From Drama Text to Stage Text : Transitions of Text Understanding in a Student Theatre Production

Exploring how text understanding evolves through interaction in a drama-text-based student theatre production, the present study takes its theoretical point of departure in sociocultural and dialogical approaches to meaning making and creativity. Video data from a Swedish upper secondary school allowed us to follow transitions of text understanding in the artistic shaping of characters from drama text to stage text. We analyze a special kind of communicative side project: short, recurrent student-initiated role-plays, embedded in teacher-led activities. The joint text understanding that was established in these side projects proved productive in the emergent shaping of the stage text