Reflections on Teaching Process Drama: A Critical Inquiry into Our Practice with/as Educators

Abstract

This paper explores our experiences as drama-in-education professors teaching educators how to create and facilitate process dramas (Bolton & Heathcote, 1995; Neelands & Goode, 2000; O’Neill, 1995) in their classrooms. A process drama involves multimodal embodied drama explorations covering a specific topic that the facilitator(s) would like the participants to explore. In this narrative of practice, we present an example of process drama that our university students created and facilitated that broached critical topics surrounding social justice for their students to explore. The university students ranged from teacher candidates in a Bachelor of Education program to those with many years of experience completing a Master of Education. In our experiences teaching drama-in-education courses, we have encountered ethical dilemmas in the creation and facilitation of process dramas. Specifically, in the topics our students have selected and their positionalities as facilitators. In this article, through narrating our teaching experiences and what we learned from them, our goal is to call for artists and educators, like ourselves, to be more thoughtful in approaching the creation and facilitation of process dramas, especially when teaching people with different subjectivities and positionalities.