Teaching Human Rights through Educational Drama; How Difficult Can It Be? A quantitative research with in-service teachers in Greece

Proceedings of ‏The 2nd World Conference on Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2021

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/2nd.socialsciencesconf.2021.03.25

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Teaching Human Rights through Educational Drama; How Difficult Can It Be? A quantitative research with in-service teachers in Greece

Nassia Choleva, Antonis Lenakakis, Myrto Pigkou-Repousi

 

ABSTRACT: 

The recent refugee flow in Greece has found Greece unprepared both on a political, financial, but more importantly on a social level. At a time where humanities, social studies and arts are considered low priority subjects in Greek curriculum, teachers are met with a challenge of how to maintain a human rights respecting culture with their students.

This paper attempts to offer a valuable bridge between human rights education elements and educational drama as a methodological approach. A 20-hour drama workshop training was given to 170 in-service teachers of all disciplines and levels in Greece, during the first semester of 2019-2020, focusing on human rights and more specifically in refugees. The research was conducted in three phases (a. before the training, b. after the training and c. after the end of school year), with questionnaires consisting of closed questions and 5-point Likert scales and multiple choices possibilities of answers.

The paper focuses on the participants’ assessment of the training, regarding their expressed teaching challenges. It also presents how the teachers evaluated the tools and methodologies of the educational drama training as per item, in terms of immediate utilization by themselves. Most importantly, they give information of actual implementations they took under, as a result of their training, as well as the factors that enabled or discouraged them in actual applications – including the Covid-19 effects in everyday school life, due to a 2, 5-month lockdown in the country.

Keywords: interdisciplinary approach; quantitative research; teaching practice.