Danielle's current research expands across many fields and disciplines including educational studies, feminist and trans research and performance and theatre. Her doctoral work, "Acting out gender: Interrogating gender through performance-based-pedagogies in high school classrooms", uses performance-based pedagogies to examine the experience and understanding of gender for high school students, and to creatively explore the construction, embodiment, reproduction, performance and subversion of gender identities. Her study, through Augusto Boal’s performance-based pedagogy, Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), explores the ways in which participants understand and respond to their gendered bodies and interrogate both external and internal experiences of gender. Pedagogically, Danielle's project investigates questions concerning the making and unmaking of gender - asking questions about what it means to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.  How do participants experience gender, as embodied and enacting in the everyday mundane, and “frequently in ways that are competing and contradictory” (Nayak & Kehily, 2013, p. 3). And what are the possibilities or consequences of doing gender differently?

Moreover Danielle is interested in interrogating performance-based pedagogies (PBP) in that they demand that students embody their learning so as to enact a meaning-making process that is both holistic and powerful (Warren & Fassett, 2004). PBP requires and encourages students to be present, to be accountable for their own learning and to be engaged. Most importantly, for her study, performance-based pedagogies demand that students understand and explore identity as performative and to then pose their own questions of identity into a performance space.

Danielle is also a professor of sociology and psychology at Fanshawe College and has over eight years’ experience of in working with youth, developing and teaching critical curricula and has extensive experience in facilitating performance based workshops with non-actors to explore a variety of issues including gender, sexual violence, critical literacy, power and privilege and global citizenship.

Wayne Martino, PhD

Supervisor