Experience, Imagination and Integration: Creative Drama for Values Education

Abstract

Values education is one of the most significant ways to promote cognition of individuals and even the sustainable development of human beings. It helps people make appropriate valuative judgments and selections. With the advancement of society, values education should not merely point to the inheritance of tradition and the uniformity of collectivism, but also adaptability to the future and heterogeneity of individual well-being. Catherine Elgin believed that students should be taught to deliberate about how to choose with broad purviews, various angles, and tight relationship between individual and community. Based on her perspective, in this article creative drama is proposed as a potential approach for values education, which includes three key dimensions. Experiencing multiple situations broadens people’s horizons and gains more potential choices. Imagination promotes people’s competence to consider further and to develop adaptability for the future. Integration of the real and unreal helps them to continuously reflect on themselves and reconstruct their relationship between individual and community. This article provides a general theoretical framework to explore the relationship between creative drama and values education, as well as how it promotes values education; however, this still requires further study in practice.