Adolescents’ Experimenting with Roles in the context of L.S. Vygotsky’s ideas: an Activity-Based Technology “Digital Storytelling Theater”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the elaboration of a new model of drama for adolescents — “Digital Storytelling Theater”. The model is based on the idea that the leading activity of adolescence is represented by experimenting with roles, in the framework of which adolescents acquire social roles as a new system of cultural signs. “Digital Storytelling Theater” allows to create conditions for adolescents’ experimenting with social and psychological objects (roles, positions, relationships etc.) In this kind of drama adolescents do not only play out roles according to a given scenario but participate in a palette of activities while working on a performance. The elaborated model of drama activity allows to construct the zone of proximal development for adolescents due to two supplementary processes: interiorization and exteriorization. Interiorization is connected with adolescents’ acquiring new cultural signs — various social roles and patterns of role behavior. Exteriorization presupposes revealing — “bringing out on the stage” — role contradictions and conflicts, which are profoundly linked with adolescent crisis and to a large extent determine the way how it occurs. The model was elaborated on the basis of the Center for Interdisciplinary research on Contemporary Child-hood of MSUPE in 2019-2022 and was tested in 3 different schools in Moscow and in Moscow Region with the participation of 336 adolescents aged from 13 to 15 years.