Drama Education And Cultural Understanding

Language is a tool for a community to remember the past,define the present,and imagine the future collectively.Underneath the difference between languages is the diversity in their cultures.When we describe the learning of a language,we are essentially referring to the learning of cultural characteristics and ways of thinking contained in such language.However,culture is a concept of complexity.From the perspective of cultural hermeneutics,culture is the environment of living.To understand a culture,it has to return to the cultural context for recognition.As a special form of language,drama conveys the cultural values of a specific group of people in a specific period through narration.Recognition in the process of drama may encourage students to simultaneously embrace language and the culture contained in language.On this basis,this research proposes a drama-based pedagogy with recognition at its core as an effective teaching method that can help students recognize the culture contained in language.In order to answer the research question on how drama-based pedagogy can help students recognize the cultural significance of language,the researcher carried out a onesemester teaching practice in Shanghai H Attached Primary School,with 15 fourth-grade students participated.The teaching was carried out in form of workshop,selecting four poems from Wang Wei's Wang Chuan collection and Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet as the main teaching texts.This research applies case study as research methodology,and collects data through teaching videos,student interviews,teaching observations,reflective diaries,and conventions.The main findings are as follows:First,drama-based pedagogy can promote multi-dimensional recognition.Recognition is at heart of this pedagogy,and drama is the medium for learners to take part in recognition.The artistic characteristics of drama affect its features in recognition.Specifically,the main artistic characteristics of drama are aesthetics,contextuality and embodiment.They lead to the aesthetic recognition,situational recognition and embodied narrative recognition as features of drama-based recognition.Drama based pedagogy offers multiple possibilities for the body to reach out,understand,and interpret the world.Second,drama-based pedagogy has the function of cultural recognition.Drama based pedagogy applies the language of drama(including spoken language and non-verbal language)to transform the original two-dimensional literary language text into a three-dimensional dramatic space.Therefore,Wang Wei's poems and Shakespeare's plays can become recognizable cultural resources.When students are engaged in a drama situation with a status of physical-mental unity,they can actively construct their own cultural knowledge by physically intervening in actual actions and actual situations.Third,drama-based pedagogy can develop students' in-depth cultural experience."Depth" hereby is demonstrated in the ways how students recognize,understand,and reflect upon culture by body-returning and cultural-situation-returning.Language contains culture,but language and culture are not connected in a simple linear relationship.As a body of unity,language and culture require learners to comprehensively understand them in a physical presence and within a specific practice.Drama based pedagogy encourages students to actively develop cultural understanding from a dialogic process,instead of passively receiving cultural knowledge which has been refined and packed by teacher.Dialogue refers to not only the conversation with peers and characters,but also the internal communication of oneself.The cultural understanding students construct in the process of dramatic recognition is practical,generative and dialogic.Drama-based pedagogy is originated from the concern of students' cognition and constructed on the theories of embodied cognition and embodied teaching.It redesigns the interaction between the body and the environment.Drama based pedagogy demonstrates that drama can act as the medium for recognition occurring,it expands the connotation of embodied teaching.As a teaching method towards students' cultural understanding development,it conforms to the tide that calls for the "responding to teaching with culture".Nevertheless,this study has its own limitations such as lack of capability to conduct quantitative assessment for raising generalized propositions.Researchers are urged to continuously develop practice and conclude theoretical values.