ABSTRACT
This collaborative ethnodrama follows the journey of a week of school tourism (Mendus, 2017) where we (four pre-service teachers at Southwestern University in Texas, a young New York playwright and two seasoned school tourists, our professor and a PhD student from the UK) visited ‘innovative’ schools in New York City. We see each tour as a performance created by each school and by framing our ethnodrama through the lens of Massumi’s understanding of affect, this chapter explores the concept that through physically visiting innovative schools we, as teachers and pre-service teachers, are constantly changing, becoming teachers in a different capacity. By sharing the script written for the Performing the World conference held in New York City in September 2018 this chapter explores the lingerings from the embodied experiences of the visits. The ethnodrama shares experiences of confrontation with dissonance regarding power relationships, conversations about discomfort with informality, lack of structure, no letter grades segued into conversations about social justice, empowerment, and activism. From this experience as pre-service teachers and more experienced teachers, we realise our own movement beyond school tourists to becoming ‘residents’ with these experiences and discourses of education embodied in our identity as teachers.
