Being borderless bodies: On the use of Beckett in a multicultural Italian public school

Scenes from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were employed to teach Italian to migrant children in a public primary school. The drama workshop helped to develop a collaborative group of students by encouraging friendship and cooperative learning. Drama education in multilingual schools can offer solutions to many educational challenges, improving communicative and relational competences. Drama is a tool for building functional vocabulary and creating the imaginary, but quite real, common space needed to establish a solid mutual understanding among students from many different cultures, where they are free to share their cultural similarities and differences. Drama can become the place for peacefully enacting the internal conflicts that arise in the building of a new, multicultural identity. From my students, I learned that a new common language could become a way of weaving intelligent relations between different cultures.

Vladimir: How’s the carrot?

Estragon: It’s a carrot.

Vladimir: So much the better, so much the better.

– Samuel Beckett