Through the Why Interview I was able to see my own strong positions and beliefs on the dissertation topics. It was evident that my motivation for undertaking the research carries its own bias. When talking about drama therapy education, I stated, “I know that we can do better, and I feel moments where I educate students – or where I facilitate learning well – and I feel that – and I’ve been in situations in classes where it doesn’t happen and it could happen” (Why Interview: 155). It was clear that I came into the research with an assumption that we can do a better job of educating students. It was also shown that I have the belief that I am an effective educator and know how to facilitate learning.
There were also several moments in the Why Interview that indicated my strong belief that affect and emotion are important components to educating quality drama therapists. “If we truly want to educate them well, then we need to teach them how to navigate emotion,” I said as part of my reasoning for including emotion in the education experience (Why Interview: 125). I came to the research believing that it was the educator’s job to model and show students how to manage affect when it arises in class,
If I’m feeling or experiencing something, especially if I am feeling it to the level that I know it’s impacting me. I mean that I know it’s impacting how I’m talking or what I’m
talking about or how I look or what I’m focusing on … I really work on the principle that if I am experiencing it someone else is experiencing something in concert – so if I can name it … because that’s what we need to do as therapists. (Why Interview: 117) This clearly shows my core assumption that affect is needed in the drama therapy classroom.
In the Why Interview I also frequently used language referring to the ethical responsibilities inherent in the use of affect in the classroom.
My ethical responsibility as a professor goes in two directions. One direction is I need to be true to the contract that’s there. This is education and I need to tend to the needs and the health and the welfare of my students. But on the other side I also have an ethical responsibility to the profession and to the future clients that these people are going to see. So, if making this person a better therapist involves evoking their personal material – that’s my responsibility as an educator in order to get them to a place where they can actually represent the field and do good ethical, competent drama therapy. (Why Interview: 66-68)
In this sense, it is clear that not only did I believe that using personal affective material was important, but that I saw it as an ethical imperative, should it be shown to be an effective means of educating competent drama therapists.
I made a strong effort to bridle my impressions and strong perspective on this and the ethical responsibilities. I believe I was effective in this effort as the concept of “ethics” was only mentioned once in all of the interviews and focus groups and yet mentioned nine times in the Why Interview. While it is perhaps disturbing that no other respondents mentioned ethics in relationship to the topic, the fact that it would seem I did not directly introduce the idea could point to my effectiveness in bridling my strong opinions.
In the Why Interview it became clear that my feelings and ideas about the navigation of affect in the classroom and the intersection of therapy and education were formidable. I
expressed criticism of colleagues in drama therapy education that consistently used the phrase “this isn’t therapy” to try and draw the lines, “I think that sends the message that your personal material shouldn’t show up. And if you’re feeling emotional about something then you’re doing the wrong thing. And you shouldn’t be feeling emotions in class,” (Why Interview: 58). My strong critical feelings were evident later in the interview,
I think we can’t say that this is education and this is not therapy and then send the students to a psychodrama class where they have a semester of pulling out their deepest, darkest moments and performing them. That’s disingenuous. That’s sending mixed messages. And it’s not “right” – from a completely ethical standpoint. (Why Interview: 125)
On the other end of the spectrum I was also critical of instructors who go too far into the realm of therapy within the classroom,
I think some drama therapy professors…cross that line and say, no, I need to become the therapist – I have an ethical responsibility for the student’s mental health – but that’s not true, that’s not my responsibility as a drama therapy educator. I need to make sure they know what their resources are and what’s available to them and that I’m not doing things that are unethical or that are going to put them in a harmful place in class – again,
where’s that line, I don’t know. But – my job is not to be their therapist. (Why interview: 131)
In the Why Interview my own struggle to navigate the complex intersection of education and therapy was evident, as were my strong beliefs about what is right, ethical, and what is wrong.
The interview also highlighted my assumption about the importance of students being in personal therapy as well as the use of therapeutic process groups within the education
experience. “How can they be part of this emotional process without having some sort of process outside of the school outside of the department to actually work through what they are experiencing?” I asked (Why Interview: 131). My responses underlined a bias toward the programs that had components requiring personal therapy and implementing process groups. Because the field is small and I had some familiarity with each of the programs, my responses in the interview indicated that I had multiple assumptions about what I would find at the various programs. It also became clear that I idealized programs that had these requirements of therapy and process group and made assumptions about the potential mishandling of affect in the other programs. These were ideas that I worked to make myself aware of and to check against the responses during data collection. In many instances, perhaps not surprisingly, my assumptions were proven wrong.
When questioned about what I hoped the outcomes would be of exploring the use of personal affective material in drama therapy education, I replied,
My hope is that I'm going to find instances and situations where the phenomenon illustrates that it’s been helpful to the growth and progress and development of drama therapists. I might find that it is being used inappropriately and ineffectively and
unethically and that students are being used or treated like clients and that their emotional stuff is being evoked and not attended to. (Why Interview: 159)
The interview showed that I was looking for moments and events within the classroom that were above and beyond the day-to-day occurrences. The examples I gave in the interview and my discussion of them, pointed to my curiosity about the larger moments, the moments that made an impact in one way or another. While this was something I tried to rein in, the more I explored and the further the interviews and focus groups went, I realized this was the nature of the phenomenon as I was outlining it and decided to let my focus rest on these moment of strong response.
In the interview it was also clear that I was hoping the understanding of the phenomenon would allow the field to establish more useful ways of discussing the student experience.
Let’s get language that’s going to be more helpful. Because I think it would be a great freedom to me as an educator to have some way of talking about this from the get-go. As students come into the program say this is how we deal with it – this is what it is. It’s not going to be ambiguous. It’s not going to give them these scary ideas about “oh, no, is it going to be too deep – are they going to be messin’ with my mind?” (Why Interview: 163)
While much of the focus of the Why Interview was on the faculty perspective, as that was my role, within the interview I expressed my ultimate desire that this research serve to improve the situation for students and their future clients. Reflecting my criticism of drama therapy faculty, my position was frequently that if the research pointed to change that could happen to improve, that, in the service of students, the change needed to be made, “If we find something that’s right and effective, if we find a better way of doing things then let’s do it! Let’s do the better things.” (Why Interview 160-161).