Drama as Embodied Learning: Moving from Theory into Action

The arts, especially Drama, are among the strongest ways to engage secondary school students in classroom activities that support and leverage embodied cognition—the concept that the whole body plays a part in grasping and communicating understandings of information and ideas. For a wide variety of reasons, however, many teachers, are reluctant to use drama as a learning modality. Because drama methods were not included in the pre-service training of most teachers, they are not aware of how drama can support the topics they teach. Teachers also fear that drama takes too much time to implement and can collapse into unproductive chaos in the classroom. After presenting the theoretical precepts of embodied cognition and its relationship to the educational uses of drama, this article shares detailed directions for an effective classroom drama activity that supports the learning of vocabulary words and guides teachers towards successfully implementing it in their work with students.