Using Sociodrama to Help Young Children Problem Solve

Abstract

Sociodrama is an arts-based, action-oriented tool of individual and collective social exploration and creative problem solving that allows participants to explore and find potential resolutions to issues of concern and conflict in their lives. This article describes how Early Years educators can begin to implement basic sociodrama into their existing programs in order to help children represent, explore, and reflect upon issues and problems of social importance.

Fostering Children and Adolescents’ Creative Thinking in Education. Theoretical Model of Drama Pedagogy Training

“…Moreover, Mellou (1995) highlights the work of Sutton-Smith (1967) and Bruner (1972) showing how “as-if” play is directly related to flexibility, inferring that both authors agree that role-play in DPT is a contributor of creative development. This capacity to analyze daily issues by playing “as-if” could help develop problem solving skills, and relates to work on perspective-thinking and empathy, as is proposed by San (2002), Laidlaw (2000); Pecaski (2012) or cited in Erdogan (2013). The latter established that role-playing and improvisation helps participants to reorganize their cognitive patterns when reviewing experiences, ideas or behaviors within a group.…”

“…For this review, the concept DPT will be used to gather all the training procedures that apply to the characteristics described above, as well as the concepts presented by Freeman et al (2003) (e.g., child-drama, play-making, child-play, or educational-drama), and the more complex process-oriented methodologies such as socio-drama (Moreno, 1943, 1947; Pecaski, 2012), Creative Drama (Rosenberg, 1981; McCaslin, 1996) or Applied Theatre (Holland, 2009). Overall, this would include all drama-based trainings or pedagogies in which the focus is on the final artistic result or any academic result (e.g., Walker et al, 2011) will not qualify as DPT.…”

“…Pecaski (2012) claims that all sessions should conclude with an oral discussion to enable children to talk about their personal actions, responses, and feelings on the session. Feedback allows children to think critically about how they acted during the session, and put into perspective how they responded to the presented situation or problem, allowing them to rethink about various appropriate solutions to the original problem.…”