Project 2000 Student Nurses Take the Stage with Interactive Drama to Facilitate Health Promotion

SUMMARY

‘Choose Health Over Ill Health Choose Education 2000’ encapsulates what a group of Project 2000 student nurses and their tutor Mutel Kerr did, and it is appropriately expressed by the acronym: CHOICE 2000.

This paper gives an account of a unique project/initiative in using interactive drama with student nurses to facilitate health promotion with pupils at secondary school level. I decided to use interactive drama with the student nurses both to empower them to understand and internalize the issues and processes of health promotion and making choices, and to pass on this empowerment and understanding to the school pupils with whom they worked. That students were somewhat comparable in age helped the transfer and identification, and that role play/interactive drama were involved caught everyone's imaginations and involved them actively, so that they learned at a deep level.

The project, which uses Participant Action Research (PAR), Altricher (1993), assesses the educative effects of interactive drama on students engaged in the project and secondary school pupils in Colchester, England, the recipients of the drama.

I argue that the application of interactive drama in health promotion will enable student nurses to communicate effectively important messages to young audiences and to encourage learning and changes in behaviour.