Town Halls, Graffiti Walls, and Exploding Atoms: Dialogue, Engagement, and Perspective-taking in Online Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

As social justice-oriented teacher educators with little experience with online education prior to March 2020, we discuss our efforts to adapt and enact Drama-Based Pedagogy for social justice purposes using a variety of technologies in online classrooms. Having used Drama-Based Pedagogy in face-to-face instruction previously, we appreciate the ways it enables meaningful dialogue among students and deepens their understanding of and engagement with the sometimes sensitive topics in our teacher education classes. In this reflective practitioner report, we share our challenges and successes adapting Drama-Based Pedagogy strategies to our online and hybrid courses.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ Role-on-the Wall is a DBP strategy that “invites students to infer meaning about a character and to visually map the relationship between characteristics (emotions) and actions (behaviors)” (Dawson & Lee, 2018, p. 233).

Guided Imagery is a DBP strategy that “invites students to close their eyes and listen to a descriptive, narrative story and to imagine they are experiencing the events being described” (Dawson & Lee, 2018, p. 230).

² Writing-in-Role is a DBP strategy that “asks students to write from a character’s perspective, typically in a familiar format like a diary entry; a letter, e-mail, or text; a newspaper headline; or a letter to an editor” (Dawson & Lee, 2018, p. 252).