This project was led by my BCU supervisor Dr Eleni Kanira. Drama in Education (DiE) is about a pedagogical process that seeks to balance both the form and content of drama. Drama in Education can engage participants with an element of living through the drama, whereby they bring themselves to the dramatic experience to learn about issues and concepts raised in the drama and through drama.
Importantly Drama in Education relies on engaging participants in fiction – fiction that they are creating themselves – and this provides a form of protection, which offers an educational, rather than a therapeutic perspective. Drama in Education in this sense creates a space for participants to understand the world in which they live.
We believe that this approach lends itself to enabling an exploration of content from other subject disciplines, such as the humanities or languages. This is particularly useful for making difficult, or controversial issues, meaningful and accessible to young people.
The most interesting part of the day was taking part in the #Mimesis in education workshop, led by Flavia Gallo of Università Roma Tre.
"Mimetic learning, learning by imitation, constitutes one of the most important forms of learning. Mimetic learning does not, however, just denote mere imitation or copying: Rather, it is a process by which the act of relating to other persons and worlds in a mimetic way leads to an en-hancement of one’s own world view, action, and behaviour. Mimetic learning is productive; it is related to the body, and it establishes a connection between the individual and the world as well as other persons; it creates practical knowledge, which is what makes it constitutive of social, artistic, and practical action. Mimetic learning is cultural learning, and as such it is crucial to teaching and education (Wulf, 2004; 2005)."
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