Playing with Fire: Empowerment and Conflict Transformation via Educational Drama

Abstract: Conflict is an inescapable reality of human interaction. While the vast majority of conflicts are solved quickly and discretely, some affect the lives of millions and persist for decades. The wide-ranging and complex nature of conflict attests to the importance of empowering social actors to transform potentially destructive disputes into opportunities for positive, social change. Furthermore, the persistence of violent conflict demonstrates that there are no definitive methods for empowering individuals to transform them. Instead, conflict transformation requires a variety of innovative approaches initiated by a multiplicity of creative individuals. The DRACON International project offered one such approach. This program sought to help adolescents mediate personal conflicts via educational drama. Although the results of DRACON were neither definitive nor exhaustive, the project highlighted educational drama as a possible vehicle for understanding and resolving disputes and pointed to an intriguing subject for future study. The following research project sought to address the weaknesses and build upon the strengths of DRACON through the implementation of a school-based, educational drama program in the Israeli occupied West Bank. The study took place over the course of six months of fieldwork in both a large, Palestinian city and small, Palestinian town. The researcher employed the qualitative methods of action research and micro-ethnography to assess the most typical types of conflicts and conflict behaviors among female, Palestinian adolescents as well as the efficacy of educational drama in empowering this target group to transform conflict. Finally, the researcher explored the affects of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Palestinian educational context on the implementation of the educational drama program. The results were illuminating. The project illustrated the ways in which core DRACON tenets could be applied in the context of an ongoing, violent conflict. The project also demonstrated profound links between the concepts of educational drama, empowerment, and conflict transformation and pointed to ways in which school-based, educational drama programs may contribute to the development of Lederach‟s moral imagination. Finally, the project highlighted the potential for adolescents to facilitate dramatic, social change and pointed to the limitless opportunities for future research involving this remarkable population.