Teaching Adolescents Civil Law: Process Drama as a Tool for Achieving Legal Literacy

Öz

Drama in Education is an experiential way of learning that can be applied in a variety of ways in many learning fields. This article presents an action research that uses Process Drama as an alternative way of teaching Civil Law class to 16 year old adolescents of the Vocational School of Kranidhi, Greece. Clarifying complex legal meanings through Drama is used as a key to Legal Literacy. A pre-test, post-test design with a control group has been used for the evaluation of the method. In total 30 students of two vocational schools took part. For the experimental group, 24 teaching hours of regular lessons were replaced with teaching using Drama in Education. For the evaluation of this intervention, a valid and reliable tool was developed. In addition, data were also collected from interviews, participant observations and critical friend observations. Results support the claim that Drama in Education leads to better understanding of complex Civil Law meanings and contributes to the proposition of Drama as an alternative way of teaching in secondary school.