In this post, Jacqueline McManus and Catherine Taylor from the University of West London explain how they use a forum theatre approach to help university students prepare for job interviews. I first met Jacqueline and Catherine at a conference in 2018 and was really inspired by their work and their commitment to a non-deficit approach for a topic that can often taught in a fairly instrumental way.

The majority of University of West London (UWL) students are the first members of their family to go into higher education and high numbers are from BAME backgrounds. Many are also holding down jobs and supporting families, while also studying for a degree – a fantastic achievement.

But we also noted that when our students went for interviews for professional jobs or placements they often seemed to lack confidence.  Students described feeling daunted and anxious about a process that plunged them into unfamiliar territory.  As we know, job interviews for graduate-level jobs involve mastery of a complex set of codes and behaviours that are not always obvious (and evidence shows that the graduate application process privileges middle class, white applicants).  Their families, although supportive, lacked the experience of going for professional level jobs, so could not help in this area.  The careers team felt that it was difficult to teach the subtleties and nuances of job interviews in a way that students would get without them feeling overwhelmed by information.

It was Careers Consultant Jacqueline McManus who first heard about forum theatre and had the idea of applying it to job interviews.  Initially she used this approach to help young people on widening participation programmes, who were applying for places on highly sought-after HE courses.  The UWL Careers team have been using forum theatre since 2017. 

So what exactly is forum theatre and how can it be used for job interviews? 

Forum theatre (part of Boal’s ‘theatre of the oppressed’) is a type of interactive theatre created by the late Brazilian theatre director, Augusto Boal, in the early 1970s.  In forum theatre the audience first watches a piece which shows an obvious injustice or problem taking place.  The play is then paused while the audience is asked for its opinion on how things could be changed to remove this injustice.  The scene is then re-enacted with audience participation on the stage.  Boal saw this form of theatre as a means of helping those people he felt were oppressed to see these oppressions enacted onstage and to be able to react to them.  Boal himself experienced oppression in its most overt form when he was imprisoned, tortured and eventually exiled for using drama to challenge Brazil’s authoritarian regime.

Our use of forum theatre involves a job interview with a candidate.  First the students watch a scene, acted out by the careers team.  The interview contains errors that can be made during interviews.  The students are asked to pause the drama when they see something they think is wrong, and to give their feedback on what they have seen.  The students then suggest what needs to be changed in order for it to be a better interview.  The interview scene is then replayed, using these suggestions.  Sometimes students participate in the re-played scene.  Finally, there is a last feedback session where students can say what worked and what may still need changing.  

Our presentation focuses on presenting problems, not solutions.  It is for our students to work out between themselves what the best resolutions could be.  This is a central tenet of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, which in turn was inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his rejection of ‘bankable knowledge’, in favour of ‘dialogic circles of culture’. Every group of students will suggest something different.  This makes them active, rather than passive, participants.   

Evidence of impact

We’ve had fantastic feedback from students about our forum theatre sessions.  We recently carried out a study into the effectiveness of our approach (funded by the Higher Education Careers Services Unit).  Students said after participating in our forum theatre performance they felt they had learned a lot about the subtleties of graduate job interviews, and the hidden traps to look out for.  Students tell us that the sessions are fun as well as informative and effective.

More importantly, students attending these workshops have had far greater success with professional interviews than ever before.  The majority of our students attending professional level interviews now get the job or the placement. 

A principle aim of our forum theatre workshops is to challenge the ‘cop in the head’ (Boal’s way of describing the internalisation of external oppression). We had found that other methods we had used for students attending interviews was overwhelming for them.  In fact, a lot of these – for example mock interviews – seemed to reinforce the feeling our students had that they ‘weren’t good enough’ (which we can put down as a ‘cop in the head’ thought).   Interviews can be a nerve-wracking and stressful experience, for there is a power dynamic at play between the interviewer and the interviewee. But with our forum theatre approach – where students can laugh at errors anyone could make at interviews – this feeling of being overwhelmed disappears. Students have fun while they learn. 

A ‘non-deficit’ approach

So with forum theatre, then, we are not taking a ‘deficit model’ approach, where we try to give students something they are lacking, such as aspirations or resilience – a neoliberal approach that blames individuals, rather than structural inequalities.  Furthermore, we are not trying to give students cultural capital – knowledge recognised and valued by the middle classes –  as we do not believe this is possible, as our approach is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that cultural capital is bestowed in its entirety at birth, or takes a lifetime, if ever, for working class people to acquire.  Instead, we believe we are using a social justice approach, which is underpinned by the theories of Boal, Freire, Bourdieu and Nancy Fraser.  For example, drawing on Fraser’s 3-dimensional model of social justice, our approach involves:

• re-distribution – students access graduate jobs
• recognition – students are deemed to have equal value and status
• participatory parity – students have the right to participate equally and to challenge their own oppression

We have adapted Boal’s method to fit with our needs, but we stick to his aims of it as a form of social justice.

We give more details on how we use forum theatre in our report for ProspectsLuminate.

In September 2019, we won the AGCAS (Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services) Research Informed Practice Award for our work on forum theatre and interview performance.

If you are interested in finding out more information, please contact us at jackie.mcmanus@uwl.ac.uk or cathy.taylor@uwl.ac.uk