Cultural diversity and drama education within an Australian context

© 2019 Patrizia Giovanna FerraraAcross Australia and internationally, the number of young people from diverse cultural backgrounds entering schools has increased. This has led to a greater complexity in pedagogy, curriculum and student populations (Banks, 2011). This thesis entitled Cultural diversity and drama education within an Australian context is a qualitative research project that methodologically involved a reflective practitioner study (Schön, 1983). The researcher developed and taught an educational unit of work entitled Cultural diversity and drama. The unit of work comprised eight lessons and was taught to a junior secondary drama class at a coeducational independent school. Central to this study were the experiences of the culturally diverse drama students engaging in the drama curriculum. Through the reflective practitioner’s own culturally diverse perspective, this study was also an examination of the drama teacher. As part of the reflective practitioner research, a combination of data was collected that included observation of drama classes, reflective practitioner journal, student journals, field notes, written documents and interviews with drama staff and students. The key findings of this study revealed that the drama students identified and discussed their own ethnic identities. It was found that trust facilitated the advancement of the unit of work between the reflective practitioner, drama students and drama teacher. The study revealed that embodied learning about cultural diversity enabled the drama students to generate their own contemporary meanings of themselves, others and of Australia. In this study it was found that stories about refugees can effectively engage drama students to understand and enact people from diverse cultural backgrounds