Reframing notions of identity, learning, and culture through the use of performing and visual arts within a detention center

This study examines a multimodal arts-based inquiry that took place within a secure detention center. The inquiry was inclusive of design, rehearsal, and production activities that culminated into a final theatre production. The methods for this study included pulling from multiple disciplines to develop multiple perspectives towards the data as categorized in the following strata: Discourse, design and production, and distribution. This included blending both epistemological and ontological approaches to representing and presenting the research. Chapter 1 discusses three motifs that have emerged in research around the relationship between arts, community, and education. This discussion provides a rhetorical landscape in which notions of the arts, literacies, and jail are used in situated within this inquiry. Chapter 2 discusses the context of the initial arts based inquiry, research study, and the significance of pulling from multiple disciplines. Chapters 3-7 are situated as five different Acts, each using a particular methodology to address a research question. The following narratives provide new possibilities for; a) understanding, critiquing and re-imaging the lived experience of those who took part in this arts based inquiry, b) using arts based inquiry as a tool for dispute and learning, particularly around those who live on the margins of society) examining felt purpose around social practices used in the development of hyper-visual narratives and which led to the transformation of student identities, d) incarcerated youth to construct and reframe knowledge through theatre production and the "electric set", and e) using guerilla filmmaking techniques as a means to disrupt the findings of this research and create a space for critical dialogue around notions of incarcerated youth.