title: [Playing with identities, transforming shared realities: school theatre workshop for immigrant and refugee adolescents].
abstract: Migration during adolescence represents a challenge for the youth who need to simultaneously work through the multiple losses associated with the migratory journey and adapt to a young adult status. The drama workshop program described here was designed to facilitate the adjustment of newly arrived immigrant teens. The aim of the program is to make it easier for adolescents to adjust to their new environment through creative group work around identity issues. The program also seeks to improve intergroup relations in multiethnic schools. The workshops are inspired both from playback theater and from Boal's form theater which emphasizes the collective transformation of the singular experience. The qualitative assessment of the program effects on the adolescents suggests that the workshops constitute a safe space of expression, in which the team and the ritual nature of the play hold the participants. The workshops facilitate the representation of the multiplicity of values in the adolescent world and invite them to reconsider the way in which they interact, with their environment, without splitting between "us" and "them," but rather creating solidarities around issues of social justice. The workshops also address the life transformation associated both with adolescence and migration and help the elaboration of the losses linked to the migratory journey and the construction of a hybrid identity.
authors.affiliation: Département de psychiatrie transculturelle pour enfants, Hôpital de Montréal pour enfants.
authors.forename: Cécile
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rousseau
authors.forename: Marie-France
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Gauthier
authors.forename: Maryse
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Benoît
authors.forename: Louise
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lacroix
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Moran
authors.forename: Musuk
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Viger Rojas
authors.forename: Dominique
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bourassa
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D004324:Drama; D006801:Humans; D015397:Program Evaluation; D012036:Refugees; D012574:Schools; D012933:Social Identification; D014171:Transients and Migrants