The Democracy through Drama Erasmus+ project aims to explore how we can use drama to create democratic spaces and classrooms that are sensitive to young peoples’ voices and to discover how teachers across Europe might facilitate the conditions for this to occur. The project develops ideas, activities and a teacher training approach drawn from two relevant educational tools in the field: Drama in Education (DiE) and Mimesis in Education (MiE).
We define Democratic Classrooms as a space for creativity and imagination, where the child’s experience is acknowledged, valued, nurtured, encouraged and developed. Democratic classrooms are a free and safe space within the boundaries of a dramatic frame; thus drama is a holding environment to enable this. In the dramatic frame, decisions should be made collectively with both young people and teachers taking responsibility for them. Moving outside of the dramatic frame then allows both teacher and their pupils to reflect upon the drama and examine the action.
Drama in Education (DiE) is a pedagogical process that seeks to balance both the form and content of drama and to engage participants with an element of living through the drama itself. Importantly Drama in Education relies on engageing participants in fiction – fiction that they are creating themselves – and this provides a form of protection, which offers an educational, rather that a therapeutic perspective. Drama in Education in this sense creates a space for participants to understand the world in which they live.
Mimesis in Education (MiE) builds upon a concept of theatrical training and uses it for pedagogical purposes. The concept of mimesis – transforming and recreating contents as poetry – is suitable for diverse educational contexts and practices. Mimesis and poetry are vectors for building a democratic coexistence, where each member can truly express oneself and be understood in his/her expression by others.
Project number: 2017-1-UK01-KA201-036559
Target groups: teachers, students, teacher educators, educational managers, policy makers, parents
Project coordinator: Birmingham City University (UK)
Project partners: Heartlands Academy Birmingham (UK), Roma Tre University (IT), KEKI Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre (BE), Ellinogermaniki Agogi (GR), InSite Drama (HU)