Drama

Drama can play a powerful role in facilitating spiritual development both in educational and community contexts. It has the potential to operate as an imaginative scaffold for spiritual development since the core constructs of drama involve both engagement and reflection, two essential features in cultivating spirituality. In improvisational process drama, children search [Page 128]for meaning and purpose, examine issues, and learn more about the real world from their improvised engagement in an imaginary one. The opportunity for “innerstanding” and inhabiting the lives of others enables young people to experience safe emotional engagement and take part in creative explorations of secular and faith tales. The creation of community, the opportunity to engage in open exploration and reflection through being as well as doing, the development of self-knowledge, and the chance to experience feelings of wonder and transcendence are all aspects of spirituality that can be fostered through drama. Drama, like spirituality, acknowledges that teaching and learning are not merely cognitive but are essentially emotional, aesthetic, and ethical.

The transformation of time and space is an essential part of drama and is often achieved through the creation of a community. Space and time are also central to spirituality. In drama a sense of the place and the people in the faith or secular tale is built, both fictionally and for real. For example, maps of a village may be drawn, people at work improvised, and different settings and related scenarios created. Through participation in the lives of others and through empathetic engagement in imaginary worlds, a sense of community can be experienced, although a balance needs to be struck between personal concerns and communal issues. Taking on a role is an act of authentic personal engagement, yet in drama more is demanded since participants operate together, responding to one another as members of the communal narrative.

Reflective connections too are central, to enable the learners to perceive links between the life of this community and their own lives. In the context of drama, time is taken to step out of the fictional frame, and imaginative connections are prompted in the form of text-to-life and life-to-text moves. In this way, the learners coauthor the text from the inside, making sense and constructing meaning together. In addition, through inventing possible scenarios and discovering the unknown, young people will be reasoning, moralizing, and imagining—some of the implicit strategies vital for a maturing spirituality. If young people write during drama, this often demonstrates their reflective tenor and emotionally positioned stance, fueling the processes of identification, connection, and transformation. They can also discuss parallel situations in the world and make freeze frames, for example, depicting similar situations both past and present in the world. If they are given the opportunity to explore these issues further, from within the relative safety of a distancing framework, then the young learners will not be made to feel personally vulnerable or exposed, even though they will be emotionally and psychologically involved. The drama and the reflective discussions provide a safety net and enable the learners to empathize whilst being given the space in which to reflect and quest for understanding within a communally shared context. Reflective engagement such as this can help young people handle ambiguity and uncertainty, explore different ways of seeing, and keep an open mind, all of which are responsibilities of spiritual education.

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