ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I present data collected from two research sites: TeenStreet, an urban youth theater group, and Herrero School, an urban pre-K through eighth-grade school. Drawing on sociolinguistic defi - nitions of literacy (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee, 1996; Scribner, 1984; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1993) and M. M. Bakhtin’s theory of knowledge (1990, 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1998), including his concepts of aesthetic contemplation, heteroglossia, and novelness, I show how self-generated dramatic arts activities position adolescents in both out-of-school and in-school contexts to engage one another’s stories and aesthetically make meaning of those stories and use them to make sense of their lives. Th e self-generated dramatic arts activities enhanced these adolescents’ senses of agency by facilitating critical and creative perspective taking. Th e adolescents perceived and even experienced ways of being that are diff erent from their lived realities. My focus is also on the writing generated by these adolescents, individually and in groups, in response to self-generated dramatic arts activities. Th e adolescents described in this chapter came to see the self-generated dramatic arts activities and writing as mediational means that could be used not only to make sense of their own lives but also to share that sense-making with others in an act of bringing forth multiple perspectives and aesthetically contemplating those perspectives. Bakhtin called this act “novelness” (1990, 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1998). Within the context of self-generated dramatic arts activities, I call it “novelness in action.”
