STAND UP!: THE POTENTIAL EDUCATIONAL IMPACT OF ANTI-BULLYING DRAMA WORKSHOP FOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Abstract

This paper is based upon an on going research into a participatory drama workshop calledStand Up! that toured in five secondary schools in Depok, West Java, Indonesia, during October 2017. The workshop was initiated by Theatre for Life, a community non-profit based in Depok, and it was funded by the Community Service Grants from the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia. Targeting at Year 10, Year 11, and Year 12, the workshop intended to raise awareness on bullying among secondary school students.Stand Up! shared the same framework, techniques, and objectives as Theatre in Education (TiE) in a way that it took place at educational settings and aimed to explore a pressing issue for educational purposes. The methods used in the workshop alternated some basic dramatic activities such as role playing, freeze frames, flashback, and improvisation with Boals forum theatre techniques to encourage students to debate pick-up lines, enact assertive behaviours to tackle bullies, and discuss effective ways to report a bullying situation to teachers or parents. This paper provides summary of the workshop content and methodologies. It goes on to discuss quantitative data from the research in order to examine the potential educational impacts of the resulting project for the young audiences whom it engaged with.

Keywords: drama, participatory, bullying, adolescene