Engaging Relationships: Learning about Social Justice through Performance Ethnography

In recent years, there has been a call to Australian universities to offer student learning programs that engage students with the wider community in pro-active and authentic ways. I use the word 'authentic' here with the view that community experiences for university students must be carefully embedded into pedagogical and theoretical teaching and learning frameworks, not as tokenism or random acts of 'goodwill', but as ongoing meaningful experiential interfaces. Community engagement needs to underpin the student experience in terms of 'real' life learning about the complexities of the culture and society in which they live and develop notions of citizenship, stewardship and equity through collaborative partnerships. One focus for this paper is how the embedding of community engagement in my own university learning programs can assist adult learners to explore the concept of social justice in active and sustained ways. The other, is how the use of 'Ethnodrama' techniques can act as a powerful catalyst for student learning and reflection about social injustices in the wider community. For the purpose of this discussion, social justice is understood as 'the full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs' (Bell, 1997, p. 3).