| Summary: | This is a research study that explores the kind of pedagogical possibilities that collective remembrance mediated by practices of drama in education, might offer to the work of memory. Under study is a drama-remembrance (an artistic and pedagogical project) that attempts to link significant historical learning with critical remembrance through the classroom drama praxis. Assuming the school as a terrain within which a community of memory is possible, this research is concerned with educational processes that facilitate the understanding of the ‘work of collective memory’. The hypothesis is that through the work of drama framed as a performative practice of remembrance, students can productively explore the work of memory; its functioning, implications and structures. In addition, by manipulating the elements of the art form, it is proposed that students also learn how drama works, its mechanisms and devices. I call this approach “Drama-Remembrance Praxis”, as it constitutes a particular application of theatre to the memory and remembrance framework. This dissertation provides an account of and analyzes key episodes of the research journey of a group of 16 students in a Grade 10 drama class, their drama teacher and myself -a drama artist, researcher and educator- as we collectively explored issues of historical memory through practices of process drama. The setting for this exploration was a project to initiate a drama classroom-based "community of memory" with one class in the Normal-Distrital Maria Montessori School, in Bogotá, Colombia, South America. Participant-researchers worked through questions regarding the public remembrance of the story of the Colombian Afro-descendant Manuel Saturio Valencia, one of last prisoners to be executed by the State before capital punishment was eliminated from Colombia in 1910. As an Afro-descendant, the story of Saturio's life and subsequent execution remains little known in Colombia. Thus at stake in this project was the recovery of forgotten stories, the construction of a more inclusive public memory, and the formation of a critical historical consciousness.
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