Removing Masks to Connect Through Theatre of the Oppressed

We are a group of doctoral students and a professor from a socially just teacher education and teacher development program in the United States who studied Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with local grassroots activists in occupied spaces. Engaging in embodied, place-based professional learning in a location different from our own caused us to experience physical, emotional, and cognitive disequilibrium. We conducted a self-study using co/autoethnography to trace our responses to this professional learning. Most of us were new to self-study, but we had the guidance of a seasoned mentor. We wove together our travel journals, text messages, and conversations to create a collective travel memoir organized by specific locations, which acted as our map. We commented on one another’s narratives and met via Zoom to pull out themes that emerged. Throughout our analysis, a Brazilian colleague acted as a critical friend to help clarify and articulate our experiences. Our self-study found that engaging with TO on-location reinforced tenets of an embodied, humanizing pedagogy of love, encouraging us to be adaptable and vulnerable to new situations, people, and activities. The complexity that arose from the context of physically and emotionally engaging with individuals in Brazil who represented a diversity of perspectives and often did not speak the same language led us to “strip off” our masks and guarded behaviors, pushing through discomfort to unveil our true justice-oriented and activist commitments as educators.