Drama’s Ways of Learning

In the US, a number of new learning paradigms seem to bear significant resemblance to the learning acquired through doing drama, an area which has not been addressed by drama educators there. Even in other countries experiencing increased research activity in drama education, some writers still believe that basic questions about learning through drama have not been adequately defined or understood. These conceptual gaps hamper research and the possibility of focused dialogue among practitioners. This article surveys relevant literature on the question of how people learn through doing drama, and proposes a construct to describe this learning process. According to the scheme discussed, drama is considered a process of creating imaginary worlds, wherein the perspectives afforded by these worlds are the bases for learning through drama. The proposed construct conceptualises the experience of the actor beginning with an inner process of feelings and imagination, developing through metaphoric thinking and perspectival activity, into an existential process of constructivist learning. Drama, even more than other storytelling and other fictional processes, employs the world-creating and hypothetical processes some have attributed to basic learning processes, which permeate daily life.