Originally appears in the Fall 2005 issue

The use of drama can greatly enhance and reinforce learning in environmental education. When students study a subject in order to dramatize it, they are challenged to explore topics from many points of view and to communicate their learning creatively. In do so, they not only achieve greater understanding and retention, but also gain insight into themselves, other people, and even other living beings. By entering the role of another being, they realize that many of their own needs and emotions are universal and that all life is interconnected. Drama can thus consolidate and extend students’ direct experience of the natural world and foster the empathy that is essential if students are to appreciate and ultimately protect it.

Although I use drama across the curriculum, I find it particularly useful for environmental education, both in the classroom and with student environmental clubs. The following are examples of the types of dramatic activity that I used most frequently. They include:

  • Guided imagery
  • In-role drama, in which students role-play imaginary or real-life happenings
  • Writing and performing plays based on a story or book
  • Creating skits and raps to present information to other classes and school assemblies
  • Researching a person or animal and then playing the role of that character in a presentation

Note that drama activities usually involve large numbers of children moving about in a small space. It is essential to develop guidelines for student behavior because even one disruptive child can ruin the experience for everyone. Students are more likely to cooperate if they are involved in this process. 

Guided imagery

In guided imagery, the teacher or leader creates and narrates a storyline, and the students listen and relate to it on a sensory and emotional level. Guided imagery can be used to create a setting and provide information for developing a role. I often use it to teach or expand on previous knowledge. The following guided imagery exercise is one that I use to develop visual images as I reinforce a previous discussion about the water cycle.

I begin the guided imagery session by having students do a breathing exercise, which enables them to focus and relax. Students find a comfortable place, preferably one where they can lie down. When they are settled, I begin by speaking in a slow, quiet voice, pausing as appropriate to allow students time for reflection:

Close your eyes. Feel yourself sink into the floor. Listen to your breathing. Lift up an arm, just above the floor, and tighten it as if you were pulling a piece of elastic. Let your arm relax and gently fall to the floor. Do the same with your other arm. Now lift a leg slightly above the floor, tighten, and relax. Now the other leg. Relax and, keeping your heels on the floor, let you feet roll outwards. Roll your head so you are facing the ceiling. Let your head relax and roll to the side. Tighten up your whole body and now relax completely.

At the count of three, take a slow breath, hold it, and then release it during another count of three. Let’s do that together. Breathe in — one, two, three — hold your breath, and now release it — one, two, three. Continue to breathe in this way, but as you breathe in, imagine the air moving to all parts of your body. As you breathe out, sink into the floor and relax.

The students are now relaxed and receptive to the guided imagery that follows:

Imagine that you are a snowflake gently floating down from the sky. You are landing, very softly, on a bed of snow on a mountain peak. It’s a comfortable place to rest. The sun is shining and you feel its rays. You have a strange but pleasant feeling as you slowly dissolve and become a drop of water. You are joined by other drops of water. You stay close together as you creep across the snow. All the snow has melted now, and the sun is shining right through you as you joyously run across the rocks with your friends. As you travel, you join millions of other drops of water, and together you become a stream, racing down the mountainside. The stream flows like a roller coaster as you bounce off rocks on the streambed, but the movement doesn’t worry you and you are not hurt. Other streams join your stream. Now, as it meanders through the forest, your stream is much larger and flows much more slowly than before.

At the bottom of the mountain, your stream becomes a river flowing through meadows. You are not moving as fast now and you have time to look around. You see all kinds of plants, insects, fish. Above the river, shading you from the hot sun, are towering trees and shrubs and flowers growing along the riverbed. How slowly you move as you enter a lake! You stay in the lake for a long time and see many strange things, such as people running beside the shore and swimming in the water. Animals come down to the water to drink and some of your friends disappear.

You start to move quickly now, because you are approaching a waterfall. Over the top you go, and down, down, down to a pool below. You are moving along the river again but the riverbanks begin to change. The trees are giving way to buildings. The river is getting wider and you are moving quite slowly. You are now passing a city and can hear the roar of traffic. Dirty, bad-smelling liquids and junk are being thrown into the river as you move along. Many of the fish are dying. You wish you were back in the mountains, but you have to keep moving downstream. The river is very wide here and you can taste salt in the estuary. You flow along, past large and small boats, and out into the ocean.

The sun is hot again and you feel yourself being lifted into the air as you evaporate into water vapor. What a pleasant feeling! You are swirling around below the clouds. A tiny piece of dust floats by and you rest on it. Some of the other water droplets are there too. You are being blown across the sky, joining up with other bits of dust and water droplets. You can see the river below you. Now you are part of a large heavy cloud, approaching the mountains. You feel cold — you have changed into snow again. The cloud is too heavy to float above the highest mountain, and you drop to the mountain peak again. Have a good rest on the bed of snow because soon you will be starting your journey all over again.

Following this guided imagery, students with experience in drama are able to work in groups to dramatize the water cycle. Inexperienced and younger students may need further guidance through in-role drama.

In-role drama

In-role drama is an exercise in which participants assume the role of another being (human or animal) in order to explore relationships, events, and issues. In environmental education, it offers opportunities for developing environmental awareness and finding solutions to problems. Students are challenged to enter the role of their character and react as their character would. This means that the teacher needs to provide background knowledge either before the activity or as the drama unfolds. If a whole class is involved, a narrator (preferably a person with a good knowledge of the subject matter) can relate and direct the story, event, or problem, while the students participate through mime and/or dialogue. Few if any props are needed, and the role-play may be stopped at any time in order to discuss a problem or direction that needs to be taken.

An unusual event in the city where I teach provided an excellent opportunity for an in-role drama. Victoria is located at the southern tip of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Tourism is a large part of the economy, and one of the dominant buildings facing the harbor is the Empress Hotel, a large, ivy-covered brick-and-stone building reminiscent of the British Empire. Cougars are sometimes sighted in the suburbs and rural areas near Victoria, but one year a cougar strayed downtown into the underground parking lot of the Empress Hotel. The cougar was tranquilized and later released outside of the city. The next morning, students arrived at school with newspaper articles detailing the cougar saga. They were eager to talk about it, and I encouraged them to think of situations that could drive a cougar into a city. They were able to understand the problem of dwindling habitat and to empathize with the fear and confusion that the cougar must have felt. We discussed the reasons for habitat destruction and decided to act out the past few days in the life of this cougar.

Our in-role drama was informal and required no equipment. We made a clearing in the center of the classroom, and the students formed pairs. One child in each pair was a young cougar and the other a mother cougar. Students spent a few minutes developing the daily life of the cougar pair. Then the mother cougar decided her two-year-old cub was old enough to fend for himself, and so chased him away.

I now became the narrator in order to guide the direction of the drama and add information. Each student played the role of a young cougar wandering through the forest, looking for food without success. The cougar continued until he came to an area of clearcutting where, of course, there was no food for him. As the children moved through the drama I said, “You are desperately hungry. You haven’t eaten for three days. How do you feel without the security of your mother? Try to show your discomfort and fear through mime.” Students were now working individually and were mindful of the importance of staying in their own space without interfering with others.

The drama now needed to take a new direction, so we stopped the role play in order to discuss and plan the next stage. We considered the impact of clearcut logging on wildlife, as well as its benefits for the human community. We decided to continue by dividing into two groups — a group of loggers just leaving a logged area and a group of hikers who confront and accuse the loggers of destroying habitat. The loggers had to defend their actions, and a heated discussion followed, with both sides producing well-reasoned arguments. The hikers seemed to know all of the concerns of environmentalists, and the loggers explained their need to make a living. The discussion enabled students to understand the perspectives of people on both sides of a very difficult issue.

After the two groups exhausted their arguments, I once again asked the students to assume the role of the cougar. I led them in search of food through the shadows of the night, across a road, and into a housing subdivision. As we progressed, I used the following narrative, which the students acted out.

You catch the tantalizing scent of food. You follow it. Some meat has been left on a backyard barbecue. You go to eat it, but a loud noise startles you. Freeze! What is it? It’s a large, aggressive dog. You are terrified. You run away, but fences are in your way and they slow you down. Now what? A light appears suddenly and a human face appears at a window. You rush into a bush to hide. You keep very still. Someone opens the door and looks out. A man comes out and shines a flashlight into your eyes. He screams, “It’s a cougar. Phone the police.”

This is no place for you. You crash through a fence and keep to the shadows at the side of the road. The passing cars blind you with their headlights.

I continued the narration in this way until the cougar darted into the underground parking lot of the hotel and crouched in a corner. We then stopped the role play in order to select the characters necessary to complete the drama: the cougar, a hotel security guard, a desk clerk, two police officers, three wildlife officers, and a newspaper reporter. The remaining students become bystanders.

I resumed the narration and the students acted out the drama. The terrified security guard saw the cougar and ran to his kiosk to phone the front desk of the hotel for help. The clerk phoned the police. When the police arrived, they evaluated the situation before cordoning off the area and calling in wildlife officers. The officers shot the cougar with a tranquilizer gun. Before placing the cougar in a cage in the back of a truck, one wildlife officer showed the animal to the bystanders and invited children to feel its soft fur. He then explained that they would take the cougar to a suitable area where they would release it. The reporter asked some questions, and then the wildlife officers drove off, taking the cougar with them.

The students worked well; each had concentrated, collaborated, visualized, articulated, organized, and synthesized knowledge. Drama experiences such as this can be extended into other areas of the curriculum. For instance, I used the cougar experience for a language arts assignment that required students to write a newspaper article about the cougar incident from the point of view of the cougar, a wildlife officer, the security guard, the hotel clerk, a police officer, or a bystander.

Literature as the basis for a play

There are many excellent children’s books about the environment that can be used for classroom drama, and sometimes a story particularly appeals to students and they want to develop it and perform it for an audience. In my class, such a book was A River Ran Wild, by Lynne Cherry (Harcourt Brace, 1992), an inspiring true story about the Nashua River in Massachusetts. A River Ran Wild begins about 7,000 years ago when Native people became the first humans to see and settle near the pristine river, which they called Nash-a-way — “river with the pebbled bottom.” Nothing changed very much until traders arrived, followed by European settlers who cleared land for farming. During the Industrial Revolution, the river was dammed to provide power for towns and factories built along its banks. Industrial effluent and sewage were poured into the river until it was too polluted to support life.

In the 1960s concerned citizens encouraged individuals and companies to clean up the river and asked governments to protect it with legislation. Vegetation was planted to create a riparian zone along the riverbanks, and now residents enjoy a greenway and clean waterway that they share with native fish, birds, and mammals. The story of the Nashua River and the people who worked to bring it back to life proves that restoring the Earth is possible — an important message to convey to young people who are sometimes depressed by the destruction of our planet.

A River Ran Wild moved my students (Grades 3 and 4), and they wanted to develop a play to perform at a school assembly. I read the story to the children two or three times so that they could make predictions and comments. We discussed the conflicts that arose between Native people and English settlers, and students acted out possible arguments between the children of Native people and the children of settlers. The students then developed the whole story as an in-role drama before writing the script in language arts class. Students were invited to audition for parts. All students were involved in the selection committee, and if they could not reach consensus, they held a vote. Every child had a part in the drama.

In art periods, students painted a scene of the pristine Nashua River on long sheets of paper that were then draped across the back of the stage. They painted additional scenes to depict the riverbanks as they changed over time. Broom handles were attached to the ends of these scenes so that, as the script dictated, the children could carry them onto the stage and place them in front of the original scene. Costumes were simply borrowed clothes and materials. For example, the Native people wore tunics cut from tan-colored sackcloth, and the bears had painted faces and wore brown tights and sweaters. Other animals were dressed accordingly.

Our school stage does not have a sound system, and some of the younger children had difficulty projecting their voices. To compensate, we enlisted a narrator to read in front of a microphone. The characters spoke as they acted, but in situations where actors could not be heard, the narration enabled the audience to follow the story. The narrator — a competent reader with a clear, expressive voice — stopped reading at predetermined places to allow the actors to perform.

Drama frequently crosses curricular boundaries. The Nashua River play involved social studies as students researched the role of governments and politicians. Students also learned some of the strategies available to citizens wishing to bring about change in a democratic society. After the presentation of the play at a school assembly, some teachers and students were inspired to restore a nearby creek. They helped a local stewardship group clean up the stream and raised salmon that were then released into it.

Skits and raps

Skits and raps are popular activities that can be used for introducing schoolwide initiatives such as garbage-free lunch, recycling, and anti-litter campaigns. For instance, Grade 6 and 7 students in our environmental club wrote and performed a skit about “The Hopeless Family” who litter their campsite with plastic bags and pop-can rings, which are hazards to wildlife. A narrator summed up the important points and challenged the school community to eliminate littering and lunch trash.

Using drama to present research

Research and public speaking are both valuable skills, and one way to develop them is to assign students a research project culminating in a dramatic presentation to the class. For example, students in primary grades may research a bird or animal of their choice and then present their research findings through drama, using simple props to dress as the bird or animal they have studied. As a group, decide on the types of information needed and develop a chart to use as a guide (e.g., name of bird or animal, physical description, habitat, diet, care of young, predators, other information).

This exercise can be modified for older students by having them research a topic or issue related to the environment and report their findings by developing and presenting a play. Students can do this project individually, in pairs, or in groups. Audiences are always interested in such presentations and welcome the opportunity to question the participants at the end of the performance.

These are but a few examples of the ways in which drama can be used as a tool to enhance learning about the environment. Drama challenges students to explore subject matter, it enables them to identify problems and search for solutions, and it helps them to develop creativity, self-expression, empathy, and compassion. Through presentations and plays, drama provides young people with opportunities to convey environmental messages to others. Finally, drama engages students in active learning. At a time when children spend increasing amounts of time in passive pursuits, it can be difficult to inspire and motivate them to take an active, participatory role in the classroom. Yet I am frequently amazed to see how enthusiastically children of all ages and abilities embrace drama. To quote my students, “Drama is fun!”

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Shelagh Levey last taught at Gordon Head Elementary School in Victoria, British Columbia. She is currently retired and working on environmental projects in her community. Her book Touch The Future: A Guide for Environmental Education is available from the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation at this address: BCTF Lesson Aides, 100 – 550 West 6th Avenue.