Emotional engagement through drama: Strategies to assist learning through role-play

Abstract

When students are involved in a classroom activity designed to promote the learning of specific concepts it is more likely they will understand and retain these concepts when they engage emotionally in the learning experience. The difficulty for teachers involved in higher education is how to engage students in their learning in an emotionally challenging way while maintaining a classroom environment that students feel safe within. In the following paper the use of role-play as a pedagogical approach for enhancing learning through emotional engagement will be discussed. The paper will highlight how the author has made use of role-play to provide genuine emotional challenges for students in a tertiary setting while still providing a safe learning environment.