Participatory drama: bridging cultural understanding and Tang poetry teaching

ABSTRACT

This article adopts Geertz's view of cultural analysis and embodiment theory, creating a theoretical lens to explore how participatory drama can support students in their understanding of the culture connoted in Tang poetry – a significant cultural heritage of China. A case study was conducted on fourth-grade (10–11 years old) primary school students in Shanghai. The findings show that participatory drama can help students perceive poetic images with their physical senses, awaken the cultural experience connoted by the body to locate meaning, and reflect on the poet's spiritual world through their bodily experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory drama
• Tang poetry teaching
• embodied practice
• cultural understanding

In the Confucian tradition, poetry is regarded as an ideal medium for education. As Confucius once said: ‘It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused’. Poetry can stimulate people's emotions and desires. Yeh (2008, 121) believes this can be further defined as an individual's deep reflections on the poet's emotion, will and spirit once touched by the mood of the poetry.¹ Tang poetry is one of the most valuable cultural inheritances of Chinese history.² Its distinctive aesthetics, delicate language, and diverse styles constitute great literature in itself, as well as a rich topic for Chinese literary education (Lin 2023). Yeh (2008) suggests that there is a common characteristic among great Tang poets: they have devoted their whole lives to improving their spiritual qualities. These qualities are captured in their works and, as such, continue to inspire generations of readers.

The Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) regards Tang poetry as an important medium for contemporary Chinese students, teaching them to embrace the spirit of their national culture.³ To this end, understanding the cultural connotations of Tang poetry is regarded as a significant teaching objective in Chinese literacy education in K12. This can be further developed into two sub-goals: (a) to understand and interpret the text with a specific focus on the key imageries and how they represent the poet's emotion and will; (b) to learn of the poet's personal spirit when creating the poem, with contextual support from background histories (Huang 2020; Feng and Zhang 2013). There is a tradition in K12 schools in mainland China that teachers use an expository approach in classroom teaching to achieve both goals stated above (Wang 2021).⁴ On the one hand, this method brings efficiency to students’ acquisition of objective knowledge such as word formations, grammar, rhetoric, etc.; on the other hand, it raises de-contextual and disembodied problems, as students are removed from their lived experience (Ding 2009). This implies that exposition as a traditional teaching approach is ineffective for teaching cultural-centered knowledge (Wang 2021).

This research attempts to explore the possibility of participatory drama as a complementary pedagogical tool to compensate for the lack of cultural experience in the existing Chinese language curriculum. The researcher follows Geertz’s (1983) cultural analysis method and regards classic poetry as a series of cultural symbols, carrying meanings that are self-weaved by human beings. In order to understand the culture contained in classic poetry, the interpreter needs to enter the world in which the creator lived and interpret the meaning in it. Meanwhile, the researcher regards participatory drama as an embodied pedagogy (Perry and Medina 2011; O’Toole and Dunn 2020), which can encourage students to take the ‘body’ as the subject of cognition and actively participate in situations to explore different human relationships. In order to explore the application of participatory drama in context, the researcher adapted three poems by Wang Wei as teaching materials and conducted workshops in a public school in Shanghai.

Cultural understanding: Geertz's view of cultural analyses

Geertz (1983) understands art as a cultural system. He believes that technical analysis is a very limited approach for understanding art – instead, one should go into the context of the work to explore its meaning. He further explains that any art form is ‘a way of experiencing’, which ‘brings a particular cast of mind out into the world of objects, where man can look at it’ (Geertz 1983, 99). To a degree, art is essentially a human self-creation of meaning. Classic Chinese poetry as a genre of artwork reflects the sprit, emotion and will of the ancient Chinese writers in their living stories, thus belonging to this category of meaning creation (Yang 1993).

Geertz (1983, 118) also emphasised the importance of the interpreter in understanding works of art, stating ‘meaning … arises from use’: meaning will be revealed only with the interpreter's current ability to ‘see, hear, touch, and even taste and smell’. This is especially important when interpreting cultural heritage. For example, when appreciating medieval paintings, people from the fifteenth century would be very likely to interpret beauty differently from people in modern societies, due to the different cultural systems possessed by the creator and the interpreter respectively. In other words, people can only proceed from their own cultural situations to interpret and appreciate a work of art. In a similar vein, contemporary students can hardly appreciate a poem in the manner of the ancient Chinese writers. Therefore, the purpose of modern students learning classic poetry is not to copycat the poet's ideological perspective at their time of living, but to be able to absorb and adapt these values into their own lives for their own good.

In general, from the perspective of Geertz's cultural analysis, understanding a piece of art requires entrance into the specific cultural context it represents. Meanwhile, it is necessary to respect the interpreter's own cultural context and subjective experience, or as Geertz (2009, 20) states, to ‘live lives in two worlds’. Although Geertz does not explicitly use the term ‘embodiment’ to describe the way in which cultural understanding is achieved, his argument implies that cultural understanding is itself an embodied act.

Participatory drama, embodiment and cultural understanding

The manner in which participatory drama can support students’ cultural understanding is in close relationship with embodiment (Duffy 2014; Xu and Zhou 2021). In this section, the researcher will firstly explain embodiment, then discuss the characteristics of participatory drama from the perspective of embodiment and, finally, explore the role of participatory drama in teaching cultural understanding.

Embodiment is a loosely constructed concept that appears in studies across disciplines. In its simplest form, embodiment suggests that cognition occurs in the coupling of the body, mind, and environment (Shapiro 2010, 3). Research has demonstrated that cognition is grounded in bodily interactions with the environment and that abstract concepts are tied to the body's sensory and motor systems. As Mark Johnson (2008, 11) puts it, higher-level thinking about meaning is always ‘shaped by our abilities to perceive things, manipulate objects, move our bodies in space’. Gibbs (2006, 46) further suggests that the body and its movements are an important medium through which we perceive culture, as he argues ‘bodies are not culture-free objects, because all aspects of embodied experience are shaped by cultural processes’. That is to say, cognition relies on various perceptual experiences of the body and is embedded in a broad cultural context.

The definition of embodiment lends itself well to participatory drama, which is a teaching method that entails a thoughtful awareness of body, space and social context (Winston 2022; Piazzoli 2019). Learning through participatory drama means that participants can bring the mind, senses, body, imagination, reflection and social cognition into the construction process of meaning understanding. Drama educators explain the significance of embodiment in teaching and learning in alignment with the characteristics of drama (Winston 2022; DeCoursey 2020). Winston (2022) believes that embodiment can stimulate students to directly perceive the meaning of the text of a drama play in the movement of the body. He agrees with Johnson’s argument that words are not the only source of meaning (Winston 2022, 37). When students act in a drama situation with body movement, their physical bodies can sense the meaning of the play.

Matthew DeCoursey (2020) argues that students’ self-awareness in drama situations stimulates their intrinsic motivation to actively explore meaning. He believes that students can maximise their perceptual abilities only when they learn for their own interests rather than for an instrumental purpose. He cites Roland Barthes’ (1977) metaphor of ‘strolling’ to further explain this argument. Barthes believes that the best mood for reading is comparable to strolling by a creek in a desert town in North Africa (DeCoursey 2020, 39). In DeCoursey's view, this physical state of ‘strolling’ can lead to more cognitive responses than walking with a specific purpose. This is because an individual walking without purpose is free to maintain a diverse attention and mobilise the body to interact and connect with their ongoing situation, therefore receiving more information.

Participatory drama has been applied in education practice related to cultural understanding for its feature of embodiment (Piazzoli 2019; Winston and Lin 2015; Lo 2013). Piazzoli (2019) argues that culture is not explicit, but embedded in the individual's body. While drama activates the physical experience of students, it also awakens cultural experiences in their bodies. Winston and Lin (2015) recognise that students are more likely to rely on cultural habit,⁵ rather than cultural knowledge, to interpret the meaning of text in the process of approaching the culture embedded in the story through bodily experience. Winston and Lin (2015) give the same workshop to local students based on the same traditional Chinese stories in two different cultural contexts, namely Britain and Taiwan. They find that children's physical responses are influenced by cultural habits. Another drama educator from Taiwan conducted a similar study in which she told traditional Chinese stories to British students; she identified that when students use their bodies to act as characters in stories from a different culture, they are already interpreting this culture in an embodied manner (Lo 2013). Lo (2013) further stated that the performance of participatory drama is a hybrid one – the student participants retain two kinds of body consciousness simultaneously in their performance: the original body consciousness (for example, as a British student) and the character's body consciousness (for example, as a character in a traditional Chinese folktale). These two types intersect, allowing students to use their own cultural experience to interpret characters.

These empirical evidences support the argument that participatory drama is an embodiment-centered teaching method, which can help students to utilise the cultural resources of the body to understand the culture of themselves and others. Aligned with other theoretical arguments presented previously, the researcher perceives Tang poetry as a symbol that carries culture. To this end, cultural understanding of Tang poetry may also be achieved through participatory drama. However, very few studies in China focus on the application of participatory drama in supporting students’ learning of the culture embedded in classic poetry. Instead, they examine how theatre can help contemporary students better connect with ancient texts through the lens of receptive aesthetics – take the work of Wang (2017), for example. Recognising such a research gap, this study aims to apply Wang Wei's poems as teaching materials to explore the way in which participatory drama, as an embodied approach, can help student participants to develop an embodied understanding of the culture connoted in poetry. My research questions are as follows:

1. To what degree can participatory drama support Chinese students to recognise the culture embedded in classic poetry through embodiment?

2. Can students develop personal cultural interpretations through their embodiment?

Teaching material: Wang Wei's landscape poetry

Wang Wei is one of the most famous poets of the Tang dynasty era. My workshop drew its material from three of Wang Wei's poems taken from his Wang Chuan collection, namely ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’, ‘The White Gravel Shoal’ and ‘The Cornel Riverside’.⁶ These poems were written during a period when, due to his failure as a politician, the poet had decided to live as a recluse. This was also the time when Wang Wei lost his respected mentor, Zhang Jiuling. Wang painfully witnessed Zhang's suffering due to political persecution. At this time, he returned to his hometown of Wang Chuan to live in isolation. During his stay, Wang Wei used his talent to design and build scenes around his house and yard, as demonstrated in the titles of his aforementioned poems. Here, Wang Wei found his inner peace, achieving a ‘harmonious state’ through the modulation his behaviour in two key ways: in his social life, he worked actively to serve his people; in his spiritual life, he was free from external disturbance, coexisting with the natural scenery and drawing life experience through his appreciation of the landscape (Yang 1993).

I selected the Wang Chuan collection as my primary material for the following reasons. Firstly, Wang Wei, the author, is regarded as a role model of the Chinese writing establishment. The characters and philosophy expressed in his political life were repeatedly imitated by later poets, and his work is considered to be representative of traditional Chinese national culture (Yang 1993). Secondly, Wang Wei evokes a vivid sense of scenery in his work through the use of imagery. This could be reconstructed very effectively in drama activities, enabling the students to use their bodies and creativity to re-image the text. Finally, it is also important to acknowledge that my study was inspired by Wang's (2018) teaching plan.

Methodology

This research utilises a case study as its methodology, inviting fifteen fourth-year students (10–11 years old) from a primary school in Shanghai to participate. I conducted a total of four teaching sessions, each session comprising 90 min. The participating students all belong to the Han Chinese ethnic group and stated no religious affiliation. Prior to the workshop, these students had studied poems by Wang Wei in the Chinese language curriculum: they were able to recite the poems and translate them literally into modern Chinese, but were unable to express the implicit meaning of the imagery (Wang 2021). In other words, they did not explore what Roland Barthes (1972) calls the associative, emotive meaning, that is, ‘connotation’.

The data collection of this study drew on drama conventions, participant observation, video recordings, interviews and field notes. The collection of multiple sources of data was undertaken to ensure evidence corroboration in further analysis (Yin 2009, 116). The studies research ethics follow the East China Normal University's criteria; no problems were encountered regarding the filming of children and the sharing of images within the defined parameters of my research. After data collection, I followed a two-step coding process that encompassed a general coding process (axial coding and selective coding) and then thematic analysis. I identified themes that share common ideas by axial coding (Matthews and Ross 2010). Following this, I used selective coding to choose the most representative data in response to the inductive themes (Matthews and Ross 2010, 317). After the initial coding, I then adopted thematic analysis to classify the data (Boyatzis 1998, 139).

Discussion of findings: interpreting imageries through the body

Mark Johnson (2015) states that poetry is the art of expressing qualitative experience through imagery. At a basic level, qualitative experience is what Dewey (1930) termed the interactive experience between a human and their environment. The meaning of this experience is not something that needs to be stated – rather, it is directly known to us as soon as we participate in our interactions with the world. For example, when driving a car, we naturally stop at a red traffic light but keep driving at green lights. The meaning of traffic lights does not require explanation. From this perspective, Johnson (2015) argues that people sense the imagery of poetry through the body and construct their understanding based on perceptual experience. In the discourse of drama education, DeCoursey (2020) emphasis that students’ perceptual experiences are more intense in drama situations than in everyday life. This is because students are able to consciously amplify their own perceptions in a drama situation: in order for the imaginative play to continue, they have to continually devote energy and emotion to constructing and physically interacting with the situation. This is also what the director Zamir (2014, 53) describes as ‘existential amplification’.

The next two activities respond to how amplified perceptual experiences can help students understand imagery. In one activity, the group were invited to browse the landscapes that Wang Wei saw in Wang Chuan. Students worked in pairs, classifying themselves as either a ‘guide’ or as ‘blind’. The ‘guide’ introduced their ‘blind’ partner, whose eyes were kept closed, to Wang Chuan through the imagery written on the card (Figure 1). Through their sensory system, they experienced the qualities of those worlds and build up an intuitive understanding of imagery. For example, the students in the extract below can ‘touch’ the cloud and stream, ‘listen’ to the voice of the waterfall and ‘smell’ the delicate fragrance of the bamboo.

Let's step over, and now we have a waterfall in front of us. Listen! …… (The ‘guide’ also closed her eyes and listened). One more step. All right! There's a cloud in front of you now. Come on, reach out, feel it, soft, like cotton candy. (The ‘blind’ partner keeps his eyes closed and says: It feels like a VR movie!)

We have come to the stream, come, touch it. (The ‘blind’ partner says: the water in the stream is cold.)

We arrive at the bamboo grove, come and smell it, the bamboo smells nice and fresh. (The ‘guide’ makes a ‘rustling’ sound). (Field Notes S1)

In another activity, the students were provided a line each from Wang Wei's poem (‘Bamboo Grove Villa’, ‘The White Gravel Shoal’, and ‘The Cornel Riverside’). Then, they were told to match their line with a scene and pair with others who shared the same idea.⁷ Once the students finished ordering their lines, I found that none of the groups had composed the ‘correct’ poem; they either placed the lines in the wrong order (marked with slashes), or picked lines that were not in the original poems (marked with underlined lines). Instead of being told the original poem, the students were asked to demonstrate a still image based on their formation (Figures 2–4).

Figure 1. The ‘guide’ introduced images to the ‘blind’ (video S1[3] 06:47).

Figure 2. Students as grass on the left and right; students as stream and laundry lady in the middle.

Figure 3. Student as drinking poet in the middle; other students as trees and flowers.

Figure 4. Student on the left as a poet with Gu Qin (a Chinese instrument); student on the right as a guest; student in the middle as a small animal listening to the poet playing the Gu Qin; student lying down as grasses.

Table

‘The White Gravel Shoal’ group:
清浅白石滩	Flow clear, so white the pebbles seem
绿蒲向堪把	The sedge springs up, a greenish sight
浣纱明月下	Wash linen under the moon
家住水东西	The girls who live nearby the stream
‘The Cornel Riverside’ group:
深林人不知	In the deep woods where I’m unknown
至此芙蓉杯	I’ll put their seeds in lotus cups
明月来相照	Only the bright moon peeps at me.
复如花更开	As the flowers bloom once again
‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ group:
独坐幽篁里	Sitting among bamboos alone
山中傥留客	If in the hills my friend remain.
弹琴复长啸	I Play my lute and croon carefree.
结实红且绿	The cornel bears fruit red and green;

After the group demonstration, Boy 5 (Figure 4, the student on the right as a guest), Boy 2 (Figure 4, the student lying down as grasses) and Girl 6 (Figure 4, the student on the right as woods) recognised that the lines they were holding did not match the scene. Boy 5 stated: ‘my line “山间倘留客” (“If in the hills my friends remain”) must not match the scene “独坐幽篁里” (“Sitting among bamboos alone”)’. He continued, ‘the scene our group showed was a poet sitting alone in a bamboo forest playing the Gu Qin. If the poet's friends stayed (as described in my line), how can it be said that the poet sat alone without company?’ Boy 2 considered that the red and green fruits in his line ‘结实红且绿’ (‘The cornel bears fruit red and green’) did not match the imagery of the bamboo forest.⁸ Girl 6 felt that her line, ‘深林人不知’ (‘In the deep woods where I’m unknown’), was more appropriate for the ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ group, because the deep forest should be a bamboo forest not a flowering bush – bamboos are much taller and denser when growing together. The students’ responses reflected Johnson’s (2008) claim that bodily experience and higher propositional thinking are along the same continuum. Reflection, judgement and propositional knowledge ‘cannot be understood as coming to us from outside of ourselves, from the words of a teacher, for example’ (Winston 2015, 85).

In their book ‘Metaphors We Live By’ (2003), Johnson and Lakoff argue that human beings are able to understand information in the environment they are in at the moment because they have had similar physical experiences. For example, we can all walk from point A to point B, so we can understand time lapse through this metaphor. In addition, they believe that a community will have common bodily experiences that influence the formation of their way of thinking. As embodied cognition researchers state, the mapping between bodily states and mental representations is derived from the meaning given by our social and cultural environment – in other words, the way we make sense of things is linked to our cultural experiences (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 2017). In the following example, the students’ discussion of the meaning of the ‘moon’ reflected the way in which their physical movement in the drama activity evoked the cultural experiences embedded in their bodies. The students could then use this experience to understand the emotions that the poet places in the imagery. Following the previous activity, after Boy 5, Boy 2 and Girl 6 each switched to the group they thought was appropriate, Girl 7, who had the line ‘明月来相照’ (‘Only the bright moon peeps at me’) still struggled to identify which group her text belonged to. She said that her line suited both ‘The Cornel Riverside’ and ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ groups, because ‘the description of the moonlight is just the background … it seems right to say that the moonlight can shine on both hillsides of flowers and bamboo forests’. When doubts arose, Girl 7 was not forced to switch to ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’, as Wang Wei's original poem suggested, but encouraged to stay in ‘The Cornel Riverside’ group, despite the fact that this created an imbalance in the number of lines in each group (5 lines in ‘The Cornel Riverside’ and only 3 in ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’). Then, the three groups were invited to create a ten-second performance, this time adding sounds to their scenes.

Table

‘The Cornel Riverside’ group:
结实红且绿	The cornel bears fruit red and green
复如花更开	As the flowers bloom once again
山中傥留客	If in the hills my friend remain
至此芙蓉杯	I’ll put their seeds in lotus cups
明月来相照	Only the bright moon peeps at me
‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ group:
独坐幽篁里	Sitting among bamboos alone
弹琴复长啸	I Play my lute and croon carefree
深林人不知	In the deep woods where I’m unkown

I transcribe ‘The Cornel Riverside’ and ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ group's performances here, as they may help us speculate as to why Girl 7 eventually changed her mind.

In ‘The Cornel Riverside’ group, five members made the following performance with sounds:

one as a poet reciting a poem, one as the blowing wind circulating among the trees, one as fruits falling from the trees and hitting the ground, one as the shinning moonlight (Girl 7), and one as the rushing spring.

In the ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ group, three members made the following performance with sounds, and in sequence:

The first is birds chirping, the second is the Gu Qin playing repeatedly, and the final sound is the voice of a poet echoing in the valley. (Video S3[5] 00:01–01:08)

After the performance, Girl 7 began to believe that her line was more suitable to the ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ rather than her current scene. In the interview, she stated:

Until I heard the sound of Gu Qin from the ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ group, I felt that the moon must be accompanying Wang Wei who was playing the Gu Qin alone in the bamboo forest, because I know that poets have the habit of playing instruments under the moon, and they like this feeling of loneliness and nobility. (Student interview. Girl 7.12.04)

Ge (2012) explains the meaning of the moon image in ‘Bamboo Grove Villa’ as a medium to express the poet's spiritual pursuit: yearning for tranquillity and staying away from the world of political affairs. In traditional Chinese aesthetics, the moon is an ideal symbol of brightness and purity, perfection and virtue. This meaning of the moon as an image has been firmly carved into the Chinese aesthetic psychology. However, Girl 7 did not initially relate the moon in her line to this – she simply saw the moon as a natural phenomenon, suitable for any scene. Her perception changed, however, when she heard the sound of Gu Qin and saw the poet performing under the moon. In contrast to the claim of embodied cognitive scientists that cultural experiences are naturally and instinctively embedded in the individual's body, researchers in embodied pedagogy believe that the awakening of cultural experiences is predicated on appropriate pedagogical design (Nguyen and Larson 2015). For example, students are purposefully guided to interact with the context and to perceive and imagine the cultural symbols in the context in a variety of ways (visually and aurally).

To extend this point, participatory drama not only provides opportunities for students to perceive and imagine, it also encourages students to externalise what they perceive and imagine through body movement. Cultural experiences embedded in the body have the opportunity to be materialised in the process of bodily representation (Piazzoli 2019). In the role play activity, each student took on the role of an image from a poem, such as ‘Green water plants’ and ‘Flowing water’. Moreover, they were told to take on the role of this image and say a phrase to Wang Wei, who had lost his way in life. I transcribed some of their statements below:

‘Green water plants’: Look at my fluffy green palm, your heart should be lighter too; don't think too much!

‘Flowing water’: Look at this water, how clear it is! It washes your heart and cleans up your mind.

‘Cornel’: You don't have to be afraid. You see, my body has gone through all kinds of wind and rain but I have been saved by miracles. You will also have hope.

‘Gu Qin player’: Wang Wei, don't worry about the affairs of the court, listen to the sound of my guqin. It only has five strings; it is not complicated to play.

‘Bamboo’: Learn the noble character of bamboo, and you will surely succeed.

‘Moon’: My bright moonlight shines on every beautiful thing, come and see, what peaceful scenery! (Video S5[7] 01:59-[6] 03:02)

As with the image of the ‘moon’, in Wang Wei's poems ‘flowing water’, ‘flowers and plants’, ‘bamboo’ and the ‘Gu Qin’ all represent a personal longing for tranquillity and integrity (Ge 2012). The meanings of these images are also related to Chinese cultural traditions. For example, bamboo in the Confucius tradition is used as a metaphor to apprise a man who has high moral standard (Ge 2012). According to the students’ responses, ‘green water plants’ and ‘flowing water’ represent a clean mind and heart, ‘red flowers’ represent hope, and ‘bamboo’ represents integrity. I would like to quote the remarkable words of the student who acted as the Gu Qin player: ‘the Gu Qin only has five strings, therefore it does not sound complicated – so is your (the poet's) life’. Liu (1997) explains that the music of the Gu Qin has five scales, and each scale is played by one string; such a pentatonic is perceived to represent neutrality and peace in Confucianism. The students’ performances demonstrated that they are bound by their culture in their understanding and expression of images, while the bodily representation allows them to speak more clearly about the meaning of cultural symbols.

This section has discussed the manner in which the students perceive the direct and indirect meaning of images in Wang Wei's poems – not just the textual meaning, but the poet's emotion and will as they are embedded in the text. In the following section, I will continue to analyse how the students understand Wang Wei's personal spirit through his poems via embodiment.

Discussion of findings: exploring Wang Wei's spiritual world

It is a challenge for drama educators to understand how students perceive the poet's spiritual world during drama activities. However, the attempt to understand is vital to reveal the potential of drama in Tang poetry teaching.

Wang Wei's spiritual world was deeply influenced by Confucianism and Taoism. In a nutshell, Confucianism requires poets and writers to actively engage in social affairs and have personal achievements; Taoism advocates a life free from the shackles of secularity (Yang 1993). Tang (2019) argues that a prominent concept in traditional Chinese culture is ‘universal harmony’, which unifies different thoughts and beliefs; therefore, Confucianism and Taoism can coordinate and complement each other, and have a joint impact on the Chinese national spirit. This complementary relationship between Confucianism and Taoism is reflected in Wang Wei's life (Yang 1993). Instead, the poet decided to be elastic and walk between the two spaces of Confucianism and Taoism. Dong and Shen (2016) suggests that ‘the complementary relationship between Confucianism and Taoism’ (儒道互补) represents the practical wisdom of the Chinese people.

Winston (1997, 2015) emphasises that values or spirituality are ‘thick concepts’ that do not have a specific form or fixed meaning. This provides a window for drama pedagogy to create opportunities for students to engage with different forms of values or spirituality in social practices. In this study, Wang Wei's spirit of ‘Confucianism and Taoism’ has been concretised into specific events. In the ‘Alley of Conscience’ activity, the students were divided into two groups and stood in two queues to depict the inner voices of Wang Wei. One group wanted to persuade Wang Wei to return to the capital city and regain his political position, while the other group wanted to persuade Wang Wei to stay in Wang Chuan. All the lights in the classroom were switched off; only two candles were lit. Meanwhile, a volunteer was selected to play the role of Wang Wei – his role was to make the final decision as he walked through the ‘alley’. When the volunteer started to walk, the students in both lines spoke loudly.

The voices that stood for him ‘going back to the government’ said:

‘Stay in the government; your position of office was earned by your mentor through immense effort’.

‘If you don't come back, your mentor will think you are unfilial!’

‘Go back to the government to recover your glory once more; your mentor is watching you from above!’ ‘You have the responsibility for the government!’

‘If you go back, you will be a hero’.

The voices that stood for him to ‘stay in Wang Chuan’ said:

‘Do not work for the government anymore—even your mentor has been defeated; now he is gone, there is nothing you can do!’

‘The government is ruled by Yang Guo Zhong; you can't change anything in this situation!’

‘You have to survive and endure, and wait for your time to fight!’

‘Don't sacrifice for nothing!’ (Vidoe S5[5]06:48-[6]08:30)

The former voice is in closer alliance to the Confucian ideology, which promotes loyalty, filial piety, and righteousness. The latter voice echoes the spirit of Taoism, where humans’ destiny is not in their own hands; one must take things as they are and embrace one's own fate (Yang 1993). Although the students did not explicitly point out that the two choices represent Confucianism and Taoism respectively, they had already recognised and deconstructed the spiritual connotations of Confucianism and Taoism. For example, on one side, the students who supported Wang Wei returning to court suggested that his mentor had entrusted him and, therefore, he was bound by responsibility; on the other side, the students arguing for Wang Wei to stay in Wang Chuan suggested that the political situation at court had been settled and that one individual could hardly make a difference – thus, it was better for him to stay and embrace the beauty of the landscape. However, the students’ understanding of Wang We's spiritual world did not come from rational deliberation, but from an emotionally charged understanding.

O’Toole and Dunn (2020) and DeCoursey (2020) suggest that students can understand the values of the characters in a play by empathising with them. O’Toole and Dunn (2020) suggest that dilemmas give students a sense of tension. Driven by this tension, they are motivated to act in the role of the character in play, thus understanding the character's thoughts through specific drama situations. DeCoursey (2020) takes a closer look at the relationship between students’ emotions in tension and the development of cognition. He cites neuroscientist Damasio's proposition of a ‘somatic marker’ to show that when students react emotionally to a drama situation, their bodies create a ‘marker’ that allows them to remember the emotional moment. This emotional moment continues to influence the students, leading them to evaluate and reflect on the emotional experience, which in turn leads to the creation of new meanings. In my study, the students were able to imagine and name Wang Wei's inner turmoil when they identified his dilemma, which meant that they were able to feel his confusion and struggle at the time. Meanwhile, the students’ responses also indicated that they were reflecting on Wang Wei's dilemma with their own emotions. The action of role-played Wang Wei in this activity reflected this argument. Once he had passed through the conscience alley, he said:

I am too difficult! Maybe both answers are correct. I think it is necessary to stay in Wang Chuan to have some rest at this moment so that I can increase my power. I will go back to the government when I have acquired more power to help the government recover its periods of prosperity.

The volunteer's words also reflect the classic ‘complementary relationship between Confucianism and Taoism’, that is, when life is difficult, one should back off and wait for the right opportunity to present itself.

In the activity of ‘sculpting the farewell’, the students demonstrated their understanding of another philosophical problem: the teacher-student relationship in Confucianism. Two students volunteered to be ‘clay’, while the others became sculptors, shaping these two pieces of ‘clay’ into a pair of statues representing ‘Wang Wei's farewell to Zhang Jiu Ling’. I captured two key moments of the statues during the sculpting process, illustrated in Figures 5 and 6.

Figure 5. Students’ sculpture of the statues’ ‘farewell’ (video S5[3] 05:24).

Figure 6. Students’ sculpture of the statues ‘gifting’ (video S5[3] 06:16).

The sculptor thought that Zhang Jiu Ling would look away from Wang Wei. The sculptor of Figure 2 explained, ‘Because Zhang Jiu Ling is too sad, he cannot hold his tears if he takes another look at Wang Wei’. This view is supported by other students: one boy stated that ‘Zhang Jiu Ling is a person who concerns all the people, not any individual. He will hide his sadness for good’. Another student added: ‘He is not like us; we will cry because of small things’. The statues in Figure 3 were made after those in Figure 2 – the sculptor of Figure 3 believed that Wang Wei should kneel instead of bowing to Zhang Jiu Ling in this specific moment. They reasoned that ‘because Wang Wei was full of sadness as he knew this was a goodbye (for the last time), he wanted to kneel’. During the circle discussion after the activity, the students discussed the emotions contained within different farewell gestures. They agreed on the complexity of the emotions expressed by Wang Wei and his mentor: the forbearance of both characters, as they dare not look into each other's eyes; Wang Wei's reluctance to part from Zhang Jiu Ling as he kneels down before him; and a father-son alike affection between the two, as Zhang Jiu Ling takes off his cloak and gives it to Wang Wei.

One interesting finding in this activity is the students can understand the father-son-like relationship between Wang Wei and Zhang Jiu Ling to a certain degree, since such relationships are unlikely to exist in their own lives. The father-son relationship between mentor and student originated in Chinese feudal society and is heavy influence by Confucianism. Confucianism believes that student and mentor are bounded in a community of common destiny: they share the same moral codes and need to consciously help each other to reach their political objectives (Cai 2004). However, this bond has disintegrated in contemporary society: the teacher-student relationship found in modern schools is arguably cooperation orientated (Wu 2013). In this context, the student-participants were still able to empathise with Wang Wei and Zhang's emotions in a dramatic situation, implying that the connection between the body and its mental representations is affected by long-lasting social and cultural constraints (Gibbs 2006; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 2017). Although the traditional Confucian teacher-student relationship and etiquette do not exist in modern schools, they are still advocated in films, TV dramas and classes in traditional culture, thus becoming an every-day cultural experience for Chinese students. The participatory drama activity provided contemporary students an opportunity to experience and re-understand the emotional connection between Zhang and Wang. As one girl said her interview:

I remember that in old times students had to kneel down to their teachers to say goodbye, but I didn't think about why. Until I saw Zhang take off the cloak and give it to Wang Wei, I instantly felt the heavy love from the teacher (to Wang). At this time, I think kneeling down is the only appropriate manner to receive this heavy love.

Conclusion

According to this studies findings, participatory drama can encourage students to step into a cultural context. It helps students to recognise the emotion, will and spirit conveyed in the poems. Moreover, through the interpretation of the meaning of these connotations, students are able to develop a personalised cultural understanding. Firstly, students are able to perceive the images from multiple perspectives – they can see, hear, smell, and even touch the scenes and landscape. In addition, they can awaken their cultural experiences to understand specific meanings connoted in those images. Finally, they can empathise with Wang Wei and stand in his shoes to experience his spiritual world. Such an embodied approach can help students construct personalised interpretations of their own historical culture.

Taking embodied recognition as its core characteristic, participatory drama frees students from the traditional cognitive understanding of culture and instead offers an activity that connects body, mind and context. To this end, drama pedagogy has advantages in supporting learning that requires situational interpretation. However, this pedagogy cannot be matched to all types of knowledge transfer or learning processes. Factual knowledge, for example, works better with an expository approach to teaching (Ding 2009). Therefore, this study does not support the replacement of current teaching methods with drama pedagogy for this particular purpose. Instead, the goal is to present drama pedagogy as a complementary modality, able to support the students approach to situational, abstract content such as a poet's emotion, will and sprit.

In conclusion, I suggest that participatory drama can act as an effective and ‘complementary tool’ in Chinese literacy education, helping students to understand their own historical culture in today's open and diversified cultural landscape. However, the limitation of this study is largely related to the methodology I applied. There is a danger in over interpreting the findings of small scale research. As a researcher, it is part of my responsibility to monitor the long-term effects of my work. Fortunately, I am still working as a drama teacher in my research site. This offers me opportunities to continually work on this project and develop further teaching designs, implement and try more teaching content, and follow up on students’ reactions and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Yeh (2008) stated that there is a process of the reader understand the poet's emotion, will and spirit – emotion and will to start with, and then the spirit.

2 Tang poetry (唐诗) refers to poetry written in or around the time of or in the characteristic style of China's Tang dynasty (A.D. 618 – A.D. 907).

3 The Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) has published government documents Chinese Language Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education Was Implemented, more details see http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A26/s8001/201112/t20111228_167340.html.

4 Expository approach pays attention to directly ‘exposing’ definitions to learners.

5 Habitus, at its simplest, is what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) calls a system of personal dispositional tendencies shaped by social culture. See Bourdieu (1977).

6 Cornel is a type of dogwood.

7 It is important to note that the English translation of these lines adds subject and place adverbial to some sentences in order to satisfy English grammar. With this additional wording, the reader can more readily spot the correct line-ordering in the poem's English version. However, there is a level of difficulty for Chinese students to identify the correct order of lines in the poem's language.

8 The word ‘cornel’ in Chinese was not on Boy 2's original line, it is added for translation purpose.