Abstract
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.
Highlights
Vignette: Newcomers Arriving on a TrainThis vignette exemplifies a short sequence from a process drama focusing democracy, migration and critical thinking in civic education in a Swedish lower secondary school.The students in grade nine huddle together with closed eyes on chairs symbolizing a train compartment
This section is not strictly tied to the research questions, instead the results are organised according to the three phases of the analysis: (1) Pedagogical actions, (2) Students’ actions in relation to an activity with a playful format, and (3) The process drama activity in relation to civic subject content
We wanted to explore this further in a Swedish context. This small case study consisted of four civic education lessons in lower secondary school taught through process drama with students with no previous drama experience
Summary
The students in grade nine huddle together with closed eyes on chairs symbolizing a train compartment. They are in role as refugees approaching a new country. The drama pedagogue narrates: When the train journey came to an end the passengers looked forward to a pleasant reception they would get at the train station when they arrived. They would immediately fill their pockets with all the things they until now only had dreamt about
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