Exploring Myths and Legends of Teacher Education 218 TRANSCENDING TRADITIONAL BOUNDARIES THROUGH DRAMA: INTERDISCIPLINARY TEACHING AND PERSPECTIVE-TAKING Anastasia P. Samaras, with contributions by Roland L. Reed The Departments of Education and Drama The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, USA crc139@aol.com ABSTRACT We conducted a self -study of drama integration with an emphasis on teaching perspective taking in a new interdisciplinary course. Our work employs a theoretical model of coming to understand the self through others or in Vygotskyan (1981) terms, from interpersonal to intrapersonal knowledge. One of our main aims was to determine how disciplines could be interwoven to enhance students’ personal development, as well as our own. We envisioned drama integration as more t han a list of activities that could include teaching the ethic of care and empathy. Teaching and learning would be in a circle wider than self - in a collaborative network with a synthesis of our diverse experiences to provoke our students to pull down or even shatter their fences. Outcomes included: students’ utilization of drama in their career goals, finding our humanness, and knowledge of self and others. As professors, we uncovered our commonalties while renewing our individual passions. We discovered that drama could serve as an international language to communicate the need and value of human diversity while bridging many disciplines and careers. INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT We are two professors from two different worlds. Roland is a drama professor, a playwright, and a director of plays. I am an education professor, a self-study researcher, and a director of teacher education - a different kind of artist than Roland. Yet, we were drawn to a collaborative endeavour to study the relative place, meaning, and integration of drama with other disciplines. We developed and taught an interdisciplinary course, Drama Beyond the Theatre and share our self-study of this endeavor. In Odysseus-like fashion, we eagerly accepted the unpredictable nature of our work and set out on a wondrous adventure filled with an aura of mythical mystique. Embarking on this transcendental journey however, meant that we, like our students, were crossing our known discipline boundaries with no markers or certainties. We acknowledged that the process could be, as our students tell us, “embarrassing and enlightening!” During the summer, we implemented our drama work with refugees, orphans, and caregivers in Bosnia and Croatia to model how professors, like students, need to be willing to solve unfamiliar problems and give action to their theories. We tested drama exercises for promoting peace, often in a nonverbal fashion, and returned to teach our course again with new pedagogical insights. There is much research to support the connections between the arts, academic achievement, success for all students, and the work place, especially the ability to reason, think creatively, and solve problems (Caine & Caine, 1994; Getty Education Institute for the Arts, 1996). In urban and “high-poverty” settings the arts have a significant impact on student improvement in reading and mathematics (Catterall, Chapleau, & Iwanaga, 1999). While there have been national initiatives for placing the arts as part of a core curricula in schools (Conso rtium of National Arts Education Associations, 1994) these initiatives have had little impact at the university level. College-level students typically complete their art requirement in a non- integrated fashion. This is particularly problematic for preservice teachers who may receive little experience or modelling of arts integration in their own schooling. COURSE DESCRIPTION Our main course objectives were for students to experience drama as a conduit for perspective taking and conflict resolution, its interdisciplinary connections in the liberal arts, and its applicability towards their career goals. We explored the means to empathize and understand better what it is like to walk in someone else’s moccasins, in someone else’s world, on someone else’s path - a real learn by