VIVIANA NICOLETA FERRARI

12. ETHICS IN THEATRE/DRAMA EDUCATION

Keywords: aesthetics, ethics, creativity, assessment, history

The past decade has witnessed a growing emphasis upon creativity and innovation
as a way to promote economic and social development. For example, a recent study
prepared for the European Commission by KEA European Affairs (2009), which
echoed similar studies in the US, UK, and Australia, called upon the Arts to assist
in developing economic competition and social innovation and upon artists to train
future generations to be creative, imaginative, and inventive. Although studies of the
ability of the Arts to enhance competition and innovation are important, instrumental
uses of the Arts must occur within the context of a deep, historically grounded
understanding of the Arts. This requires consideration not only of the instrumental
functions of Art, and the technical skills required to create art, but also of how
education in, and through, the Arts promotes human flourishing.
A focus upon the instrumental functions of art increases the risk that the Arts –
and arts education – will be primarily understood and evaluated in terms of economic
utility at the expense of such valuable but non-utilitarian qualities as “appreciation
of beauty, love and wisdom, noble sense of purpose, [and] cultivated imagination”
(Armstrong, 2009, p. 76). Education in the Arts involves cultivating the innate human
impulse towards mastery of the self, particularly the expression of the self in the
context or presence of others, and the distinctively human intentionality that under-
girds this mastery; specifically, the cultivation of the sense of taste that undergirds
good judgment (Gadamer, 1960; Galimberti, 1987; Sennett, 2008).
Beside these general concerns related to all artistic education, specifically within
the field of applied drama and theatre in education, there is still tension between the
instrumental and the artistic-aesthetic functions (e.g. Schonmann, 2005). Schonmann
argues that the majority of roles that theatre and drama have in education today
point towards roles in sociology, psychology and communications – “by-products”,
than to roles in aesthesis. Thus, Schonmann observes, by “cutting ourselves off from
our artistic-aesthetic roots, there is the risk of losing the basis for our justification”
(p. 35) and calls for “another proportion (balance)” between the artistic-aesthetic
function (aesthetic intention primary) and the instrumental function (aesthetic
intention secondary) (p. 31).
The main question that arises is where can arts education look in order to find an
“another proportion” between the artistic-aesthetic function and the instrumental
function in arts education and more specifically in theatre and drama education, in
order to address responsibly the pedagogical requests. This voice will consider a
possible answer that stands in viewing the ethicality implicit in theatre and drama

S. Schonmann (ed.), Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education, 73–77.

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VIVIANA NICOLETA FERRARI

as a dimension that permeates and acts as a connecting tissues (a whole) in between

the multiple parts that compose the dynamic educational phenomenon at hand, and
thus reconsider the tensions expressed above.

ETHICS – HARMONIOUS PROPORTIONS

The ethicality of education in, and through, the arts, particularly drama and theatre,
is manifest in the fact that dramatic acts are frequently social – and thus intrinsically
ethical – acts that involve the recognition of, attendance to, and synchronization
with others. As Heikkinen (2003) suggests, theatre and drama in education develops
a dramatic arena for ethical dialogue. The ethicality of aesthetic and artistic education
is, however, often tacit, which has profound implications for the conception, content
and practice of responsible pedagogy. In part due to art’s craftsmanship component
that is passed on orally from master to apprentice, in part due to how the aesthetics
construct is generally used by cognitively dominated education; impasse generated
in the dissociation of mind from body (Martin-Smith, 2005).
Gardner (1999) calls for philosophically-minded focus in education on truth,
beauty and the good, with the aim of activating the student’s capacity to grasp
complex and subtle ideas and to make sound judgements and decisions by
developing a “righting mechanism” (p. 249). These elements can express their full
educational power if grasped at their origin that can be traced back to Greek
thought, to the ethics of measure as harmonious proportions of the Pythagoreans
and to Plato’s “the supreme measure of all things” (Reale, 2004, p. 245). Posed on
these bases Aristotle created the ethics of mesotes – the Doctrine of Means, treated
in Nicomachean Ethics; and it stands for: a relative “due and right proportion”
which should be observed in all our actions (e.g. Armstrong, 1947; J. Armstrong,
2009; Gadamer, 1960). In Gadamer’s view, the ethics of mesotes may be intended
as an “ethics of good taste”; good taste intended here as the peak of moral
judgment, a construct that comprises reference to the act of comprehension. Kant
subsequently in Critique of Pure Reason restrained the field of good taste to a
judgment on beauty and thus inaugurated the transcendental justification of the
aesthetical conscience (Gadamer, 1960), and divaricated further the distance in
between the subjective and the objective.
Although the subsequent historical delimitation of the aesthetics as a construct,
the art form maintained, through a particular sense of proportion, in its generative
structure unity of the concepts of truth, beauty and the good. It may be argued that
the pedagogical value of arts education is within the aesthetical dimension that is
an integral part of ethics. This profound ethical component is the point of reference
for quality assessment of the interrelations within the work of art as well as the
intercurrent interrelations within the artistic, pedagogical and social dimension.
With this ethical perspective in mind, we are compelled to agree with Schonmann’s
(2005) statement, that of the three interrelated orientations in theatre and drama
education today, the artistic-aesthetics, the pedagogical-educational, and the
sociological-cultural, the artistic-aesthetic dimension is the core from which both
pedagogical and cultural aspects spring (p. 38).

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