Student drama productions in English as communicative action

My contributions to the panel is based on my experience of directing Hong Kong university student productions in English and evaluating the extent to which the productions and the specific performances raise participants' and audience's consciousness with regard to communicative action (Jürgen Habermas) and establishing the idea of knowable communities (Raymond Williams) within a framework of theatre as social forum. I take the view that the community begins where one is actually working and participating. I will evaluate not just the performances - both as processes and products - in themselves, but also to investigate the students' awareness and perception of the pedagogic phenomenon of 'knowledge transfer' to their own personal and social contexts; these include the development of speaking skills, awareness of posture and vocal projection and articulation, as well as the wider targets of civic awareness, interpersonal interaction, self-confidence and self-concept, social role-playing, etc. None of these pedagogical goals for aesthetic education, using drama as a tool for self-development, can be achieved without clarity and good pedagogic content knowledge in coaching and facilitating during the rehearsal
process. Intensive work on both the body language and the spoken language of the performance enables students to interpret the challenges posed by the source texts. Thus we describe the process as a journey toward ownership, autonomy and self-confidence.