Learning Drama in Metaverse: Enhancing Students’ Literacy Skills Beyond Classroom

The Teaching Development Grant (TDG) project “Drama Education in Metaverse: Learning New Literacies beyond Classroom” has started in January 2023, which aims to build an interactive, novel, and safe space for students to continue drama-learning after lecture and tutorial classes.

In this metaverse-learning environment, students can choose their own avatars to participate in various drama activities, such as process drama, character-profiling, and rolling roles, etc. Students can interact with each other in a virtual-physical form, using voice-over, texting, gesture, and movement to communicate. Implementing the metaverse platform will be blended with classroom activities to extend the teachings of communication skills and appreciation of dramatic literature in class. While language and literature learning serves as the starting point of this project, its ultimate goal is to develop students’ literacy skills. Literacy here refers to a way of thinking needed across the disciplines: from general operational skills, such as reading and writing, to thinking of the cultural and critical aspects.

In addition to providing a drama-blend package for drama and literature courses, the project also plans to deliver drama education workshops for EdUHK students and local secondary schools, because the effect of drama education in terms of personal growth is not only for participant/student, but also for facilitator/teacher. Students of EdUHK who participated in this project will have the opportunity to hold drama workshops in the local schools. Therefore, this activity would produce learning outcomes for the students of both EdUHK and local secondary schools.  

The construction of the drama-learning metaverse has been finished initially. Two workshops as pilot runs will be held this summer. After implementing this platform, it is expected to produce a new metaverse-based drama education conceptual model and also the empirical evidence to explore how metaverse can nurture creative impulse, competition, collaboration, inclusion, and integration for drama education.

The drama-learning metaverse is a town where Main Street is central.

One of the spaces in the drama-learning metaverse is “Home” which would be adopted as different characters’ homes by adding/omitting objects for the contexts of different dramas.