Theoretical Explanation of the Patterns and Implementation of Remodeling Moral Education Class with Drama: Based on Goffman's Situational Interaction Theory

Abstract

Drama is an art presenting contradictions and conflicts through verbal dialogues and body movements. Remodeling moral education classrooms with drama means placing students in a class of "situations, conflicts, experiences and reflections", allowing students to create and perform drama scripts in combination with previous life experiences and current moral issues in the classroom. By constructing dramatic conflicts and resolving dramatic contradictions, a real moral problem situation is built for learners. Remodeling moral education class with drama has changed students'moral learning environment, where learners are regarded as core participants and are required to understand the moral dilemmas of characters, to perform the moral growth of figures, and actively to construct moral cognition in active participation and self-development. This helps to eliminate the separation of the current "intellectual moral education" from the "disembodied moral education"and is an important way to fulfill the fundamental task of "cultivating people with moral integrity". In moral education classrooms, the moral motives, behaviors and their consequences presented in drama are simplified analogues of students'complex moral lives, which helps enhance students'understanding of the complexity of individual moral lives. In addition, remodeling moral education classrooms with drama is based on Goffman's "observer–subject"model of situational interaction theory and the theory of dramaturgy which center on the interaction of members in the classroom field and it realizes the two-way penetration and two-way exchange between students'dramatic situations and social life, presenting a new form of vividness, life-orientation, and vitality and therefore can lead students to explore the true meaning of life. Remodeling moral education classrooms with drama persists the Marxist view of literature and art in China as the fundamental guiding ideology, connects drama with students'real life as the basic principle, and accomplishes the compatibility between drama and the school moral education ecosystem as the implementation path. And it also conforms to the situational learning advocated by the new curriculum standards by enhancing students' ability to distinguish right from wrong to establish correct value orientations from an early age.

Keywords

• drama
• dramatic conflict
• smoral learning environment
• moral lives
• moral education class
• situational learning