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Dramatizing Living-in-the-World: Affective Generalization in Drama-in-Education Workshop

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Abstract

Drama-in-Education workshops (DiE) emphasize on balancing between teacher’s delicate structuring and participants’ spontaneous exploration and creation in dramatic activities and thus can be a powerful liminoid space to scaffold and facilitate young people’s development. Still, more researches are needed to dig into and understand such a dynamic and complex process happening in the workshop. In this article, we presented the theoretical background of conceptualizing drama as a hybrid cultural-aesthetic form to identify its potential in educational guidance. The perspective of developmental cultural psychology was introduced to frame DiE practice as a catalytic process working on releasing and transforming participants’ developmental forces. The hierarchical levels of semiotic mediation in cultural psychology can help to capture participants’ affective and cognitive generalizations in semiotic forms and to perform a micro-genetic analysis of the flow of participants’ subjective experiences. We also provided a step-by-step analysis of a DiE practice working with young Chinese immigrants to illuminate our theoretical proposal.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Huiru Yan and Xinhuang Chen from Shanghai Theatre Academy and Xiaowen Li from East China Normal University for their support in devising and conducting the workshop. We are also grateful to Kari Mjaaland Heggstad and Sisi Zheng from Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and participants in living-room seminar organized by Jaan Valsiner in facilitating ideas for analyzing the empirical data. Also many thanks to Enno von Fircks and another anonymous reviewer. Their constructive suggestions has helped us a lot in improving our work.

Funding

The author Shuangshuang Xu received funding from China Scholarship Council for her phd study in Denmark (No. 201808310229).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Shuangshuang Xu

  2. Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future, Shanghai, China

    Shuangshuang Xu

  3. School of Psychology, East China Normal University & Minhang Teenagers Practice Education Base, Shanghai, China

    Jing Wang

  4. Department of Special Needs Education, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Luca Tateo

  5. Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

    Luca Tateo

Authors
  1. Shuangshuang Xu
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  2. Jing Wang
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  3. Luca Tateo
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Correspondence to Jing Wang.

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The study with humans has been approved by University Committee on Human Research Protection, East China Normal University.

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Xu, S., Wang, J. & Tateo, L. Dramatizing Living-in-the-World: Affective Generalization in Drama-in-Education Workshop. Integr. psych. behav. 56, 513–541 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-021-09625-9

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