Process drama in modern school's curriculum

Rimac Jurinović, Maša. (2018). Process drama in modern school's curriculum. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Croatian Language and Literature.
(Poslijediplomski doktorski studij hrvatske kulture) [mentor Gruić, Iva and Hrvatić, Neven].

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Abstract

Modern educational and teaching practices require new approaches to achieving educational and teaching objectives. Today, it is no longer possible to envision education being carried out in schools, without taking into consideration the achievements of pedagogy and didactics. On the other hand, nor is it possible to actively participate in the process of education, without taking into consideration the achievements of modern society. In order to comprehend the context of the current educational practices, this dissertation studies pedagogy and its key determiners. In order to understand the educational practices themselves, it is also necessary to study the history of pedagogy and the development of education in relation to pedagogic and educational accomplishments. This dissertation also deals with the concept of modern elementary education, the planning and creation of elementary school curriculum, and the concept of methodological approaches and new ways of ensuring success for every student, in accordance with his or her capabilities. Today, we define and measure students' accomplishments via their competencies, which is prescribed by the National curriculum framework for pre-school education, general compulsory and secondary education. Thus, it is necessary to point out the latest theoretical understandings and complement them with the practical know-how about the competencies of both the teachers and students. This dissertation extensively studies the concept of curriculum in theory, while the research carried out aims at contributing to the educational practices, as the National curriculum framework is an umbrella document that is being implemented, checked and adjusted in schools. Finally, a special attention is paid to the school curriculum as well, since this document and concept proscribes how to improve education in schools and how to make schools stand out owing to the quality of education that they provide. It is the school curriculum that makes schools distinctive and recognisable in their approach to education. The school head and his or her management team play the key role in developing the school curriculum – however, the teachers' contributions must not be neglected either. Moreover, they should be encouraged to participate more actively in the creation of activities implemented by the school curriculum. We focused on one of the possible approaches to enriching the school curriculum - the use of drama activities in educational practices. Although drama in education is present in Croatian schools, it is not systematically applied in the process of achieving educational and teaching goals, while it is an integral part of the school curricula around the world. In spite of this, a certain number of teachers in Croatian schools engage in the practical use of drama in their lessons; however, these lessons are not held on a regular basis. In addition to this, drama education is rarely the subject of scientific or professional research in Croatia, which is the reason for terminological ambiguity. So, in first part of the investigation presented in this dissertation, we aim to put an end to this phenomenon but also to provide the drama educators and theorists with systematically organised terminology, applicable in drama education inside and outside schools. In the second part of the investigation, we examine the presence of different drama fields in Curriculum for elementary school and National curriculum framework. The aim of this part of the investigation is to analyse the practical use of drama in today’s schools. The third, the most elaborated part of the investigation, deals with the use of process drama in schools. The use of drama in education is not subject-limited; it may be cross-curricular, that is, drama in education can be used for the purpose of inter-subject correlation, which is proclaimed by this dissertation. Process drama is a method of teaching and learning through drama with a specific feature – the imaginary dramatic world gets created during the process of dramatic play. There are several recognisable features of process drama: the participation of the whole class, lack of audience and active participation of the teacher. Furthermore, process drama is organised in stages that consist of dramatic play and non-dramatic parts – stepping out of the role is what makes non-dramatic episodes possible. Due to its structure, process drama can integrate very different teaching and educational goals. The effectiveness of process drama has been explored worldwide and it has proved to be effective and useful. Based on this scientific evidence, process drama has been chosen as a methodological approach for the empirical part of the investigation presented in this dissertation, which is structured around the question: can process drama be used to encourage prosocial behaviour and decrease aggressive behaviour in schools. Therefore, the third part of the investigation has the following aims: (1) to investigate if the use of process drama can affect the development of prosocial behaviour, and the decrease of aggressive behaviour in schools; (2) to investigate (possible) differences induced by two different approaches towards main problem: direct approach and an analogy-based approach (The direct approach uses the motives and scenarios that the students can easily relate to in their personal and everyday lives. The analogy-based approach uses various way of distancing (in time and/or space) from the key issue.); (3) to investigate the students' attitude towards the use of process drama in schools. For the purposes of this research, three hypotheses have been proposed: The use of process drama will stimulate the development of prosocial behaviour and the decrease of antisocial behaviour of elementary school students.; Direct approach and an analogy-based approach will have different impact on students. (The aim is to establish which approach is more effective.); The students will have a positive attitude towards the use of process drama in their classroom. The research investigated the relationship between the independent variables, direct and analogy-based approaches in process drama, and the dependent variables of prosocial behaviour and aggressive behaviour. In addition, the differences between the impact of the direct and analogy-based approaches were compared. The students' attitude towards the use of process drama is explained in the descriptive analysis. The research was carried out in one elementary school in Zagreb, six classes were included, comprising 12-to-14-year-old students (seventh-graders and eighth-graders). Total number of included participants was 124. The quantitative data for the analysis were collected at the beginning and at the end of the process drama workshops. The qualitative data were collected during the research via various process drama techniques and the constructed attitudes scale. The data were subjected to a statistical descriptive analysis and an analysis of covariance. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the use of process drama did not affect the development of prosocial behaviour or the decrease of aggressive behaviour among the students. The difference in the manifested aggressive behaviour between the group subjected to the analogy-based approach and the other two groups represents a statistically significant finding. However, this was found to be an artefact. The results of the qualitative analysis confirmed that the students had a positive attitude toward the use of process drama techniques, regardless of the approach. Because the findings did not suggest that the use of process drama affected students’ behaviour, it the final discussion different aspects of understanding of process drama and the possibilities of its use in educational context, are examined. The students’ feelings of pleasure and success should not be ignored in such evaluation of this methodological approach, because they create positive atmosphere in classroom.

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