Experience report: Workshopping alternate outcomes to Sexism through participatory classroom roleplay

Abstract

This experience report outlines how a participatory Sexism Response Workshop helped a diverse set of students in a large class have wide-ranging and open conversations about sexism. We ran the Sexism Response Workshop for a class of 92 undergraduate students, splitting the students into two groups to make the workshop manageable. The workshop was run by a theater facilitator and was based on Augusto Boal's ‘Theater of the Oppressed’ methodology. We report how the workshop was conducted, the types of roleplay situations and the responses of the students and observers, as well as written responses of some students who chose to blog about the activity the following week.