Drama Experience in Educational Interventions

Abstract

Drama techniques have been widely implemented in many different areas of education and in clinical settings. The effectiveness of using theater as a means to promote change by capitalizing on its strong emotional component has been attributed to two main functions: a cathartic function and a performative one. In the first, actors produce a drama about a social problem that allows the audience to identify with the characters and may even change the audience members’ points of view; in the second, participants of the intervention are actors themselves and use drama techniques to portray everyday-life situations, attempting to consider social problems from different perspectives. Despite the widespread use of theater workshops in educational and clinical settings, an issue that requires further investigation and research is the assessment of their effectiveness. Many different reasons contribute to making the workshops’ effectiveness difficult to assess: Firstly, quantitative methods seem not to be perfectly suited for evaluating changes that drama may produce, as they are based on emotional experiences rather than on cognitive acquisitions; secondly, qualitative tools may require a large amount of time for the collection and analysis of data, and they may fail to generate comparable results. A reconnaissance of methods for assessing the effectiveness of drama intervention is presented in this paper, and a proposal for further analysis is provided.

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