We advocate for using the principles drama in online courses to help students connect the course material with their lived and imagined experiences. The goal is to provide a new way to approach material for greater understanding, as well as more effectively engaging students in the online classroom.
Online education is continually evolving in order to stay relevant and desirable for students. In the authors’ experiences, many students want and need their education to relate to their lives, personal and professional. One that allows them to grow as human beings and as professionals. Often, the space between students’ lived experiences and the presentation of course materials is vast causing students to lose interest and underperform. The question then becomes how to present course materials in a way that actively engages students and propels them to make the connections between their lived experiences and the course materials.
Drama, historically a field separate from general education, but more recently part of the focus on Arts Integration in K-12 settings, has been successfully used in on-ground courses to demonstrate historical events or figures, develop communication skills, and promote problem solving. What if drama was used in the online environment? In 1967, Brian Way asserted that “…drama will increasingly become a way of teaching and a way of learning for everyone” (p. 7). This is true of many traditional K-12 classrooms (Farmer, 2011), and the authors believe will become true of online classrooms as well. Using the principles of drama, such as collaboration, communication, storytelling, and ensemble training, we will discuss how drama can effectively be used for helping online college students to make connections between course material and their lived experiences.
Our work draws on the previous research of Philip and Nicholls (2007) who studied the benefits of bringing drama to the online classroom. However, it is the authors’ contention that the principles of drama transcend theater courses and can be applied across disciplines providing a more dynamic learning experience. While the idea of drama, as metaphor for online learning is not a new one, there is little current discussion of the direct application of these principles of drama to the college online classroom.
The focus of this work is from the perspective of teaching and designing curriculum for online courses in multiple disciplines. The authors will discuss best practices and offer key information about the ways drama can be used to help engage their students in the online classroom. Finally, the authors will offer examples of interactive classroom drama activities adapted for the online environment.