ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how drama in education can respond to the challenges posed by ‘new media practices’ in everyday life in general, and by social media in particular. Being able to perform and express oneself in social media and to reflect in diverse and varied ways is crucial in today’s media-dominated culture. However, engaging with social media requires the user to handle a high level of communicative complexity.
Based on the analysis of two examples from a recent PhD project called #iLive (Knudsen, 2017), we intend to discuss how these challenges could invite drama educators to reconsider their conceptions of what drama education could be in the 21st century. By applying theory from both literacy and design-oriented scholars, we argue that one way of responding to a digital society’s complexity is knowingly accepting it. Rather than rejecting complexity and attempting to avoid it, the drama teacher can frame different forms of communication and create educational designs that embrace it, thus empowering students to deal with the complexity.
