Defining Process Drama

The following article is comprised of an extract from Beyond the Script Take 3: Drama in the English and literacy classroom by Robyn Ewing and Jennifer Simons, with Margery Hertzberg and Victoria Campbell.

Drama is an art form, a method of teaching and learning and a body of knowledge in its own right. Essentially it is about enactment: Using the body aesthetically in time and space to explore events, characters, issues, questions, perspectives or ideas.

Process drama

One of the most important forms of educational drama is process drama. The term ‘process drama’ usefully distinguishes the particular kind of complex improvised dramatic event from that designed to generate or culminate in a theatrical performance. As Cecily O’Neill (1995, p. xvi) defines its purpose – process drama establishes an imagined world, a ‘dramatic elsewhere’ created by the participants as they discover, articulate and sustain fictional roles and situations. 

Students develop their understanding of this imagined world through the same meaning-making processes that they use in everyday life: They interpret body language and voice qualities; read emotions; explore subtexts; respond to what they think other people want; manipulate symbols; and use particular values to make a decision, choose from alternative actions and evaluate the consequences of that choice. They do so in an imagined world that they create together. Groups of students collaborate in-role to express and explore ideas. There is no outside audience and no intention to communicate beyond the participants themselves. So, although the participants in process drama work in-role, their acting ability is not usually important: All that is needed is that the participants willingly suspend their disbelief. Sometimes, of course, either a formal or informal performance will emerge from the activities but this is not always the case. Nor is it necessary. 

In process drama, the participants are generally viewed as social beings. The objective is to pursue an understanding of the society they live in. The teacher’s role is to facilitate this pursuit, creating a space where ‘radical tolerance’ is the goal. Rather than a form of tolerance that simply allows us to ‘put up with’ the existence of multiple forms of life and world views, radical tolerance aims at a mutual recognition and co-understanding (Mayerfeld Bell & Gardiner, 1998, p. 6). In our increasingly globalised community, it is our contention that developing mutual respect for and deep understanding of each other should be central at every level of education.