The Role Of Drama Education In Developing Empathy & Social Skills

The communication between actors, characters, and audiences reflects the significance of empathy as a determinant of action. Brecht's legendary venue stylishly empowers the outlining of sympathy such that sets it in a verifiable setting. I refer to this procedure as critical empathy; the foundation for a new curriculum based on narrative techniques with drama at its core.

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Empathy mirror neurons Verfremdung kindness critical empathy Previous article Next article In this essay, I argue that critical empathy should be central to the curriculum and that theatre is the most efficient method for practicing it. Without this limit, youngsters will be unprepared to make due, let alone flourish, on the planet they are acquiring.

The situation is clearly outlined in the OECD position paper The Future of Education and Skills 2030 (Citation 2018)

Children who start school in 2018 will need to stop thinking that resources are endless and can be used; They will need to place a premium on the well-being, sustainability, and prosperity of everyone. They will need to be accountable and empowered, prioritizing sustainability over short-term gain and collaboration over division.

Education has the potential to make the difference between people embracing the challenges they face and being defeated by them in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. OECD Citation (2018)) If young people's education affords them the right to the dramatic opportunity to practice empathy and the theatrical skills to frame this empathy critically, our chances of meeting these challenges will be significantly improved.

Empathy's benefits and drawbacks The full impact of recent discoveries in the neuroscience of the human brain, made possible by the invention of fMRI scanning, is only beginning to be felt across a variety of fields. One of these is applied social theatre, a subfield of theatre.

It has made us distrust our feelings and believe that our ability to reason is superior. According to Dutch neuroscientist Christian Keysers, this is a fundamental distortion of how our brains function:

We need to quit thinking in dualistic terms that affirm the cognizant legitimate objective psyche in resistance against stomach responses. Consciousness, the brain, and the body are always trading partners. Keysers Citation2011, 105 says that many crucial processes for social cognition take place in the brain but are not conscious.

Such an organization leads to the idea of typified information which is major to action, for example, theater in which the body, cerebrum, and cognizant brain are completely utilized in the help of social comprehension coordinated at portrayals of the world as we experience it and, once in a while, as we might wish to transform it.

We can begin to appreciate the significance of the identification of what has been referred to as "mirror neurons," which was initially accomplished through the work of Vittorio Gallese and his team at the University of Parma. Once we are freed from the false Cartesian binary of body and mind ("je pense, alors je suis"), we can begin to appreciate the significance of the identification. The following is how Daniel Stern explains how mirror neurons work:

The activity of these mirror neurons maps the visual information received while watching another act to the equivalent motor representation in our brain. It makes it possible for us to directly participate in the actions of another person without having to imitate them.

The term "mirror neuron" is, as James Thompson has suggested (personal comment to the author), too narrow to encompass this process. Instead of a mirror that can impersonate, yet with mutilation, these neurons are how we go into an empathic relationship with another. Empathy, telepathy, and sympathy all result in the transmission of emotions triggered by listening to and watching another person. All in all, in the social collaborations of our day-to-day routines we are continually acting like a theater crowd, perusing and answering. Keysers puts it this way:

Our brain appears to share a rich mosaic of neural activity with the observed individual, including representations of his behavior, when we observe the behavior of other people. substantial activities, his sentiments, and his looks (Keysers Citation2011, 112).

This definition of what it means to be human is very different from Piaget's view of child development, which saw each person as an isolated entity. As a result, formal education systems need to be completely rethought. However, I would recommend a dialectical rather than a binary evaluation of their relationship and caution against any overly simplistic substitution of heteronomy for autonomy. Even though every society is made up of individuals and every individual cannot function outside of social frameworks, elements of autonomy may prove essential for our well-being.

Drama and theater audiences are well aware of the implications. The words and activities of the characters in front of an audience affect the cerebrums of those watching. However, affect transcends telepathy between the stage and the audience; it likewise works among entertainers and characters. The capacity of the human imagination to empathize with fictional characters is a remarkable quality.