Drama in Education in Career Guidance and Counselling: enhancing teenagers’ agency and empowerment
Christina Zourna
https://doi.org/10.64741/901607iqmotg
Abstract
In a recently published PhD study, forty students from grades 9, 10, and 11 at a Greek high school participated in a quasi-experiment during an Action Research intervention that used Drama in Education as the primary method for career exploration. The intervention successfully enhanced the teenagers’ agency and empowerment through personal involvement and active engagement in all processes. Over time, the students in the experimental group assumed the roles of participants, researchers, designers, facilitators, and evaluators. According to the research findings, they developed essential career skills and transferable competences at personal, social, and early professional levels. Their career self-efficacy and career decision-making skills improved to a statistically significant degree compared with the control group. Specifically, they demonstrated higher-order skills in career planning, goal setting, problem solving, self-appraisal, and informed decision making, while also acquiring new strategies for understanding themselves and navigating the increasingly complex labour market. The mixed methods integrated results provide fresh evidence that support previous research on the role of the arts in fostering teenagers’ agency and empowerment. Moreover, they highlight Drama in Education as an effective approach for exploring and coping with career-related issues.
Keywords: Drama in Education, intervention, teenagers, career guidance, mixed methods research, 21st century skills development
Career guidance: what has changed in the 21st century?
According to its definition stated in the 2905th Education, Youth and Culture meeting in Brussels on November 21, 2008 (European Council 2008), career guidance is:
a continuous process that enables citizens at any age and at any point in their lives to identify their capacities, competences and interests, to make educational, training and occupational decisions and to manage their individual life paths in learning, work and other settings in which those capacities and competences are learned and/or used. Guidance covers a range of individual and collective activities relating to information-giving, counselling, competence assessment, support, and the teaching of decision-making and career management skills (2008: 2).
Based on this definition career guidance and counselling theorists increasingly emphasize the use of reflection and meaning making in experiential career guidance interventions (Lent et al. 2016; Maree 2016). Attributing a profession suitable to one’s skills and knowledge is no longer effective as it used to be in the previous centuries. Career experts suggest that in the chaotic conditions of our era, it is imperative that during the career exploring and designing process, professional counsellor practitioners approach the individual’s specific needs in holistic ways (Sidera and Papavassiliou-Alexiou 2016). In the 21st century researchers are rather interested in processes that address the individuals as whole personalities, take into consideration their unique temperament and focus on their ability to adapt and self-regulate in new conditions (Cardoso, Janeiro and Duarte 2018; Kim et al. 2015; Santos and Ferreira 2012). Other researchers emphasize the need for deeper understanding and practical applications of the decision-making processes about career choices by using psycho-educational methods and constructivist career theories (Akkermans and Kubasch 2017; Kepir Savoly and Dost 2020; Maree 2022; Ochs and Roessler 2004). Moreover, it is suggested that in the career guidance and counselling process the individual be considered as an active agent, not a passive receiver (Krivas 2002).
The first time in our lives that we face career choices and career decisions consciously and independently is when we are teenagers in secondary education. Recent developmental and evolution psychology research about the physiological, cognitive, and social changes during adolescence support the idea that teenagers can think more abstractly and in a more mature way than their younger selves (Meschke, Peter and Bartholomae 2012). Thus, teenagers no longer need to experience certain conditions firsthand; they can comprehend unprecedented situations and their consequences through a combination of imagination and cognition. According to career guidance experts Nathan and Hill (2006), discourses, case studies, imaginary settings, analogies, metaphors, and role playing could be useful. In the current paper it is claimed that in our era there could be a meeting point of career guidance experts’ demands and the Drama in Education method. However, a question emerged: has drama ever contributed to career skills development? An extended literature review seemed inevitable.
Drama in Education and Career Skills development
In 2008 a two-year project, ‘Drama Improves Lisbon Key Competences in Education’, known under the acronym DICE, was launched across twelve European countries involving over five thousand 13-to-16-year-old teenagers. Its major aim was to assess how essential competences improved through Educational Theatre and Drama. The research findings indicated
a significant and objectively measurable impact of drama on five of the eight key competences: communication in mother tongue; learning to learn; interpersonal, intercultural, social, and civic competences; entrepreneurship and cultural expression (DICE 2010: 7).
After this initial project was published more research was carried out on the effectiveness of the Drama in Education method to develop children and teenagers’ skills. In a systematic literature review of all publications since 2012 on the Scopus database 765 documents were found (Zourna, Koutsoupias and Papavassiliou-Alexiou 2025). The detected documents were then analysed with Bibliometrix, VOS viewer software tools and the PRISMA Statement meta-analysis framework (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017; Bitzenis, Koutsoupias and Boutsiouki 2023; Moher et al. 2009). Published across 583 distinct sources these documents were authored by 1650 independent or collaborating researchers in 52 countries. In the subsequent meta-analysis, 314 selected papers were systematically examined and categorised according to target population, type of intervention, and primary outcomes (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: PRISMA diagram of identification, screening, eligibility and inclusion of the detected documents.
The results indicated that drama interventions enhanced children’s learning skills and strategies, teenagers’ critical thinking and career skills, university students’ creativity and decision-making skills, and professionals’ multicultural, leadership and communication skills. Thirty-three of these articles referred specifically to teenagers (see Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Categorisation of the documents included in the meta-analysis.
The examined documents revealed that the drama interventions were facilitated as long or short-term projects, hosted within private or public schools, indoors or outdoors, in local or international collaborative projects, in face-to-face, online or hybrid settings. The teenagers’ career skills reportedly developed through drama are summarised below, along with their corresponding sources. These skills are usually called transferable as they are not attributed to one profession, but they can be useful to any professional conditions or work transitions.
a) Language skills: reading, writing, listening, speaking (Davies 2018; Kempe and Holroyd 2013); foreign language skills, academic motivation (Dawoud, Hasim and Saad 2022)
b) Cognitive and meta-cognitive skills: STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) (Davies and McGregor 2016; Green et al. 2020; Peleg et al. 2017; Walan 2019; Zourna, 2023); critical thinking, analytical thinking, decision making, sustainability (Chan, Wong and Tang 2024; Ong et al. 2020)
c) Social skills: communication, teamwork, intercultural, multicultural (Thorkelsdóttir and Ólafsdóttir 2022); diversity and social inclusion awareness, empathy (Forysiewicz 2020); active citizenship skills, volunteering, change agency (Nelson 2021); intimate relationships (Heard et al. 2019); leadership skills (Zourna and Papavassiliou-Alexiou 2023); public speaking, cultural aptitude (Asimidou, Lenakakis and Tsiaras 2021; Jacobs 2023)
d) Personal skills: emotional awareness, reflective thinking, empowerment (Jjarrah 2019); self-awareness, self-efficacy, stress management, self-confidence (DeBettignies and Goldstein, 2020; Jayne and Purswell 2017)
e) Taking initiative and entrepreneurship: problem solving, creativity, imagination, taking initiative (Gill 2013; Jayne and Purswell 2017)
f) Health and wellbeing: prevention of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), substance use and treatment (Mayaba and Wood 2015); bullying and cyber bullying coping skills (González and Florido 2020; Karaosmanoğlu, Adıgüzel and Özdemir Şimşek 2022; Lenakakis and Sarafi 2024; Mavroudis, Bournelli and Huang 2016; Ranney et al. 2021); anger and conflict management (Kaçıra Çapacıoğlu and Yıldız Demirtaş 2017); prevention of victimization (Donohoe 2020).
After the meta-analysis, another question emerged: since Drama could be effectively used to develop teenagers’ career skills, could it also be applied as a career exploration, design, and guidance method? Due to the qualitative nature of Drama in Education a mixed methods study seemed appropriate to provide an answer to this question.
Drama in Education and Career Guidance
In the years 2017-2025 in the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece, a PhD study following the mixed methods research paradigm, explored the impact of Drama in Education on the development of career decision-making self-efficacy and career decision-making skills of teenagers (Zourna 2025). One of the goals of the study was to examine the possibility of using Drama in Education as a career guidance, exploration, and design method. The research questions included the following:
a) What is the impact of Drama in Education on career decision-making self-efficacy?
b) What is the impact of Drama in Education on career decision-making skills?
c) Which career skills can be developed through Drama in Education and how?
The research comprised of a pilot study, the main research, and a follow-up study. The flow can be seen in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3: Flow chart of the PhD research (pilot study, main research, follow-up research)
* SCCT stands for Social Cognitive Career Theory
** CGC stands for Career Guidance and Counselling
*** DiE stands for Drama in Education
The main research followed a sequential exploratory design with three consecutive phases and an emphasis on qualitative data (Creswell 2014; Hanson et al. 2005). The three phases can be seen in Fig. 4 and are explained in detail below.
Fig. 4: The sequential exploratory design of the main research with three consecutive phases and an emphasis on qualitative data
The first phase started with an assessment of teenagers’ needs for career guidance services. Ten high schools were selected as a convenience sample, a percentage of 20% of the existing high schools in eastern Thessaloniki; informed consent forms were delivered to all students of grades 9, 10, and 11 in these schools. The parents and guardians of 242 students signed the form and 237 of these fully completed the two printed questionnaires: CDMSE-SF with 25 items (Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale – Short Form) and CDDQ with 34 items (Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire) (Betz, Klein and Taylor 1996; Gati, Krausz and Osipow 1996). These questionnaires are worldwide recognised for their validity and reliability and are used in the majority of relative research internationally for assessing self-efficacy factors and difficulties in career decision making. The cluster analysis of the teenagers’ responses provided the career guidance issues that the teenagers face according to their age and grade such as self-knowledge, goal setting, information gathering, decision making, incentive for career decisions, and problem solving. The same two questionnaires were also completed by forty students in one of the schools who voluntarily consented to participate in the second and third phases of the research. The cluster analysis assigned them to two groups of twenty people, equivalent by gender, grade, and cluster: the experimental and the control groups.
The forty students participated in the Action Research of the second phase that included a quasi-experiment and a career guidance intervention programme based on Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent, Brown and Hackett 2002). During the intervention the experimental group experienced, studied, and used Drama in Education as an exploration method of career issues whereas the control group did not use drama at any stage of the career guidance and counselling process. In the beginning of the intervention the experimental group experienced drama for six weeks with scenarios written by the researcher; in the next five weeks they were trained in using the method, studied drama theory and techniques, and learnt how to design an original drama scenario. For the next eight weeks they worked in four-member teams to write their own scenarios; for the next twelve weeks the teams applied most of these scenarios in drama workshops. The two aforementioned questionnaires were once again completed by all forty students after the end of the intervention providing quantitative data comparable via usual statistical methods. Broad qualitative material was also produced and documented in the workshops via the drama activities, the researcher’s diary, observation sheets, interviews, and evaluation forms.
Since the two groups were initially equivalent by gender, grade, and cluster, their only difference was that the experimental group experienced for the first time ever and used drama during the intervention while the control group had no experience or use of drama at all before or during the same interval. Thus, the difference observed between the two groups concerning the career skills development and the change in scores of the factors of career self-efficacy and career difficulties scales could be exclusively attributed to and explained by the impact of Drama in Education as a career exploration and design method.
In the third phase of the main research the career guidance intervention was evaluated by the students of the experimental group in two focus groups interviews; one year later, in follow-up communication they also provided feedback on their career skills development up to that moment as well as their perception of the longitudinal impact of Drama in Education on their careers.
How was the Drama in Education method used in the intervention?
After being trained in drama theory and practice, the experimental group was arbitrarily divided into teams of four. Each one of the teams selected career issues that its members unanimously decided to explore through drama. They designed appropriate scenarios which afterwards they facilitated in face-to-face drama workshops; in these workshops their peers – the rest of the experimental group – participated by taking on the necessary roles of the corresponding social or work environment in the scenarios. Questions and challenges were explored that concerned the three major pillars of career guidance and counselling: self-knowledge, information about the professional world and decision-making processes. In addition to these, the students also chose to explore the following: gender stereotypes in working environments, stereotypes about professions, professions’ added value and prestige, teamwork and collaboration at work, relationship among co-workers and/or leadership, crisis management, and work transitions due to conflict of interest or values. The applied scenarios of the four-member teams referred to the following professions: teacher – foreign language, science, preschool, special education, literature, and mathematics – police officer, music producer, farmer, doctor, surgeon, businesswoman, military officer, pilot, chef, social worker, psychologist, hairdresser, and chemical engineer. Drama techniques were used appropriately in the workshops, such as role on the wall, hot seating, objects of character, teacher in role, small group play making, gossip circle, still image, frozen picture, defining space, collective character, space between, meetings, circular drama, thought tracking, conscience alley, circle of voices, group sculpture, writing the hero’s diary, as well as the five layers of an action by Dorothy Heathcote (Avdi and Chadjigeorgiou 2018; Davis 2014; Neelands and Goode 2000).
The four-member teams worked as described by the ‘Activity Theory’ which was introduced by Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky (Burner and Svendsen 2020). More specifically, the process was based on the third version of the ‘Activity Triangle’ suggested by Yrjö Engeström (1987), Professor in Adult Education in Finland (see Fig. 5). This triangle summarises the way each team of four students worked. The description below explains the procedure from top to bottom and from left to right.
Fig. 5: Activity Triangle (Engeström 1987)
As Method/Tool the students used the Drama in Education method. The Subjects were the twenty students of the experimental group. In each workshop one team of four were the designers/facilitators and the rest – sixteen students – were the participants. The Object was the production of at least one original scenario from each team who freely and unanimously chose the career issue and formulated questions for investigation. The Rules were established by the Drama in Education method and the team of facilitators. The Community/Social Context was formed by the rest of the students as participants and the leading researcher as observer of the whole procedure. The Division of Labour was two dimensional: on the one hand, each team of four students as researchers formulated the question(s) for investigation, made extensive research on the selected career issue, gathered necessary information, designed and wrote the drama scenario, implemented and evaluated an experiential workshop. On the other hand, the researcher monitored the whole procedure, collaborated with each team of designers, observed facilitation of scenarios and evaluated the workshops. The Outcome was measuring the impact of the procedure on the dependent variables of the two questionnaires, CDMSE-SF and CDDQ, as well as on the skills development of the students in the experimental group. The same twenty students participated in each Activity Triangle either as researchers, designers, and facilitators or as socially contextual participants; thus, the Outcome was measured individually for each student; in the end, for reasons of comparability with the scores of the control group a mean score of each variable was reported for the whole group.
Data analysis and Results
As mentioned earlier, the research followed the mixed methods paradigm (Bazeley and Kemp 2012; Fetters, Curry and Creswell 2013). As highlighted by mixed methods experts Fetters and Molina-Azorin (2017), it is imperative that the mixed methods integrated results emerge from the various research phases and support the broader and deeper investigation in order to find answers to the research questions. In the current research, the integrated results indeed confirmed that the quantitative and the qualitative findings of the three phases complemented each other.
The quantitative data were analysed through open-source software implementing statistical methods i.e. the package SPSS as well as multivariate analysis methods. The qualitative material was codified through the open-source software QualCoder and analysed through inductive reasoning based on Grounded Theory (Auerbach and Silverstein, 2003; Brailas, Tragou and Papachristopoulos 2023; Charmaz and Henwood 2008; Elliot 2018). In addition, in the first phase of the main research Multiple Correspondence and Hierarchical Cluster Analyses were utilized to obtain visual representations of the relationships between the individuals and to detect their common characteristics (see Fig. 6); thus, appropriate clusters emerged from the data and facilitated the continuation of the research process towards the next phases as is required in mixed methods approach (Kassambara 2017; Koutsoupias 2024).
Fig. 6: The Multiple Correspondence and Hierarchical Cluster Analyses rendered visual representations of the clusters of individuals with common characteristics (the students of the experimental group are encircled)
According to the research quantitative results, the students of the experimental group significantly increased the total score of the career decision-making self-efficacy scale by 6% on average as well as the scores of four out of five main scale factors by 5.4% to 10.2% on average; namely, goal setting, problem solving, self-appraisal and career scheduling. They also significantly decreased the total score of the career decision-making difficulties scale as well as the scores of the two out of its three main categories: decision-making difficulty due to lack of readiness and lack of information. The respective scores of the control group in both scales were less optimized. The pre- and post-intervention scores of all forty students in the two groups were compared using SPSS (for more details see Zourna 2025: 102-105, 109-112). These quantitative findings were complemented and confirmed by the qualitative material that was gathered in the later stages of the research; namely, from the diaries, the observation sheets, the evaluation forms, the interviews, and the follow-up study.
A representative example of the jointly displayed mixed methods integrated results can be seen in Table 1; the quantitative results reported in the first column are supported by quotes in the other three columns drawn from the qualitative material (as suggested by Fetters and Molina-Azorin 2017).
As observed in the first column, the students of the experimental group developed many career skills at a statistically significant level: self-appraisal, career scheduling, goal setting, risk taking, crisis, time and stress management, problem solving, social skills, leadership skills, being out of comfort zone, public performance, digital skills, information gathering about the self and the others, and decision making skills. One major conclusion of the research was that the students of the experimental group developed these career transferable competences on such a level because they were personally involved and actively engaged in all processes in the roles of researchers, designers, facilitators, participants, and evaluators of the drama workshops on career issues that mostly interested them.
Drama in Education leading to Agency and Empowerment
Since its early implementations Drama in Education has been known for its effectiveness in curriculum teaching and learning outcomes, language skills enhancement, and personal and social skills development. In this paper we claim that it can also be effectively used in career guidance and counselling for teenagers being the psychodynamic, anthropocentric, inquiring, and proactive career guidance approach that career experts imply in their latest articles (Lent and Brown, 2020; Maree 2020). Drawing upon the results of the mentioned research it is supported that drama may offer a methodological contextual basis for enhancing teenagers’ agency and empowerment, especially in the field of transferable career skills development and career management. The teenagers in the secondary education are not as stressed to get involved in imminent career decisions and choices as young adults usually are (Janeiro, Mota and Ribas 2014; Maree, Cook and Fletcher 2018). Thus, it is our strong belief that career guidance services during the schooling years using Drama in Education as a career exploration method may prove to be a powerful tool in the hands of teachers, career counsellors, psychologists, and other stakeholders; they could offer ample time to teenagers to discover personal and work values, interests, competences, to become aware of and accept their emotional world and self, to face dysfunctional beliefs and attitudes, to develop career decision making skills and even successfully face future challenges in their lives and careers thanks to the long lasting impact of the method (Meschke, Peter and Bartholomae 2012; Pezirkianides, Stalikas and Malikiosi-Loizou 2023; Whiston et al. 2017). We hope that this research has provided a clear example of how drama can be applied in career guidance and counselling and that more research on this topic will accumulate even more evidence on the versatility and adaptability of the Drama in Education method in scientific fields other than education.
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Notes on Author
Christina Zourna is a mathematician, teaching secondary education mathematics since 1988. She has an MA in Adult Education, and is a Dr. in Lifelong Learning at the Educational and Social Policy Dept, School of Social Sciences Humanities and Arts, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests include applications of Drama in Education in teaching the curriculum and in developing personal, social, and professional skills for teenagers, students, and adults. Her original idea of using Drama as an innovative method in career guidance and group counselling for adolescents has been officially copyrighted (990/11-02-2022).
email: christina.zourna.2@goncaloalmeida-gagmail-com
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4860-2807
https://christinazourna2.wixsite.com/my-site-1
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