre-service drama teachers: how do I support those last few so they get where they need to be? That fundamental question about teaching and learning sits at the heart of this text, as I provide a variety of resources to support teachers in navigating the learning needs of the students in their drama classrooms.
At times, the book gets into the finer detail — what should you plan to assess, in what way, at what time, and how do you partner with students throughout the learning experience to illuminate their growth and development? At other times, I ask the teacher to step away from their work to interrogate the bigger picture — why are we doing it this way and what are the larger ramifications of this work that we do? Among those broader questions I ask readers to grapple with is one that relates to “the white gaze” — the idea that a general audience member is white and holds aesthetic expectations grounded in white culture. As the majority of school aged children in the U.S. are people of color while the majority of teachers are white, might the bias of the white gaze be a factor worth examining as we imagine assessment in the drama classroom?
As you read the excerpt from Assessment in the Drama Classroom: A Culturally Responsive and Student-Centered Approach that follows (reprinted here with permission of the publisher), consider the ways in which the bias of the white gaze might be a factor in your drama pedagogy. Yes, you might have a strong contingent of girls, but is that curly red wig the only choice for Annie? And more, if those girls are people of color, is Annie the right choice to begin with? Consider how we light ‘midnight’ beyond a wash of blue LEDs which will make performers with a darker complexion disappear from the stage. What texts are you using? What styles of performance are you centering? Who are you elevating as theatrical icons? Whose ideal are we striving for? Some initial approaches to overcoming this bias are indicated in the excerpt (and know that the book has more detail about each), but how else might you partner with students to center their own cultural aesthetics in their artistic work? Only then will we begin to support all students in getting where they need to be.
Assessment and the White Gaze
Author Toni Morrison had a deep concern about the critiques of her novels in so far as literary critics are often white and she was not writing her novels in order to present the experience of Black folks as seen through the “white gaze.” Of this phenomena, Morrison said:
I remember a review of Sula [one of her novels] in which the reviewer said, “One day, she […] will have to face up to the real responsibilities, and get mature, and write about the real confrontation for Black people, which is white people.” As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books. (Greenfield-Sanders, 2020)
As of spring 2018, 80% of classroom teachers in the United States are white (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023a) and, as of fall 2020, 54.7% of students in public, Pre-K-12 schools in the United States are students of color (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023b). Similarly, in 2021, 85.1% of teachers in state-funded schools in England were white British (U.K. Department for Education, 2022) while “33.9% of primary school pupils, 32.3% of secondary school pupils and 30.2% of special school pupils in England come from a minority ethnic background” (Weale, 2021). Given this racial, ethnic, and cultural incongruence, when we think about and implement assessment, we must reflect on what we are asking students to do in our classrooms.
- Are you asking students of color to perform for you — likely a white woman — and to conform to your “white gaze” — a manifestation of a performance that a white person will find aesthetically pleasing, or to conform to a white standard or white criteria?
- And if so, what will you do to eliminate that paradigm from your classroom?
How do we overcome this? As teachers, we need to consistently employ student-centered, culturally responsive approaches — from when we craft the learning objectives, through developing the summative assessment task, its criteria, and documentation method. What do the students bring to the creative experience? What are their aesthetic sensibilities? What do they consider “good” theatre? Co-constructing rubrics with students is one way to achieve this, but so too are centering their prior experience, culture, and interests, as well as implementing self- and peer-assessment practices. Empower your students to establish standards of their own.
References
Greenfield-Sanders, T. (2020). American Masters: Toni Morrison On Writing Without the “White Gaze.” An excerpt from Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/toni-morrison-on-writing-without-the-white-gaze/14874/
Jones, J. P. (2024). Assessment in the Drama Classroom: A Culturally Responsive and Student-Centered Approach. Routledge.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2023a, May). Characteristics of Public School Teachers. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr
National Center for Education Statistics. (2023b, May). Racial/Ethnic Enrollment in Public Schools. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cge
U.K. Department for Education. (2022, June 9). Reporting year 2021: School workforce in England. https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/school-teacher-workforce/latest
Weale, S. (2021, June 29). Only 5% of state school governors in England from ethnic minorities — report. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jun/29/only-5-of-state-school-governors-in-england-from-ethnic-minorities-report
Jonathan P. Jones, PhD, is an advisor, faculty member, and coordinator of doctoral studies at NYU Steinhardt for the Program in Educational Theatre. At NYU, he teaches courses in pedagogy and theatre history; at CUNY, he teaches courses in public speaking and theatre history. Jonathan has presented on theatre education, research, creativity, and pedagogy in the US, UK, Canada, China, and Iraq. He serves as editor for ArtsPraxis, on the editorial board of Applied Theatre Research and Youth Theatre Journal, as well as Chair-Elect for the board of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE).
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