The (Out)Laws & Justice curriculum in partnership with the NYU Program in Educational Theatre, NYU and the NYU Partnership Schools Program held a Professional Development Workshop on using process drama and primary sources to teach American history. Participants included in-service social studies teachers, New York University students preparing to teach social studies, and educators interested in the topic. Seventh-graders were invited to demonstrate what process drama looks like in real time, giving workshop participants an opportunity to see young people step into role and figure out what happened in a specific historic event. These three clips give a glimpse of their work and their thinking.
The whole-group drama process is essentially, as the great drama teacher Dorothy Heathcote frequently described it, a lived at life-rate and operations from a discovery-at-this-moment basis rather than being memory based. —Planning Process Drama: Enriching teaching and learning, by Pamela Bowell and Brian S Heal.
Participants in a process drama take on roles that are required for the enquiry, investigation or exploration of the subject matter of the drama. The task of the teacher is to find ways in which to connect the students with the content and enable them to develop responses to it through active engagement and reflection. —Planning Process Drama: Enriching teaching and learning, by Pamela Bowell and Brian S Heal.
As we set about creating process dramas with our students, we can hold in the back of our mind that a developing body of understanding seems to support the drama teachers’ long-held belief that children are predisposed to learn through drama, because the evidence seems to be showing that our brains need to ‘rehearse’ life in order for us to learn. Process drama creates no-penalty, fictional circumstances in which we can do just that. —Planning Process Drama: Enriching teaching and learning, by Pamela Bowell and Brian S Heal.