Acting up: Five elementary teachers explore classroom management through dramatic play.

摘要

This qualitative dissertation investigates the extent of which drama helped teach classroom management skills more explicitly to teachers, while also exploring the extent of which teachers described using drama as a way to manage their classrooms. Teachers reported positive correlations between dramatic play and learning about management as well as using dramatic activities as a way to manage their students. Teachers reported progress with individual students and felt a noticeable difference in their classroom community when they integrated drama in their lesson plans and created a dramatic context in which their classroom expectations could be followed with a stronger sense of purpose. Teachers also found the process of using drama challenging. Teachers expressed feeling constrained by administrative expectations, lack of time, and a fear of creating more chaos because of the excitement caused by drama lessons. Teachers revealed large personal growth over the course of this research and indicated that drama helped them further understand their teacher selves. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that drama can be used as a management technique in the classroom, and more importantly, as a way for teachers to develop their own management styles and perceptions, and provide teachers with a forum in which to share, learn, and grow through collaborative dramatic play. Further research in the areas of management training and drama education in teacher education programs and in the application of these methods in the classroom would greatly help to expand and contribute to our understandings of what it means to be a teacher, and how to build respectful caring classroom communities with students.