Abstract
This chapter describes the first of a series of research projects in Australia which investigated the use of techniques to empower school students to manage the conflicts they encountered in their daily lives. The research team developed a set of clear concepts intended to make conflict understandable, then experimented with various drama techniques to enable students to explore these concepts. The chapter explains the addition of class-based peer teaching where older students who had learned effective conflict management then taught younger students these techniques and concepts. The effectiveness of these evolving techniques is described, including the fact that the students actually used their new knowledge in real life contexts. Finally, a project in year 3 of the research investigating the use of theatre performance is explored. A class of senior students prepared an interactive show for parents and other students, incorporating some of the drama techniques they had been learning.
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Acknowledgment
We are indebted to Dr Anna Plunkett for much of the retrieved data, and for her insights, throughout the 1998 phase of the program, and also the phases 1999–2000, described in Chap. 4. The pseudonyms for the schools and all students in both chapters are also taken from her PhD thesis (Plunkett 2002).
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Burton, B., Lepp, M., Morrison, M., O’Toole, J. (2015). The DRACON Project in Brisbane. In: Acting to Manage Conflict and Bullying Through Evidence-Based Strategies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17882-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17882-0_3
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