Chapter Approaching the real (Expanded and newly edited)
The stories, fairy tales, and myths often used in early years classrooms can offer various opportunities to approach contemporary reality and understand the relationship of self to the world through the art of drama in education.
The stories we tell daily in or out of the classroom are expressions of social and moral values that not only describe the world but also suggest how we should live in it. People have always used such stories in various forms, such as personal or official narratives, speeches, anecdotes, fairy tales, myths, or fictional stories, to describe the world and justify how they live in it.
These stories describe their personal or collective identity, themselves and their future, their expectations, hopes, ideas, values, actions, behaviours, and roles in the world. This article focuses on these stories of values, with a special emphasis on the fictional stories often used in educational drama. It explores these issues in the field of early years education.
Depending on the teacher's social consciousness and knowledge, these stories could create a framework where students can reflect on how and when they should or should not fit into a community or group. In this context, it is necessary to find ways to make these stories relevant so that they can be integrated into students' contemporary social context (contextualisation) and related to their experiences and quests.
The publication discusses how stories in younger education could be used in drama practice in the classroom to create dramatic contexts for students to explore the fundamental questions of identity and belonging: "Who am I? Who can tell me who I am?"
The article outlines, first, some crucial elements of the nature and function of stories in general and their relationship to our reality. It continues by exploring their relationship with ideologies and, finally, explores Aesop's myth "The Hare and the Tortoise" in light of the above while proposing a drama lesson for approaching questions such as "Who am I? Who can tell me who I am?"
