ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the use of drama in the classroom to engage students in participatory sense-making and spontaneous languaging. Through dramatic inquiry, students engage in acting toward and with one another in unfolding events. The frame of dramatic inquiry provides a means for students to employ emotions and embodied actions to act out scenes together through their languaging. Critical to enacting drama in the classroom is engaging in reflection about how students employed “in-between” meanings, enacted roles, addressed challenges, and assumed social agency. Through responding to popular plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Fences, students engage in debates based on characters and events in the plays which can facilitate a deeper understanding of the play as well as the social work of responding to sexism and more generally to think through challenges within and connections to students’ own lives. Students can also can write their own dramatic scripts or rewrite lines from plays by languaging dialogue from characters. Reflecting on their work, students write about how their changes shaped characters’ actions and relations based on students’ initial interpretation of the play.
