Learning to write critically : drama as pedagogy and the implications for cultural criticism

This paper analyzes the role and use of drama in engaging students with the work of cultural criticism, as it is practised in the educational settings of critical writing under the Liberal Studies curriculum within Hong Kong senior secondary schools. Drawing on action research conducted at the site of a local secondary school, we explore the pedagogic potentials of dramatic intervention for the exercise of cultural analysis and critical writing in class, and examine students’ dialogic thinking, engagement and communication among themselves, and with their target readers outside of the classroom. By mediating the process of critical composition we review the multiple dimensions and uses of criticism in the pedagogic space opened for and through writing. At the end of this experimental study on the work of drama in cultural criticism as writing, we discuss the implications such pedagogy may have for critical writing education at schools.