ABSTRACT
It is a dark, wet winter day on Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest, where the colder weather brings weeks of endless rain. A group of first-year education students gather together in the unremarkable classroom. After the usual shuffling, a dimming of the harsh fluorescent lights, a shifting of chairs, they enter the space of the lesson. Their instructor hands them copies of a form, labeled Record of Observations: Literacy Assessment. This will be an “as if” experience-a playing at being people other than themselves. They know to expect this by now in the course. But the instructor’s intention is to trick them a little, to nudge their perceptions of the world of teaching and learning. She hopes to provoke the group of student teachers to think about who their future students might be as well as who they, themselves, might become. The “double space”1 of the theatre, even in a brief drama experience-a playing at being teachers-provides a fluid geography, a place of boundary crossing where they can all become someone else at the same time and in the same space that they also remain education students, working together in an ordinary classroom.
