Dramatic Education, An Interdisciplinary Approach to Learning.

Overview & Synopsis

This thesis argues that dramatic education is a subject matter whose content is four interrelated disciplines: theater, language arts, humanistic education, and social-psychology. It is also a process of learning crucial artistic, linguistic, humanistic, and scientific issues through the basic dramatic method of dramatization. The history of dramatic education in England (with some attention to Canada) and America is interpretively reviewed, and an interdisciplinary approach toward understanding what and how students learn through drama is set up. It is concluded from this study that dramatic education represents the means and ends of the four disciplines; dramatic education is a way of learning how to learn the nature of human action and discourse as well as develop the dramatic skills essential for further learning; one learns through drama by means of representing the empirical world in terms of mental images, then representing a view of that world through one's language and actions; and dramatic education is a natural process. (TS)