People as historical sources
Drama and Simulation (role play) in history
It is important in the teaching of History to show learners that what they are doing has relevance to them today. History is also about now. A further consideration is how, through teaching and learning in History, we can help learners to respect themselves, to learn to think and to learn to communicate. Effective communication is worth gold in today's world. A good way to do this is through drama, role-play and verbal responses.
Drama is something that needs careful thought and preparation. It is not relevant or useful on all occasions; and it needs a great deal of concentration and effort for it to succeed. It also has limited use; dealing only with those areas where you can afford the time that drama takes.
Having said that, drama is also a valuable means of developing historical understanding in learners and complements the process of history as enquiry. Drama can help to concentrate understanding on specific moments in the past, allowing learners to ‘climb inside them’ in the process of understanding. It can also help learners to understand that some questions raised in the study of the past might have a range of possible answers.
Drama needs to be linked closely to the historical situation and to real evidence about the past. Often an historical resource such as a story, document, picture or artefact provides a good starting focus for a piece of drama. This will occur when the learners already have some knowledge of the topic. Drama can also be a process of building a story, being used as an entry into a topic that will be developed during further lessons.
The teacher might also take a role in the drama, taking on the role of one of the characters. This need not necessarily be the leader. It could also, for example, be that of someone who needs to solve a problem and the learners are asked to offer ideas and solutions that they will all consider.
The central point in this is that whatever the form the drama takes, it needs to be based on real people and situations from the past.
An important historical learning and understanding gained from drama is the ability to empathize – to really feel what others felt. The kinds of empathy resulting from drama include a straight personal empathy in which a learner begins to feel a little of what a character or group under study felt, and empathy for a situation in which the learners begin to understand the constraints within which people or groups in the past operated.
Simulation or role-play is closely linked to drama. Again, the aim of role-play is to try to help children to understand why people acted as they did in the past and needs to be based on real evidence about real people in the past. This can only be done successfully once the class has spent some time working with the evidence. The simulation can be as simple as giving learners a role, describing the situation, and asking them to come up with a solution or solutions.
Simulations can also come in other forms such as board games or staging class debates on historical issues.
Related Pages:
Next page: Defining and using resources
Previous page: Story-telling in History
References
How to conduct & present historical research
Oral history - an educational tool for educators and learners
Source: Unpublished material from 3 Provincial History Conferences, December 2002, supplied by Claire Dyer, SA History Project, National Dept. of Education.