A meditation on drama practice from an artist in Canada. My university students are preoccupied with damage and trauma. There are paralyzing obstacles to working across differences that were useful for a time but no longer serve a robust solidarity. The stories we collect, tell and re-tell ourselves to prepare for a 'never again' are stifled if…

This article provides an overview of the Survivors: Local Stories of Domestic Violence (hereafter, Survivors) civic engagement project. Survivors' learning objectives were to increase the understanding of the complexity of intimate partner abuse and foster empathy in outsiders' responses, something at the cornerstone of the #MeToo social movement…

The didactic-performative experience at a distance, centred on the body in action of the training laboratories activated at the University of Study Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and the University of Study Suor Orsola Benincasa of Naples, encouraged, through the exercise of 'simplex property' of the separation of functions, the crossing of…

This article presents a new research design for pedagogical research at university. The design demonstrates how personal and cultural citizenship education can be a form of transformative human rights education by nurturing citizens who challenge patterns of exclusion. It draws on shared traditions of citizenship and human rights education that…

The development of student teachers' beliefs about good teaching needs to be integral to their education programmes. This study attempts to scrutinise the contribution of a theatre education course to the conceptualisation of a group of eight student primary teachers' notion of good teaching and a teacher's ethos. The findings reveal that, within…

While higher education has historically been tasked with the responsibility of fostering the moral development of society's future leaders, this duty is even more challenging today, as recent studies are reporting Millennial college students have higher levels of narcissism, coupled with declining levels of empathy and creativity compared to prior…

Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed has been the basis for radical performance techniques practiced around the world. Widely a staple for theatre performance syllabi, it also has an innovative application for the social work classroom. This article designates Boal's four stages of his poetics of the oppressed and concomitant theatrical…

In this article, we reflect on the way our verbatim theatre script Out at School was paired with Theatre of the Oppressed work in an undergraduate applied theatre class. Through an engagement with the complex lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) families at school, students moved from a response of what Jenny Salisbury calls…

We explored the potential of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education as a tool for enhancing mindfulness, body awareness, and perceptions of transformational leadership capacities among college students. The intervention consisted of thirty-two, 1.25-hour long group sessions taught by a certified Feldenkrais instructor twice weekly to 21…

This qualitative study examined the question: How can arts-based approaches facilitate transformative learning in a student teaching seminar? Two teacher educators facilitated a supplemental and voluntary arts-based ST seminar that comprised six, two-hour sessions. Thirty-four student teachers participated over five semesters making use of Theater…

In November 2011, the author--Ivan Fuller, a professor of theatre and associate dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Rider University--attended a joint symposium of the American Conference of Academic Deans and Phi Beta Kappa that was designed to wrestle with the question of why the humanities matter. At one session, participants…

This case study is one of twenty cases derived from Anderson and Risner's international study of teaching artists in dance, and theatre, which investigated participants' (n=172) artistic and academic preparation in dance, and theatre, initial entry into the teaching artist field, rewards, challenges, and obstacles in participants' work, artists'…

Abstract: Developing and nurturing empathy in medical trainees has been recognized as an essential element of medical education. Theater may be a unique instructional modality to increase empathy training. Methods: A multi-disciplinary team developed a theater workshop for first year medical students. Through the use of theater games, art images…

To inform students about global violence against women and to empower them to take action, the authors developed an interdisciplinary course focused on experiential learning and theatre education. Their article discusses the development of the course; the implementation of active learning strategies to develop critical thinking, empathy, and…

How does improvisational theatre promote aesthetic learning in leaders, emphasizing emotion and somatic, or sensory, knowledge? While improvisational theatre has been used in organizational settings, there is little empirical research describing the aesthetic learning process geared towards preparing educational leaders. Based on a case study of…