Distancing at close range: making strange devices in Dorothy Heathcote's process drama Teaching Political Awareness Through Drama

Abstract

By refocusing traditions preoccupied with stimulating critical reflection, the article seeks to contribute to a rekindling of a socially oriented drama teaching and to add to the reservoir of teacher reflection in the field. A passage of a drama by Dorothy Heathcote is analysed, in which the theme of pollution is the concrete starting point, whilst the governing idea is concerned with a concept of politics: ‘to discourse about why it is that some people seem by right to be able to decide what shall happen to others’ (Heathcote, letter to author, 2007). But the main focus of the article is to investigate the notion of distancing in drama education; the analytical lens is rhetoric theory, and the method of analysis is a close reading of a three-minute video sequence. This article discusses aspects of distancing that can be regarded as rhetorical devices, thus regarding distancing as a more composite aesthetic device than it is commonly considered in drama teaching, where it is seen primarily as a tool for protection. In choosing a rhetorical perspective, the article sets out to demonstrate an analytical approach, which, in its attention to detail, discloses not only artistic and pedagogic choices made on a structural level but also in the exercise of language.