Entering the Ecotone: Drama as Disequilibrium in the Educational Ecosystem
摘要
This chapter reports a study based on interviews with student teachers at Malmö University, Sweden, about their learning in how process drama can be used in teaching on literature and stories. The study explored the possibilities and resistance the students expressed throughout the process in relation to the elements of awakening of emotions, ambiguity and open-ended learning related to process drama. The impetus for the research derives from my doctoral project where process drama was integrated in the teaching in a primary school. Findings from the doctoral project are discussed in relation to the student teacher’s interviews. During the doctoral project, the metaphorical concept of Ecotone evolved as a way to understand the tensions between traditional teaching and process drama. The Ecotone, a notion deriving from ecology, describes a habitat, for example a clearing between a farmland and a forest. The uniqueness of the Ecotone is its richness and diversity as a direct consequence of the disequilibrium in the relation to adjacent habitats. It illuminates the wildness in drama and consequently its disturbing presence in an educational context where control and rationalism dominate. The study draws on Biestas critique of the instrumentalization of art in education and that it should not only be a matter of expressing oneself, but coming-in-contact with the world (Biesta, Letting art teach. Art education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys. ArtEZ Press, Arnhem, 2017).