In May 2007, 15-year old Jordan Manners was shot and killed in the hallway of his Toronto school. In early June 2007, the Toronto District School Board (2008) commissioned an investigation into school safety, which resulted in a four-volume 595-page report entitled The Road to Health.
In an attempt to provoke discussion about the report and its recommendations among teacher candidates and teacher educators at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of University of Toronto (OISE/UT) where I work as a teacher educator, playwright and performed ethnographer, I adapted The Road to Health into a performance script entitled Zero Tolerance
In September 2008 Zero Tolerance was performed as a rehearsed reading for 500 teacher candidates at OISE’s Safe Schools Conference. The performers included a group of teacher candidates, a teacher educator, and three researcher and development staff members from OISE’s Centre for Urban Schooling. The performance was followed by a set of prepared responses from a panel that featured Vice-Principal and Ph.D candidate Dean Barnes from the Halton District School Board, one of OISE’s partner school boards; Bev Caswell, an OISE teacher educator; Jeff Kugler, the Executive Director of the Centre for Urban Schooling, and Charis Lo, a teacher candidate who had participated in the reading. A further two-hour discussion for audience members who wanted to discuss the report in some detail followed the performance. About 30 teacher candidates attended this discussion. The other teacher candidates attended workshops on peace building, conflict resolution, and peer mediation that provided opportunities to discuss practical strategies for dealing with some of the issues raised in the performance.
Zero Tolerance will be read again at the University of Toronto on February 25, 2010, from 3-5 pm at Hart House.
All the best,
Tara
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