Exploring the Significance of Theatre as a Pedagogical Tool in Teaching Personal Communication to Engineering Students

This innovative practice full paper explores the significance of theatre as a pedagogical tool in teaching personal communication courses to engineering students. Teaching non-technical subj ects, such as humanities and communication courses, to engineering students has been a momentous challenge. This is due in part to the perception that these subjects are not directly related to the technical nature of the field of engineering studies. Furthermore, these courses are perceived to be irrelevant to the practical applications of technology and engineering in the real world. Engineering students prefer hands-on, practical, and experimental projects that directly correlate with their technical field of study. Therefore, instructional methods and pedagogies play a pivotal role in shaping engineering students' learning, especially of humanities and communication courses. Personal communication courses in the past have been primarily delivered through lectures on communication theories and a few classroom experiences delivered through activities. However, in an effort to enhance the learning efficacy, we chose to use theatrical formats and exercises as a pedagogical tool to teach personal communication capacities and skills. This unconventional approach allowed us to bring the dynamism of real-life communication scenarios into the classroom. The theatre exercises were adopted from the work of Augusto Boal and Konstantin Stanislavsky and were used in two ways: 1. Physical theatre exercises which involved body work and movement-based exercises. 2. Theatre-based communication activities, which involved group activities based around various roles and characters, in case-study scenarios. The theatre activities, specifically tailored for practicing personal communication skills, provided students with a platform to simulate real-life experiences within the safe confines of a classroom, thereby providing them with a unique opportunity to exercise their communication skills in a practical context. Our research included control and experimental groups, with the latter having the Theater-Oriented Pedagogy (TOP) integrated into their curriculum. The data analysis revealed a higher learning performance in personal communication skills among the experimental group. Additionally, students preferred communicative theatre exercises in comparison to physical theatre exercises. This paper, therefore, argues that the learning performance of personal communication skills significantly improves when the theatrical format is employed as an instructional method for engineering students.