Dress Rehearsal for Life: Using Drama to Teach Philosophy to Inner-City High School Students

Abstract

Introduction:  This article is about an experimental enrichment program for inner-city high school students called Carroll-Cleveland Philosophers’ Program. It involves busing forty Cleveland high school students to the John Carroll University Campus to study philosophy and engage in various service learning activities. Through the process of writing a textbook for the course, we have developed a distinctive “drama pedagogy”. It asks the students to write philosophical dialogues and perform them on videotape. In this article, I will raise the question of whether this pedagogy teaches philosophy. Relying on Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being In, I argue that it does.