Learning “what it’s like to be someone else apart from yourself”: developing holistic empathy with process drama

Abstract

A small, but growing, number of studies explore the connections between process drama pedagogy and the development of empathy. In our view, empathy involves affective and cognitive processes of the heart and the mind. In this article, we report findings from a year-long New Zealand research project with four primary school teachers who integrated process drama pedagogy into their programmes. Through a relational lens, we analysed classroom lessons, teacher interviews, research group meetings, student focus group interviews and student writing samples. Three vignettes detail how process drama pedagogy fostered emotionally charged experiences within rich contexts. We argue process drama pedagogy developed students’ cognitive and affective processes, which fostered student capacity to explore diverse perspectives and develop holistic empathy.