South Australia—Adolescent Conflicts and Educational Drama

Abstract

This chapter briefly describes the Australian cultural context and the nature of drama education in Australian secondary schools and then outlines the findings from research conducted in two stages with year 9 students in a range of metropolitan secondary schools in South Australia. Our first aim was to ascertain the gendered perceptions, experiences, nature, prevalence and hurtfulness of conflicts among the students. This involved conducting interviews with teachers and counsellors and focus groups with and a survey of students in fourteen schools of different types. In the second phase, we used the research data from stage one to develop strategies to test the effectiveness of educational drama as a method for imparting conflict handling skills to adolescents in one of the metropolitan public secondary schools surveyed, with a focus on teaching conflict styles and strategies. Our aim was to discover whether we could impart culturally relevant skills for dealing with conflict in a positive and constructive way to adolescents through the active medium of educational drama. In the early stages we taught essential concepts, such as trust and empathy, which were demonstrated in a wide range of drama exercises, and then in small groups students constructed plays based on typical conflicts they experienced at school, which successfully demonstrated that they had learned and understood the concepts and the various styles and strategies for handling conflict.