Drama as Serious (and Not So Serious) Business: Critical Play, Generative Conflicts, and Moving Bodies in a 1:1 Classroom

Abstract

This study, part of a longitudinal classroom ethnography, explored the use of drama as a social art or tool that invited children to produce knowledge and critical insight into their relationships with technology. Through a series of process drama engagements, fourth, fifth, and sixth graders constructed meaning with their bodies, improvising multilayered, dramatic scenes related to the introduction of one-to-one (1:1) iPads in their classroom. One dramatic engagement is explored here in detail: children’s production of digital commercials that argued for or against 1:1 devices in schools. Using a framework for analyzing performative experiences in education, analyses focused on the moment-by-moment emergence of children’s bodies and affect within a single focal commercial. Findings suggest that by positioning classroom practices, rituals, and discourses as productive sites for collective cultural and dramatic interpretation, children became active theory makers, producing knowledge that went far beyond rational classroom discussions about technology. This work suggests that the intersection of drama and technology offers possibilities for expanding the interpretive space of the classroom—a way for teachers and children to collectively and critically consider how technology may disrupt ways of being and learning in classrooms, inviting new forms of relations between bodies and materials.—