Process Drama in Civic Education: Balancing Student Input and Learning Outcomes in a Playful Format
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Education, Stockholm University, SE 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
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Educ. Sci. 2019, 9(3), 231; https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9030231
Received: 1 June 2019 / Revised: 26 August 2019 / Accepted: 26 August 2019 / Published: 31 August 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovative Methods in Teaching in Secondary Education)
The purpose is to investigate process drama for teaching civics, mainly democracy and migration. Process drama implies students and teacher to take on roles, to explore a subject content collectively. The study is based on a secondary school educational initiative where a drama pedagogue was invited to address civics through process drama. Four civic lessons were video recorded and analyzed through an activity theory framework. From this perspective, process drama can be understood as two activities with different motives/objects, the educational and the fictional, where the fictional activity should have a playful format. The results show that the dialogical approach used by the drama pedagogue created a democratic opportunity and also established the playful format. The students’ engagement was notably high. However, it was obvious there were no challenging or probing questions being asked by the drama pedagogue or the civics teacher, neither in nor out of role. As a consequence, the full learning potential of process drama in civics education could not be achieved. We suggest a co-teaching approach between civic teachers and drama pedagogues, to overcome challenges in using process drama in civic education for learning objectives to be attained.
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Keywords:
civic education; drama in education; process drama; lower secondary school; playful format; teacher-in-role
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Hallgren, E.; Österlind, E. Process Drama in Civic Education: Balancing Student Input and Learning Outcomes in a Playful Format. Educ. Sci. 2019, 9, 231. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9030231
AMA Style
Hallgren E, Österlind E. Process Drama in Civic Education: Balancing Student Input and Learning Outcomes in a Playful Format. Education Sciences. 2019; 9(3):231. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9030231
Chicago/Turabian StyleHallgren, Eva; Österlind, Eva. 2019. "Process Drama in Civic Education: Balancing Student Input and Learning Outcomes in a Playful Format" Educ. Sci. 9, no. 3: 231. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci9030231
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