Last Friday, Ph.D. candidate, Sam Tanner (Curriculum and Instruction) invited two students from Roseville Area High School to a "Teaching Multicultural Literature in the Secondary Schools" class. The students, Zach Schroeder and Maggie Strahan spoke about their experiences in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) theatrical investigation into whiteness at their high school. At the event on Friday facilitated by Sam Tanner, the students participated in the class as it worked through discussions of cultural pluralism, critical whiteness, and the literary imagination.

As both the instructor of the course and primary researcher organizing the student project, Tanner found an intersection between the work that he was doing in the high school and his doctoral pursuits. The project is the site of his dissertation and will attempt to understand how YPAR might be utilized through the artifice of theater in order to investigate the study of whiteness in a suburban, public high school.