DLT Podcast 15: Erika Piazzoli and Fiona Dalziel

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In this episode Erika Piazzoli and Fiona Dalziel, who are university teachers and drama in education researchers in Ireland and Italy, respectively, speak about the Sorgente project. Their joint research project focussed on performative language teaching and learning with several groups of migrants and asylum seekers. In this interview, Erika and Fiona talk for example about:

  • who was involved in this project that took part in Dublin and Padova and included practitioners and researchers from several countries, focusing on various art forms, including drama, music and visual arts
  • how the project came about, who the learners were and how the pandemic put it on hold for 18 months
  • how the pandemic influenced the field work when the drama-based work could finally take place
  • the three research topics and questions: motivation to belong, embodied research methods, ethical imagination
  • several examples of arts-based teaching and learning, such as:
  • working with language portraits as jumping-off points
  • the process drama on the myth of the Simurgh, how it relates to the theme of migration and how the teachers approached sensitive questions raised by the story
  • working with zines
  • how the researchers documented the work and gathered research data
  • ethical guidelines and practices in the project, such as aesthetic distancing, trauma-informed practice and brave spaces
  • what brave spaces are
  • the research report and the book
  • how the 9 research themes of the project are summarized by a “data poem”

Shownotes