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This article was downloaded by: [Temple University Libraries]On: 16 November 2014, At: 14:24Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Research in Drama Education: TheJournal of Applied Theatre andPerformancePublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/crde20
Process drama and interculturallanguage learning: an experience ofcontemporary ItalyErika Piazzoli aa Department of Education , Griffith University , Brisbane,AustraliaPublished online: 16 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Erika Piazzoli (2010) Process drama and intercultural language learning: anexperience of contemporary Italy, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatreand Performance, 15:3, 385-402, DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2010.495272
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2010.495272
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Process drama and intercultural language learning: an experienceof contemporary Italy
Erika Piazzoli*
Department of Education, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
This paper illustrates research on the effects of ‘process drama’ toenhance intercultural awareness for learners of Italian as anAdditional Language. To validate the potential synergy between‘process drama’ and intercultural language learning, I created six‘process dramas’ to explore some contemporary Italian socio-cultural issues, as part of a third-year course of Italian at anintermediate/advanced level of proficiency. I experimented withmanipulation of aesthetic distance to allow participants to de-centre and empathise with the characters and situations, to triggeran intercultural awareness process based on experience, reflection,analysis and action. The findings confirm that strategies ofmanipulation of distance crafted within a ‘process drama’ approachcan be successful in enhancing intercultural awareness in anAdditional Language learning context.
Introduction
This paper presents research conducted in 2008 to explore processdrama as pedagogy for the teaching and learning of Italian as anAdditional Language. In particular, the aim of the research was to mapout drama strategies to support intercultural language learning at anintermediate/advanced level of proficiency.
In the last decade, language pedagogy theorists have shifted theirgaze from communicative language teaching, an approach aimed atreplicating natural communication, to intercultural language learning,a reflective orientation to create and interpret meaning. This changeechoes the social interactionist theory of Second Language Acquisition,which frames language as a system shared by a social group of peopleand conceives culture as an integral component of language,embedded in the choices we make as we speak (Kramsch 1993). Theemphasis on language learners as makers and interpreters of meaning
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1356-9783 print/ISSN 1470-112X online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2010.495272
http://www.informaworld.com
RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and PerformanceVol. 15, No. 3, August 2010, 385�402
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brought linguists to acknowledge the unpredictability of language,conceptualising teachers and students as ‘social actors’ who enact theirroles in the classroom. Drawing on Goffman (1959), interculturallanguage learning theorists argue that the interaction betweenteachers and students of Additional Languages is dependent on theperceptions that each individual brings to the constant mutualmonitoring of classroom discourse.
Although on a theoretical level this is an inspiring shift, on apractical level teachers of Additional Language (AL) are still bound bycommunicative approach resources with task-based, fragmentedscripts that require limited critical thought. Indeed, as Scarino andLiddicoat (2009) point out, communicative tasks tend to focusexcessively on spontaneous language, as opposed to purposefullanguage; thus without purpose, language interaction in the ALclassroom is sometimes reduced to ‘a sterile pointless activity’ (2009,38). Recently the Australian Department of Education, Employment andWorkplace Relations has commissioned a rationale for an interculturallanguage learning pedagogy. In the guidebook, Scarino and Liddicoat(2009) urge all AL teachers to design programmes that positionlearners as interpreters and makers of meaning. Scarino furthersuggests that intercultural language learning programmes should‘articulate the scenarios for interaction and the processes of interpret-ing meaning in interaction in and through language’ (2008, 8). At thesame time, Scarino encourages teachers to create programmes thatthrive on the unpredictable nature of language.
In my own experience as an AL teacher of Italian, I was unsatisfiedwith my current approach and resources; after seven years ofpractice, I felt that my lessons were not as meaningful and reflectiveas they could have been. How could I articulate scenarios formeaningful interaction that thrive on the unpredictable nature oflanguage without falling into the pitfall of stereotyping the targetculture? I realised I needed a more flexible, drama-oriented approachto support my teaching practice and hence became interested inthe potential of applied theatre for AL learning. My search led me todiscover process drama, an approach which claimed to enhancemotivation and communicative competence (Kao and O’Neill 1998).I was curious to find out how process drama could enhance mystudents’ motivation to communicate and, most importantly, whatstrategies could help me to promote intercultural awareness in theAL classroom.
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Process drama and intercultural language learning
Alfred, Byram, and Fleming define intercultural awareness as ‘theawareness of experiencing otherness and the ability to analyse theexperience acting upon the insights into self and other which thisanalysis can bring’ (2003, 4). To ignite the process of interculturalinquiry, the authors argue that:
experience is not enough; it must be coupled with reflection, analysisand action to initiate a transformation through which the experience ofany kind of ‘otherness’ can be seen as an intercultural encounter. (Alfred,Byram, and Fleming 2003, 5)
How can AL teachers provide quality learning experiences for theirlearners, enhancing intercultural awareness? Communicative languageteaching resources do model language structures but do not focus onexperience and reflection. On the other hand, the very structure ofprocess drama can provide a structure to mould the cyclic process ofexperience, reflection, analysis and action; it actually draws onexperience and reflection as a pivotal point for learning, turningimplicit meaning-making into explicit knowledge (O’Toole and Dunn2002, 24). Indeed, process drama can offer participants the possibilityto experience dramatic worlds, reflect, analyse and change as a resultof the experience; it engages the body and the mind not only toproduce appropriate language, but also to express emotions and ideasthrough non-verbal communication, arguably a fundamental dimen-sion to language learning. As research in the last decade has shown,process drama has been used to support AL learning by enhancingspeakers’ confidence, fluency and motivation to communicate in thetarget language (Kao and O’Neill, 1998).
Bowell and Heap have argued that process drama is ‘a potentmeans by which perception and expression may be heightened’ (2005,60), generating effects that endure in time, as both leader andparticipants are touched and transformed by the experience they co-create. This definition pinpoints the core notion of interculturalawareness, in terms of experiencing otherness and analysing thatexperience. It also resonates with principles of intercultural languagelearning, and its goal of meaning-making. To this regard, Fleming(1998, 2003) has used process drama for intercultural educationpurposes. He argued that this approach can be a powerful tool toinstigate the intercultural inquiry process, as it gives learnersan opportunity to distance themselves from their own cultural
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perceptions. However, whereas Fleming’s work focused on a mono-lingual context, I was interested to experiment with process drama in amultilingual classroom of Italian AL learners, with speakers of inter-mediate to advanced level of proficiency.
Research design
The objective of the research was to identify strategies to allow for theenhancement of intercultural awareness using process drama in an ALcontext. For this purpose I designed and facilitated six process dramasas part of an Italian language course at a tertiary institution in Brisbane,Australia. The workshops were conducted in the target language, withEnglish being used sporadically by participants for clarification. Theparticipants were 12 undergraduate students enrolled in a third-yearItalian course offered in 2008 by Griffith University. The data collectionof the research was carried out in the first seven weeks of the course.Participants ranged from 18 to 65 years of age, and came from adiverse range of educational, geographical and socio-cultural back-grounds. Out of the 12 students, only two had some previousexperience in drama. Their participation in the process dramas wasvoluntary and, in order to comply with ethical requirements, was notassessed. The course aimed at reflecting on contemporary Italian socio-cultural issues; to facilitate this process, as compulsory reading for thecourse I chose the play Sotto paga! Non si paga! (‘We won’t pay! Wecan’t pay!’) by Dario Fo and Franca Rame, written in 1974 and revised in2008. Students were expected to read sections of the play on a weeklybasis.
Each week was structured across three hours of contact, dividedinto a one-hour tutorial centred on the text and a two-hour processdrama, both conducted in the target language. Each process dramawas based on a theme emerging from the play, rich in Italian socio-cultural references, thus allowing an insight into contemporary Italy.Through participatory action research, after each process drama weengaged in a ‘communicative forum’, a platform for discussion todecide which socio-cultural theme the group felt interested to explorein the next week. In this way, learners had to actively engage inmeaning-making to share their perceptions with the group. Thisprocess was aimed at empowering the participants to shape thecontent of the course according to their own interests, personalisingtheir learning experience. This is a fundamental condition under-pinning intercultural language learning; it is also in line with models of
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participatory action research demonstrated by Kemmis and McTaggart(2005), which focus on the collaborative nature of researchers andparticipants. I was therefore dependent on my co-participants todetermine the focus of the dramas, allowing their choices to inform theaction research cycles.
Themes that were explored through the process dramas included:protesting as collective action in Italy, sarcasm as sense of humourembedded in traditions, the temporary worker as an Italian collectiveidentity, issues of integration of Roma people in Italy, chronicpessimism co-existing with politics and corruption, and the stereotypesof bigotry in the Italian society. For each theme I used a different pre-text, including the opening passage of the play, a catalogue from anItalian supermarket, a photograph, a satirical poem, a scene from amovie and a current affairs article. Research tools included video-recording of the six workshops, transcripts of the communicativeforums (and translations into English), my reflective journal, 10 semi-structured interviews, three concept-mapping diagrams and one focusgroup using Video-Stimulated Recall. In order to stimulate participants’recall, I created a DVD based on some extracts from the workshops.I chose three key moments from each process drama, which I editedtogether in an 18-minute long sequence. Participants watched andengaged in discussion, triggered by my open questioning. This wideset of research instruments generated a large amount of textured datawhich I inductively interpreted to draw the findings presented below.
Manipulating distance
One of the strategies I explored to enhance intercultural awareness wasmanipulation of distance. In doing so, my aim was to encourageparticipants to experience otherness from a different spatial, temporalor psychological dimension. It is exactly this condition, according toFleming (2003), which makes process drama a unique intercultural tool.
To this respect, Eriksson’s discourse on distance was particularlyrelevant to the design process. In his discussion (Eriksson 2007) hedrew on Bullough (1957) and Ben Chaim’s (1984) theories of aestheticdistance to conceptualise distance as existing on a continuum. Erikssonframed this concept within educational drama, arguing that on theaesthetic distance continuum, creating an excess of distance wouldresult in an abstract or over-distanced aesthetic experience, whilecreating a shortage of distance would consist in an overly realistic,under-distanced experience. I used this notion as a pivotal point; I
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increased degrees of distance to encourage de-centring, through‘reflection and critical examination on one’s previous emotion’; Idecreased degrees of distance to create empathy, or the ‘projectionof one’s own emotional life into the character-images’ (Eriksson 2007,20). Envisaging distance on a continuum informed my design process,enabling me to experiment ways to stimulate participants to receivethose insights into ‘self and other’ which Alfred, Byram, and Fleming(2003) place at the core of the intercultural encounter.
Strategies to de-centre
‘De-centring’ has been defined as a ‘willingness to suspend disbelief inone’s meaning and behaviours and to analyse them from the viewpointof others with whom one is engaging’ (Byram 1997, 34). In order toallow participants to de-centre, I designed dramatic episodes thatincreased the degree of distance between participants and the idea ofItaly which they had created for themselves. In order to achieve that, Idrew from a workshop on intercultural awareness presented by Boltonand Heathcote (1998) at a conference on language and drama inDurham, UK. Heathcote’s distancing strategy was to expose partici-pants to an external cultural system, related to neither their culture norto the target culture, as a way to distance themselves from theirperceptions. This strategy clearly resonates with intercultural language-learning premises that new learning is shaped by prior knowledge andcultural perspectives.
For example, in the first workshop participants were enrolled asJapanese journalists working for an Italian magazine in Tokyo. Throughrole, situation and context, we established a dramatic world based onJapanese cultural values like honour and respect. In this drama thejournalists were to travel to Italy to carry out interviews with an ItalianVIP of their choice, in order to uplift the profile of the editorial andprevent it from bankruptcy. On their way to the interviews, journalistswere confronted by a trade union protest blocking their way, andmissed their opportunity to meet the busy VIPs. To avoid going back toJapan empty-handed, they tried to line up an interview with the unionprotesters instead. When improvising the last-minute interview, thejournalists knew that the outcome of it would influence the future oftheir job and, therefore, their personal honour and respect amongpeers. The build-up of dramatic tension behind this episode fuelled anintense, in-depth role-play. Confronting a typical Italian situation froma newly acquired Japanese perspective helped them to distance
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themselves from their pre-conceptions and boosted their motivation tocommunicate. To this regard, a participant observed:
You think of other . . . other perspectives, someone else’s perspectiveof . . . you know, the Italians. Like the Japanese perspective of theItalians, whereas it’s not the Australian perspective, so it’s kind of . . .different! (Sandy)
Throughout the workshops, I continued to provide opportunities forparticipants to de-centre from their cultural codes, encouragingstudents to distance from their own assumptions about Italy to re-discover the target culture from a fresher perspective. After reflectingon this experience a participant commented:
I guess, as an Italian student I’m . . . biased, ’cause . . . I really like Italy soI don’t see the faults so much, maybe . . . but when you’re kind of forcedto look at it from an outsider’s perspective . . . you see more of the faultsand more of the good things about it . . . (Emi)
This realisation is an initial step towards de-centring and can begrounded within intercultural language learning, which aims at de-centring learners from their own linguistic and cultural perspectives toconsider the diverse perspectives of others.
Strategies to empathise
Parallel to these strategies, I also designed episodes which decreasedthe distance between participants and their perceptions of socio-cultural issues, experimenting with the other side of the continuumand interweaving the two dimensions to give more depth to theexperience of otherness. An example of how I manipulated distance toallow for an increased projection of participants’ emotional lives intothe characters was the process drama on the Roma people. Theeducational objective was to reflect on the difficult topic of issues ofintegration between the Roma ethnic community and mainstreamcommunity in Italian capital cities. In recent years, this deep-rootedissue has witnessed a renewed wave of intolerance and racism in Italy,fuelled by the mainstream Italian media that has stigmatised ‘gypsies’as an outcast ethnic group. My educational focus was to enableparticipants to see beyond the stereotypical representation of theRoma community perpetrated by the media.
Through a combination of process drama conventions, studentswere exposed to the reality of Roma communities in Italy. Starting from
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the pre-text, a photograph of a Roma child in a camp, we werelaunched in a dramatic world where we experienced living as Romachildren. To begin with, I assumed the low-status role of the five-year-old child in the photo. In this way, we were suddenly involved into theeveryday struggles of the boy, who experienced racial bullying andpreferred to avoid school whenever possible. They heard the narrationof a typical day inside a camp, and then created tableaux of daily life inthe caravans. The climax of the drama was a school meeting withparticipants in role as Italian parents. Here I assumed the high-statusrole of the school principal, complaining about the behaviour of gipsychildren and challenging the parents in role. The drama concluded withan improvisation of participants in role as Roma children waiting forthe school bus. It was a meaningful episode: learners had empathisedwith the characters to such an extent that they experienced sheer joywhen they decided, in role, to skip school to go begging for money inthe streets. This is remarkable, considering that participants were adultlinguistics and education students who acknowledged and valuedchildren’s rights to education. Through processes of drama, they wereable to empathise with another point of view and experience adifferent perspective to survival, schooling and justice.
This process drama produced a strong effect on participants. Themajority, when interviewed, referred to this workshop as the mostmeaningful for them. Some learners indicated throughout the course astrong level of emotional commitment to this process drama as a resultof the empathy generated:
You just realise how innocent the children are; they have absolutely no sayin what’s going to happen to them! . . . I remember going away from thatlesson . . . I was really sad, in that lesson, thinking about it . . . (Miriam)
This comment was made straight after the workshop and echoesstrong empathy with the issue. Indeed, even after a considerableperiod of time had elapsed, some participants seemed to maintain astrong level of empathy. The following comment, for example, wasmade four weeks after the workshop:
That just broke my heart . . . the way that I could . . . really feel . . . a realunderstanding of you know, of . . . that kind of racism . . . this peoplehave to go through . . . (Sarah)
Data from concept-mapping diagrams also confirmed a strongerengagement with this topic. Used for exploring conceptual change,
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concept mapping is based on the assumption that knowledge in themind consists of mental representations. I planned this as the finalactivity of the course, to enable participants to reflect on their growingunderstanding. In groups, learners were asked to brainstorm keyconcepts and match them to six radial diagrams, representing the sixworkshops. Most groups interconnected ideas with more than onetopic; all groups created more connections to the process drama onissues of Roma integration, using phrases, rather than key words.
Communicative forums
Another strategy I used to enhance intercultural awareness wasengaging in communicative forums. Through the forums, which lastedup to 30 minutes, participants were invited to decide on a socio-cultural theme emerging from the play to explore for the followingweek. They were encouraged to choose the theme which they felt theywere less familiar with and, in order to make this decision, they had toactively engage in an intercultural inquiry.
While workshops were conducted solely in the target language,students had the option of using their first language during thediscussion forums. I made this choice to ensure all participants felt theycould contribute to the discussion, regardless of proficiency. Thisapproach is in line with Liddicoat’s recent discourse on the use of firstand target language in intercultural language learning (Liddicoat 2008).Even so, most of the participants managed to sustain the debate in thetarget language. To make this clear, in the communicative forumextracts below, I have indicated in italics those contributions whichwere originally made in English. Two conditions were necessary tocreate the basis for intercultural inquiry in the communicative forums:establishing a student-centred environment and fostering a culturalsynergy between facilitator and participants. Once these conditionswere in place, as a group we were able to enter what Bhabha (1994)has defined as the ‘third space’, a concept that embodies the interfacebetween the encounters of two cultures.
Student-centred environment
If a student-oriented environment was easily established duringthe process dramas, due to the intrinsic nature of the pedagogy,this condition was much harder to maintain in the discussion forumsthat followed, where students had a tendency to revert to the
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teacher-oriented approach with which they were familiar. As a facilitator Iposed open-ended questions to start the discussion. I deliberately triedto ask questions for which I did not have a prepared answer; in doing so,my aim was to neutralise the power dynamics between teacher andparticipants, an essential condition underpinning the philosophy ofprocess drama, as well as intercultural language learning. During thediscussion, students would often bypass my suggestions for discussionto ask me specific questions on recent developments on Italian socio-cultural issues, eager to take notes. Unconsciously, they were falling intothe traditional dynamic of classroom interaction, where the teachertends to be the primary source of information. When students askedme a question which could have triggered a lecture-type response,I answered it to the best of my knowledge but also encouraged them toreflect on it, relating it to their personal experience.
For example, during the communicative forum following the dramaon chronic pessimism and cycles of politics and corruption, I was askedto explain the reasons behind the collapse of the Prodi Government inApril 2008. This topic still remains a heated point of discussion amongItalians; knowing myself, I could have spoken about it for hours.However, I answered succinctly to the best of my knowledge and thenbroke free of the teacher-oriented dynamic by engaging the group ina reflection about it:
Erika: How do you . . . how do you feel about this? What do you thinkabout this as Australian students that look at Italy from abroad?
Tina: Think . . . think? Think what, think about what?Erika: Of Italy, of this issue with corruption, these cycles of Govern-
ments that cannot go forward . . .Tina: I think it’s very sad, because . . .Emi: Why is it very sad?
Tina: Because Italy cannot move forward . . .Sarah: Yes, because every time there is a Government, after a very short
time there is another . . . which means that it’s not possible todo anything at all, almost, because there are all differentGovernments, with ideas . . . different ideals, I think it’s sostrange!
Rocco: But I . . . am on the other side . . . (Communicative forum 5)
Learners were not used to this approach but, through the progressionof the weeks, they came to appreciate it:
It’s not question and answer kind of thing, it’s more . . . that you caninterpret, interpret! Like something that you can actually kind of thinkoh, I know something about that I can say, so in [a traditional] classroom
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they might ask you a straight answer and a straight question . . . and youdon’t know the answer so . . . can’t say anything . . . (Sandy)
Establishing a student-centred approach based on a co-operativeinteraction in the discussion forums was at times challenging, asparticipants were not used to it and constantly tried to revert to theirfamiliar mode of interaction. However, this condition was necessary forthe transformative process of intercultural inquiry to occur.
Cultural synergy
According to Jin and Cortazzi’s cultural synergy model (1998), in orderfor intercultural awareness to be generated in an AL classroom, it isessential for teachers and students to acknowledge their culturalidentities and use them as learning resources. Cultural synergy, theyargue, has a deep effect on classroom discourse bridging differentperspectives and attitudes. At the beginning of the course, none of theparticipants seemed to be willing to expose their private identitywithin the group; being at the final year of their university degree, themajority of students was used to a more traditional, teacher-orientedapproach. Below is an extract from my reflective journal following thefirst communicative forum:
More than a discussion forum today seemed to me like a session at thedentist! I’ve had to painfully extract words out of them . . . once they warmedup, they shared some superficial information. (Reflective journal week 1)
In order to encourage a cultural synergy, I chose to share my personalidentity, using it as a platform for discussion on intercultural themes.For example, below is an extract from the forum following the processdrama on Roma people in Italy:
Erika: Just think that I was born in Milan, I lived in the city centre for19 years and I have never dared to address personally a Romaperson! When I was little, I was scared of them . . . now I’m anadult and I wonder why. Why was I scared of gypsies when Iwas a little girl?
[Everyone nods deep in thought] Miriam: Yes.Rita: Mmm . . .
Louise: Maybe the media has . . . influenced . . .(Communicative forum 3)
Following my example of sharing my personal and cultural identity,gradually we began to work towards a cultural synergy. Participants
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began to ask and answer their own questions and use each other’sexperiences as resources for discussion. In the extract below, forexample, I model this pattern as a question is initially addressed to mebut I encourage the group to answer:
Rocco: About what we discussed today . . . I ask this question [staringdirectly at me].
Erika: Go ahead!Rocco: Italians have this pessimism, well, that’s for sure. But still . . .
you can live fairly well in Italy, you can ski, you can do thebeautiful things . . . there’s still industry, still there’s fashionwhich is still the best of the world . . .
Erika: Uh uh.Rocco: The food is the best of the world, Italy is still going! . . . I think
it’s really strange that Italians have this pessimism . . .[Pause]
Sarah: That’s because . . . when someone grows up with some-thing . . . which is familiar, like is always there . . . I don’tknow, some ignorance . . . it’s the same thing for us, inAustralia . . .
Miriam: But have you done the drama on temporary work with us?Rocco: Yes, yes.
Miriam: And even after that you think that Italians live well?(Communicative forum 5)
Initially Rocco had addressed the question directly to me, indicatingthat he wanted to hear my response as he perceived me in the role of‘the expert’. In order to neutralise this pattern, I listened to thequestion, but did not answer it. In this way, Sarah intervened andopened the discussion to the group. Through this process, the groupgradually established a cultural synergy.
The ‘third place’
Once these conditions were in place, participants were able to enterwhat Bhabha (1994) has defined as the ‘third space’, the hybridisedculture that emerges where two different cultures meet. Bhabha’s‘third space’ theory is useful to contextualise intercultural discourse.Greenwood framed it within process drama, arguing that this approachcan be used as an agent for change within the ‘third space’ tounderstand, interpret and represent the ‘third culture’ created betweenintercultural encounters (2001, 196). In a language learning context,theorists adapted Bhabha’s notion arguing that learning an AL is likestepping into a ‘third place’. Kramsch (1993) defined this as the
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intermediary place, the common grounds for the interaction betweenexisting sets of meanings (from the native culture) and alternative setsof meanings (from the target culture). In this sense, the ‘third place’ isnot a fixed point common to all learners, but is rather a negotiablespace between self and other; it is a dynamic space beingrenegotiated with every intercultural interaction. The experience ofthe process dramas followed by the communicative forums providedopportunities for learners to reflect on such ‘third place’, enablingthem to get an insight into how their perceptions are culturallymediated by their own language and culture and by the languageand culture they were studying. Analysing and reflecting onexperiences encountered in the dramatic worlds managed to triggerin participants that transformation of consciousness which occurswhen entering a ‘third space’.
The transformative process
Data from my reflective journal, interviews, concept mapping, com-municative forums and focus group indicated that through a combina-tion of de-centring and empathising strategies, interwoven with aprocess of experience, analysis and reflection, some participants wereable to engage in intercultural inquiry and adopt a reflective stance.Based on an inductive analysis of the data, I identified an evolvingpattern of intercultural growth among participants consisting of: de-centring from cultural codes; experiencing otherness; enhancingintercultural awareness (Figure 1).
Not all participants were able to experience the three phasesillustrated above. This seemed to be related to their commitment,motivation to learn and willingness to participate in the drama,
Figure 1. Pattern of intercultural awareness growth.
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which in turn were influenced by personal, social and socio-culturalfactors. For example, during the focus group discussion, Michaelremarked:
I don’t know that I got a lot out it because . . . I’ve always been animmigrant . . . so I actually know what it’s like to be an immigrant andacceptance and that sort of thing and ehm I . . . I mean, there’s a certainamount of . . . racism coming through . . . (Michael)
Michael argued that he ‘didn’t get a lot’ out of the drama on Romaintegration. This workshop closely explored issues of racial discrimina-tion among children from disadvantaged backgrounds. As such, itmight have recalled too closely Michael’s personal childhood experi-ence, and might have been perceived as too threatening. Indeed, asNeelands and Goode have argued, drama can be perceived threateningby those participants who are not ready to let go of their concerns inthe real dimension, to transpose them to a symbolic dimension (2000,111). Overall, throughout the 12 hours of contact, Michael might haveonly experienced the first phase of intercultural awareness growthdescribed above; he might have needed more time to embrace theother phases. Unfortunately, the short timeframe of the researchlimited this possibility.
On the other hand, those participants who were able to experienceall three phases above demonstrated a degree of interculturaltransformation which enabled them to experience a shift of perceptionand engage in interpretation and creation of meaning. For example, atthe end of the course, Sarah reflected:
I think I’ve glamorised Italian culture and when I went to Italy I was16 . . . I’ve kind of gone . . . oh, Italy is just amazing! This [experience] forme it has taken a little bit of the glamour out of Italy, for me but I feellike I’m better equipped . . . (Sarah)
By overcoming the stereotypical view of Italy that she had formed as ateenager when she visited Italy as a tourist, Sarah was able to re-adjusther perception as an adult. Later on, in the same interview, shecontemplated:
I think because I have had this . . . you know, desire to learn Italian andto be . . . at least, I know the word is Italo-australiana, but I wanna be . . .Austral-italiana! [Laughs] Ehm . . . so I realise, and I understand that I’malways gonna have that ‘Australianness’ or whatever, that I would neverbe . . . native-like . . . (Sarah)
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From this extract, it appears that Sarah has come to acknowledge andaccept her identity; she has been able to come to terms with and de-centre from her desire to be ‘Austral-italiana’ and realised that thismediated her experience. This, in turn, enhanced her understanding ofintercultural awareness:
Because the other funny thing is that [amazed, almost shouting] onlysince doing process drama . . . I’ve heard about the [social] problemsfrom the Italians at work . . . It’s never come up before and I don’t knowif that’s just a coincidence? . . . Do you know what I mean? Or maybebefore I just wasn’t noticing it because I didn’t want to? (Sarah)
Sarah, who worked in a restaurant owned by an Italian family, was ableto gain a new insight into her colleagues’ conversations and was ableto experience the Italian otherness at her workplace under a differentperspective. She overcame her pre-conceptions of a ‘glamorised’ Italianculture she had formed as a teenager; she de-centred from her owncultural codes and developed a degree of intercultural awareness.
As Alfred, Byram, and Fleming state, there is no such thing as acomplete or finished intercultural experience (2003, 6). As such, I donot claim to present a finished theory or practice of transformation ineducation. However, I do argue that process drama can provide thenecessary support for teachers of AL to scaffold intercultural languagelearning at an intermediate/advanced level of proficiency. If AL learningpedagogies need to acknowledge the unpredictable nature oflanguage to support meaning-making, then process drama can providea flexible structure to achieve this goal.
Conclusion
This paper illustrated a research project carried out in 2008 thatexplored drama pedagogies applied to intercultural language learning.In particular, the context of the study was a course of Italian asAdditional Language at an intermediate/advanced level of proficiency.The research objective was to map out drama strategies to address thechallenges of intercultural language learning. The project involved thedesign and facilitation of six process drama workshops, conducted inthe target language, with 12 third-year students in a tertiary institution.Using participatory action research, co-participants engaged in aprocess of intercultural enquiry to explore some contemporary Italiansocio-cultural issues. These included protesting as collective action inItaly, sarcasm as sense of humour embedded in traditions, the
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temporary worker as an Italian collective identity, issues of integrationof Roma people in Italy, chronic pessimism co-existing with politics andcorruption, and the stereotypes of bigotry in the Italian society. Eachworkshop started from a different pre-text and was connected to theplot of the play Sottopaga! Non si paga! (‘We won’t pay! We can’t pay’),the compulsory reading for the course (Fo and Rame 2008). Theprocess drama workshops were followed by communicative forums;these were discussion platforms to empower the group to choose asocio-cultural issue to be explored in the next drama. Their choicebecame my starting point to design the subsequent workshop,following weekly cycles of action research.
Two strategies to enhance intercultural awareness were identified:(1) manipulation of aesthetic distance and (2) the communicativeforums. Through the manipulation of distance, participants were ableto experience distancing and/or empathising with characters andsituations. Examples from specific workshops were provided toillustrate strategies used to increase distance (de-centring) and reducedistance (empathising). Through the communicative forums strategy,participants were able to reflect and negotiate meaning. They werepresented with some intercultural issues drawn from Sottopaga! Non sipaga! (Fo and Rame 2008) and were encouraged to explore their ownunderstanding through open discussion. Through this strategy, it waspossible to create a student-centred environment and a culturalsynergy, two conditions necessary to create intercultural awareness.Once these conditions were in place, it was possible for participants toenter what Kramsch (1993) defined ‘the third place’, an intermediaryplace, for the interaction between existing and alternative sets ofmeanings. In line with participatory action research principles, thepaper privileged participants’ voices drawing from a variety of researchtools, including my reflective journal, 10 semi-structured interviews,transcripts of communicative forums, concept mapping and a Video-Stimulated Recall focus group.
The research reinforces previous findings pointing to the benefits ofprocess drama for AL learning (Kao and O’Neill 1998; Stinson 2007,2008). The main argument of the paper is that, through thecombination of different drama strategies, some participants wereable to engage in a pattern of intercultural growth consisting of (1) de-centring from cultural codes, (2) experiencing otherness and (3)enhancing intercultural awareness. This pattern was triggered by aprocess of experience, reflection, analysis and action in line with Alred,Byram, and Fleming’s intercultural awareness model (2003) which
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constitutes the framework of the research. Within this framework, thestudy confirms previous literature arguing that process drama is asignificant approach to support intercultural awareness (Fleming 1998,2003) and highlights the synergy between process drama andintercultural language-learning pedagogies. To this regard, moreresearch is needed to validate the benefits of process drama across awider range of contexts and language proficiencies.
Keywords: Additional Language learning; intercultural awareness; processdrama
Notes on contributor
Erika Piazzoli is a PhD candidate at Griffith University; her research focuses onthe aesthetic dimension of process drama for intercultural language learning.Erika teaches Dramatic Form and Communicative Performance at GriffithUniversity and Italian at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
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