This book details the creative process, implementation and assessment of two applied theatre projects ("Common Knowledge" and "You Be the Judge") designed to foster reflection on academic integrity issues with students at Brock University.
The book examines the usefulness of applied theatre in promoting academic integrity, to both ESL and non-ESL students. It focuses on how the nature of applied theatre can transcend the barriers of language. It shows with great detail on how applied theatre methods benefit ESL people in gaining confidence and a greater understanding of potentially new social norms.
About the Author :
Joe Norris, Professor Emeritus, taught drama in education and applied theatre in the Department of Dramatic Arts, at Brock University. He focused his teaching and research on fostering a playful, creative, participatory, and socially aware stance towards self and other. He is a recipient of the 2025 - Ted T. Aoki Award for Distinguished Service within the Field of Canadian Curriculum Studies from the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies; the 2025 Outstanding Achievement in Arts & Learning Award from the Arts and Learning of the American Educational Research Association; the 2015 Tom Barone Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts Based Educational Research from AERA's Arts Based Educational Research SIG. His book, Playbuilding as Qualitative Research: A Participatory Arts-based Approach, received the 2011 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association's Qualitative Research SIG. Rick Sawyer and he have pioneered the development of the dialogic research methodology, duoethnography, with two books on this reflective dialogic approach. They received AERA's Division D's 2015 Significant Contribution to Educational Measurement and Research Methodology Award for their book, Understanding Qualitative Research: Duoethnography. Joe continues to write, teach part-time, and remains active with Mirror Theatre.
Kevin Hobbs is Actor, Writer, Researcher, and Educator who employs narrative theory, performance and other artistic methodologies in his research and educational work. He is President of Mirror Theatre. His masters in social justice and equity research used a Playbuilding methodology to explore how person-centred care is achieved in medicine. The thesis received the 2011 ARTS Graduate Research Award from the Canadian Society for the Study of Education. He is Co-Recipient of the 2010 Alan Blizzard Award for "exemplary collaborative projects that improve student learning." He is completing his Ph.D. on the use of performance pedagogy in healthcare curriculum.
Nadia Ganesh is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Health Sciences at Brock University. Her Vanier-funded thesis will focus on health system discrimination against Indo-Caribbean women. In addition to being an Actor/Researcher/Teacher with Mirror Theatre for the past 8 years, she is also a board member of Carousel Players and currently serves as student co-chair of Brock University's President's Advisory Committee for Human Rights, Equity, and Decolonization.
James Papple previously worked as the Associate Director of York University's English Program, Associate Director at York University's English Language Institute and as Academic Coordinator at Brock University. During his time at Brock James received four Best Practices awards from Brock University's Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies (2006-2009). He is very active in the ESL community having recently been awarded the Distinguished Member award of TESL Ontario, an organisation that he was previously Chair of the Board of Directors from 2015 to 2017. He also served for six years as a board member on the Centre for The Canadian Language Benchmarks. James continues to serve on several boards in his field including TESOL International Association, Avenue, and Six String Nation.
Eldon Friesen has taught or administered ESL/EFL programmes in Korea, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Canada. He has interests in curriculum and materials development along with assessment and project specification writing. He is also interested in data record keeping for ESL assessments. He is currently ESL Academic Development Coordinator in ESL Services at Brock University. Eldon has recently expanded program curricula by developing eBook learning modules with H5P interactions for various levels of Brock's ESL programming.
Michael M. Metz is Artist Educator who holds a masters of education in curriculum and pedagogy from the University of Toronto. Michael has taught in drama education settings with young people aged four to seventeen and has more recently taught undergraduate students at Brock University. Michael has been a member of Mirror Theatre since 2014, participating in 10+ productions, and serving as board President for one year. Michael's research interests involve using drama as an educational tool to promote dialogic learning.
Mirror Theatre is a participatory theatre company that works in educational and community settings to advance our understanding of social issues through storytelling and improvisation. It is volunteer-driven, and run by theatre professionals and scholars in education, research and applied theatre. Collectively, its members have devised and performed over 100 projects and written may articles and chapters describing their research and pedagogical approaches.
