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An Embodied Drama Therapy Approach To Restorative School Practices: A Method, Sarah Harmer

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Restorative School Practices offer schools a circle structure to shift the punitive mindset and power dynamics commonly found in America’s schools, to a model that focuses on relationship, connection, and mutual respect. Drama therapy interventions utilize embodied or active work that engage the entire person. The purpose of this thesis was to create a method to explore the addition of embodied drama therapy techniques to deepen the experience of the restorative school circle process. Three community-building and social emotional learning focused circles, in a second, fourth, and sixth grade class, were compared using the traditional scripts and then the same …