The Resonance in Stories: Applying Playback Theatre to Evoke Empathy and Story Sharing Among Junior High School Students

• Main Authors: HUANG, SHIH-TING, 黃詩婷
• Other Authors: CHANG, LI-YU
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6q64nz

碩士 === 國立臺南大學 === 戲劇創作與應用學系碩士班 === 106 === The objective of this action research was to investigate the effects of Playback Theatre on empathy and story sharing among seventh-grade students. A course using Playback Theatre as the teaching method was implemented in four teaching cycles over one semester. In this course, fairy tales and picture books with themes that progressively proceeded from the self, family, school to the society, were utilized to incite students to resonate with the stories, associate the stories with their life experiences, and then spontaneously share their life experiences and feelings. The stories they shared would be acted in the form of Playback Theatre. The research data included observations, teacher’s reflection journals, interviews with students, feedback sheets, and dialogues with observers and drama educators, all of which served as a foundation for modifying the course in subsequent teaching cycles. Results showed that with warm-up activities and stories used as the scaffold, the students were more able to resonate with the stories and associate the stories with individual experiences, resulting in higher willingness to share stories. Besides, the grouping methods which alternated on a weekly basis allowed the students to collaborate with different partners. This design helped evoke feelings of empathy in students and led to more concentration of attention and more dedication to acting others’ stories with their teams. Based on the results, this study proposed a few suggestions as follows: 1. Course design: The teaching time should be flexible, and activities should be designed to cultivate the improvisation skills, instant reaction ability, and tacit understanding for cooperation in students. Students’ mental and physical development should be considered in the choice of story themes, and adequate guidance should be provided to students. It is also necessary to develop class rules and audience guidelines to ensure a safe and stable atmosphere. 2. Teaching techniques: Instructors should have sufficient teaching experiences and be engaged in continuous learning of all roles in the Playback Theatre and performance-related knowledge, especially the hosting skills, all of which will be helpful for them when guiding students to share stories and act. 3. Empathy and story sharing: Instructors are advised to maintain an open attitude characterized by active sharing and listening to induce students’ willingness to share. After hearing the stories shared by students, they can provide positive feedbacks and opinions from different perspectives, motivating students to show empathy for whatever they come across in this diverse world.