Drama-in-Education for Understanding: an Investigation from the Perspective of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Mediation
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Drama‑in‑Education for Understanding: an Investigation from the Perspective of Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Mediation Shuangshuang Xu1 · Luca Tateo2 Received: 24 August 2020 / Revised: 26 October 2020 / Accepted: 27 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Drama in education (DiE) is a lively and productive area of art entering into education. This article tries to establish dialogues between DiE and psychology by revisiting the phenomenological world opened by DiE from the theoretical lens of cultural psychology of semiotic mediation. First, we propose to distinguish three main approaches in DiE towards production of new understandings and conceptualize them into different models of meaning making processes from the lens of cultural psychology. Based on the three approaches, we will theorize participants’ experience in DiE into three layers: the layer of everyday, dramatic, and existential. Each layer of experience contains unique potential to produce signs from different generalization process, and the three approaches can be mapped out on different interacting zones between layers. To illuminate the theoretical discussion, the case study of a DiE workshop “The green child” is used to investigate the characteristics of its artistic form and structure, in launching participants into travelling among the three layers of experiences and in facilitating different levels of affective generalization for aesthetic experience to emerge. Keywords Drama in education · Cultural psychology · Semiotic mediation · Existential affectivity · Affective generalization
Introduction The Main Characteristic of Drama in Education Drama in education (DiE) emerges as an interdisciplinary area between drama and education. DiE generally refers to using art of drama to support and facilitate learning in a collective educational context. Along the history of drama’s entry into educational areas, different values have been emphasized: speech training, language learning, classroom * Shuangshuang Xu [email protected] 1
Aalborg University & IBEF, Aalborg, Denmark
2
University of Oslo & Federal University of Bahia, Oslo, Norway
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liberalization, physical training, and personal development (Bolton 2007). In this article, we are interested to discuss the ways DiE contributes to the development of new understandings in children. For this sake, we start from Heggstad (2019) definition of DiE, which highlights essential characteristics: an art subject for co-creative experience and learning. Through body and voice, fantasy and imagination, we are identifying with portrayed characters and situations and are learning and expressing ourselves in new ways. We alternate between spontaneity and structure. We are creating and transforming form and structure and reflecting on play events and play actions both within and outside the play. (p. 2) According to this definition, DiE is a co-creative and co-constructive learning process between participants and teacher, distinct from childr
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