Contagious learning: Drama, experience and perezhivanie

The relationship between experience, emotions, cognition, and learning is of increasing interest to educators and researchers who recognise that efforts to promote student engagement and learning must take into account factors beyond the purely cognitive and instrumental. The significance of experience considered as a unity in regard to child development was discussed through the concept of perezhivanie decades ago in the work of Lev Vygotsky (1934). Contemporary explorations of perezhivanie as a concept and phenomenon may be further informed through drawing upon Dewey’s work on Art as Experience (1934) and the concept of metaxis as understood in drama education literature. This paper will examine the special nature of arts and educational drama experiences for experiencing, realising, and expressing perezhivanie. It also reflects upon the role of the teacher, their own experiences of arts-inspired perezhivanie and the potentially contagious impact of the teacher’s experiences for their students.