Gregory, Anna
(2023)
From Functioning to Flourishing: How Does Drama-Led Peace Education Help People Know, Experience And Transform Conflict?
A Participatory Action-Research Project in a single school.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
Building on my peace-education experience, this inquiry explored a more creative way to co-construct knowledge around conflict and transformation. As well as documenting the development of my educational praxis, this research details how social justice, liberatory education, creativity and action aligned for me and twelve child co-researchers through a participatory action research (PAR) experience.
The study comprised four action-research cycles: two group cycles (the Peace PAR project) bookended by two solo-practitioner cycles. The Peace PAR project took place in an English primary school in the Midlands over two school terms, involving 12 inner-city youths aged 10–11 and four adult participants. Together, we undertook a collaborative and democratic inquiry into transformative solutions to complex relational problems.
The Peace PAR Project’s process revealed the co-research group’s underlying relational conflict, including the unjust ways we treated each other and were treated by others (including adults). Our developing consciousness initiated our transformation towards radically new senses of self-perception and agency, stimulating more action as we upheld our right to be considered differently by each other and school staff. Using cycles of action and reflection to develop understanding and practice, we co-created an alternative research focus through a radical, inclusive epistemology.
Four key themes emerged from the study. First, the project demonstrated how values-led, arts-engaging practices enabled the co-researchers and I to step beyond dominant discourses and rationality to deconstruct our personal and social worlds and offer alternatives. Second, blending PAR and Theatre-of-the-Oppressed methods provided a unique epistemological framework, pedagogical approach and creative methodology based on sensory knowledge substantiation: we understood by seeing, hearing and feeling. Third, the inquiry offers an original contribution to knowledge by shedding light on how young people understand peace, peaceful methods, and peaceful mechanisms of dialogue about conflict. Finally, the study demonstrates the benefits of a short-lived democratic peace education in a school environment dominated by more regulated arrangements of space, time, and bodies.
As well as investigating values, oppression, conflict and peace in exploring how arts-engaged research and drama-led peace education might help people experience, know and transform conflict, this study revealed how I taught others and how others taught me within the contextual influences of our shared learning conditions. Our restorative-based, values-led inquiry valued human complexity over procedural simplicity. We concluded that radical change doesn’t need to be violent. Within the Peace PAR project, we made Our Peace.
| Item Type: |
Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
(PhD)
|
| Supervisors: |
Sellman, Edward
Jones, Susan |
| Keywords: |
Peace Education, Participatory Action Research, Drama, Theatre of the Oppressed, Restorative Justice, Restorative Approaches, Education, Creativity |
| Subjects: |
L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1024 Teaching
L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1501 Primary education
L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary education. High schools |
| Faculties/Schools: |
UK Campuses > Faculty of Social Sciences, Law and Education > School of Education |
| Item ID: |
71989 |
| Depositing User: |
Gregory, Anna
|
| Date Deposited: |
14 Feb 2024 10:44 |
| Last Modified: |
15 Feb 2024 08:44 |
| URI: |
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/71989 |
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