Author: Saskia Puusaar (MSc)

Abstract

This article reflects on an applied anthropological impact study conducted within the “Play More, Stress Less” training programme for Estonian preschool teachers. Combining the psychodramatic approach to early childhood development and learning with ethnographic methods, the project explored how embodied, role-based learning fosters teachers’ self-awareness, emotional resilience, and professional creativity. Drawing on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and two quantitative questionnaires – the Job Satisfaction Index (JSI) and Occupational Self-Efficacy Scale (OSS-6) – I analyse how psychodramatic core principles resonate with anthropological understandings of play, embodiment, and meaning-making. The findings suggest that when teachers re-learn to play, they re-connect to both the children and themselves. Play becomes not only an educational tool but also an anthropological medium of empathy and renewal.

1. Introduction

Upon entering the room where the training was held, a quiet hum of anticipation filled the air. Around twenty preschool teachers – mostly women between 30 and 55 – were preparing for two days of psychodramatic exercises designed to reawaken their sense of play. Coloured scarves and soft toys lay scattered across the floor, hinting that this would not be a typical professional training. As an anthropologist, I had come to observe how psychodrama could support teachers’ emotional well-being and creativity, yet I soon realised that full understanding would not come from distance alone. Participation, rather than mere observation, would blur the boundary between researcher and actor – and that blurring would become central to what I learned.
Estonian preschool education is designed for children aged roughly 2 to 7 years, preparing them for compulsory schooling at age seven. Most kindergartens are municipal, though private options exist, and attendance is voluntary but widespread – nearly all Estonian children attend. Groups are usually divided by age: nursery groups (2-3 years), younger (3-5 years), and older preschool groups (6-7 years), with class sizes of around 14-20 children and at least one qualified teacher plus an assistant per group. A typical day runs from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., structured around play-based learning, outdoor activities, meals, naps (for younger children), and creative or thematic lessons aligned with the national preschool curriculum, which emphasizes social development, independence, language, creativity, and environmental awareness. Meals are provided, and outdoor play is considered an essential daily routine regardless of weather.
The “Play More, Stress Less” Erasmus+ project was created as part of an international collaboration to support early childhood educators in their everyday task of providing the emotional basic needs to the children as well as address a growing concern among them: how to sustain empathy and vitality in a profession often marked by exhaustion, limited resources, and emotional overload. The training – developed by the Estonian Psychodrama Institute, Szenen Institute and InterPlay Institute and SKM Köln – Sozialdienst Katholischer Männer e.V.  – combined movement, improvisation, and guided role-play. Instead of focusing on classroom management or teaching techniques, it invited teachers to reconnect with spontaneity – the same quality they try to nurture in children every day.
At its heart, the project sought to remind teachers that play is not only a child’s natural way of learning but also a teacher’s path to renewal. Through action and imagination, teachers could explore classroom tensions, rehearse alternative responses, and rediscover joy in interaction. Play became both a method and a metaphor: a space where emotional understanding could be practised safely, without the rigid expectations of ordinary life.
From an anthropological perspective, the training created a field in which the core elements of both anthropology and psychodrama came into focus – embodiment, empathy, and the creation of shared meaning. Both disciplines are grounded in the idea that understanding others requires stepping into their reality, even if only temporarily. Role-taking, storytelling, and reflection turned the training into a living ethnography, where insight was generated through experience rather than detached analysis. The project unfolded at a meeting point of two disciplines, both asking what it truly means to encounter another person with openness, imagination, and care.

2. Theoretical Background: Where Anthropology Meets Psychodrama

J. L. Moreno (1953) proposed psychodrama as a practice grounded in the belief that action can reveal deeper truths than words alone. Through role reversal, mirroring, and spontaneous improvisation, participants can re-experience and re-frame relationships that shape their emotional lives. The process relies on embodied encounter rather than abstraction, inviting people to step into each other’s perspectives. While psychodrama originated as a therapeutic method, its group-based structure has since been adapted to educational and organisational settings, where it functions as a form of collective reflection and creative learning (Holmes, Karp & Watson, 1994).
Anthropology, too, is concerned with how meaning is created through embodied and performative action. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) identified play as the very foundation of culture, an activity through which humans continually generate social order and symbolic meaning. Bateson (1972) described play as a form of “meta-communication,” a frame in which we learn to distinguish between reality and representation. Turner (1982) extended these ideas to ritual and theatre, arguing that liminal spaces enable transformation by momentarily suspending social hierarchies. These perspectives together highlight play as a mode of experimentation in which new patterns of relationship can emerge.
Later anthropologists deepened this performative view of human life. Mauss (1935) emphasised that culture is learned through techniques of the body – repetitive gestures and postures that express social values. Csordas (1990) reframed embodiment as the central paradigm for anthropology, locating perception, emotion, and imagination within bodily practice rather than detached cognition. Geertz (1973) proposed that culture operates as a “web of meaning” that people both spin and inhabit, while Bourdieu (1990) introduced habitus as the embodied matrix of such webs – the ingrained dispositions that organise perception and action. Sutton-Smith (1997) added that play itself is inherently ambiguous: it can be serious, subversive, and exploratory all at once, holding together the contradictions that define human creativity.
In this sense, psychodrama and anthropology share methodological DNA. Both rest on participation, observation, and the imaginative leap of acting as if one were another self or in another world. In my fieldwork, this shared epistemology became tangible as teachers entered children’s roles, testing emotional boundaries and uncovering insights that were at once educational and existential. Wulf (2013) captures this convergence: education, like culture, is a performative and relational process through which people make meaning by doing.

3. Methodology

This study combined quantitative and qualitative methods within a reflexive anthropological framework, seeking to understand not only what changed for participants but how those changes were experienced. The mixed-method design allowed both measurable outcomes and interpretive depth, reflecting the dual aim of evaluating impact and capturing lived meaning.
Quantitative Components
Before the “Play More, Stress Less” training, participants completed two short questionnaires designed to trace potential shifts in professional well-being. The first was an Index of Job Satisfaction (Brayfield & Rothe, 1951), which measured overall contentment with work, motivation, and sense of purpose. The second, the Occupational Self-Efficacy Scale (OSS-6) (Schyns & von Collani, 2002), assessed teachers’ confidence in their own competence and coping capacity in challenging situations. Together, these scales provided a measurement of the teachers’ sense of agency and satisfaction in their daily work. The numerical data were used not to produce generalisable statistics but treated as signposts – patterns to be interpreted through the teachers’ own words, emotions, and embodied experiences.

Qualitative Components
The qualitative part of the study formed its interpretive core. I conducted participant observation at one of the training sessions, taking detailed fieldnotes on group dynamics, body language, and moments of insight. Additionally, I conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers from both northern and southern Estonia where the two trainings took place. The interviews ranged from 30 to 60 minutes and often evolved into reflective conversations, where teachers shared personal stories, classroom challenges, and moments of emotional breakthrough. These dialogues not only provided rich data but also extended the spirit of the training itself – creating a space of mutual reflection and meaning-making. These conversations deepened the understanding of how organisational and cultural environments influence the adoption of new educational tools.

Ethical and Reflexive Considerations
Ethical clearance was obtained through an organisational agreement with the participating preschools. All participants gave informed consent, and identifying details were removed from the data. Quotations have been translated from Estonian to English, with care taken to preserve tone and nuance. In addition, I maintained a reflexive stance throughout the process, acknowledging how my presence and participation inevitably shaped what was observed. In this sense, the methodology mirrored the spirit of psychodrama itself – understanding through action, awareness, and encounter. By weaving together quantitative measures and embodied ethnography, the study sought to capture a multi-layered picture of transformation: not only the measurable outcomes of a professional workshop but the subtle, sensory, and emotional processes through which teachers reconnected with play as a source of renewal and meaning.

4. Findings and Reflections

4.1 Play as Children’s Work – and Teachers’ Too

Across interviews, teachers repeatedly defined play as the child’s work. One explained: “In fact, play is the child’s real work, and the teacher must explain this to parents.” The phrase captures a profound insight, challenging the divide between work as productive and play as frivolous. Here, play becomes not a distraction from learning but its very medium – purposeful activity through which children think, feel, and grow.
Teachers described play as a diagnostic and developmental mirror. They observed how children’s coordination, empathy, and emotional balance surfaced through play: “Playing with soft toys shows whether a child uses aggression or can be gentle.” Such moments showed that play is not only symbolic but also observational – it reveals the moral and emotional worlds in which children operate. Teachers learn to read these micro-actions as social texts, much like anthropologists interpret rituals as condensed meaning.
This understanding reverberated inward. Seeing play as meaningful labour prompted teachers to reconsider their own professional identity. Rather than supervisors or managers, they began to view themselves as co-players – participants in a shared world of meaning-making. In this liminal space, authority and participation coexist, allowing creativity and empathy to emerge. Psychodrama supported this transition: by embodying roles, teachers practised a form of knowing through doing. Classrooms thus became small laboratories of human interaction, where understanding arose not from distance but from active participation in the scene itself.

4.2 Psychodrama as Embodied Education

Teachers described how role-play became a practical tool for helping children confront everyday fears. One teacher reflected: “In one of our groups we recently played dentist, and the next day the children actually went to the dentist for real.” Through laughter and shared improvisation, children explored what the visit might feel like, taking turns to play both dentist and patient. This anecdote encapsulates the essence of Moreno’s concept of action insight – learning and emotional integration that arise through doing rather than describing.
In such moments, psychodrama moved beyond therapeutic technique and became education in its purest form. Through embodied participation, the children as well as teachers tested strategies for empathy and reassurance in a symbolic, low-stakes environment. This allowed them to experiment with tone, body language, and authority – skills central to emotional attunement in early childhood education. Within the frame of as if, both children and teachers could renegotiate relationships of care, fear, and trust. The act of play opened a safe passage between the real and the imagined, enabling emotional rehearsal for experiences that might otherwise provoke anxiety.
Ultimately, these exercises illustrate how psychodrama bridges cognition and embodiment. The children did not simply talk about going to the dentist – they practiced it, together, through play. This shift from verbal reflection to embodied exploration mirrors anthropology’s own turn toward understanding knowledge as lived, sensory, and situated. In that sense, the psychodramatic approach to learning becomes an anthropology of emotion in action: a method for transforming insight into embodied understanding.

4.3 From Reflection to Action

Teachers repeatedly emphasised that the greatest strength of the “Play More, Stress Less” training was its immediacy. It did not remain theoretical or distant but addressed their everyday challenges. As one participant said, “We took a specific child and a specific situation, and we solved it during the training.” Her satisfaction revealed a key truth: learning becomes meaningful when it produces visible change. The workshop offered a rare chance to pause, reflect on a concrete case, and receive immediate feedback from peers and facilitators.

This hands-on approach validated teachers’ knowledge and turned abstract ideas into practical strategies. Instead of only hearing that play supports emotional regulation, they experienced how to apply it through improvisation, role analysis, and reflection. The training embodied the principle of learning by doing, transforming tacit know-how into conscious competence. Yet enthusiasm did not always translate into sustained practice. “At first there was a lot of enthusiasm, but then autumn fatigue set in,” one teacher admitted. Time pressure, large groups, and seasonal exhaustion limited how much new insight could be integrated. The tension between inspiration and routine showed how social context shapes the use of psychological tools.

These reflections highlight that a psychodramatic approach to education, like any embodied method, requires temporal space for integration. Teachers need moments of collective reflection long after the workshop ends, to translate new awareness into daily rhythm. What the training initiated was not a finished transformation but the start of an ongoing process – a cycle of trying, adjusting, and sustaining. The insight thus shifts from “we learned” to “we are still learning,” positioning play not as a one-time exercise but as a living practice that evolves with experience.

4.4 Playfulness as a Tool for Emotional Regulation

Many teachers shared that adopting a playful approach transformed how they coped with stress and emotional tension in their work. One reflected, “A playful attitude has helped… there’s no point in getting angry.” This insight captures how playfulness, rather than being a luxury, can serve as a form of self-regulation and resilience. When teachers re-engaged their bodies through movement, voice, or humour, they found themselves better able to de-escalate difficult moments and remain calm in the classroom. The training created a safe environment to practice that awareness. Playing as adults – often perceived as frivolous – became a professional strategy for restoring balance, empathy, and connection.
At the same time, not everyone felt comfortable with this approach. As one participant put it, “Some teachers genuinely enjoy playing; others prefer not to.” This ambivalence revealed how personal histories, personality, and social expectations shape relationships with play. For some, exaggerated gestures or childlike voices felt liberating; for others, they provoked embarrassment or resistance. Psychodramatic methods therefore exposed not only collective patterns but also individual limits.

Recognising these boundaries proved crucial. Playfulness cannot be mandated – it must emerge from trust, consent, and emotional readiness. The training showed that spontaneity requires cultivation: teachers need to play and experiment without fear of judgment. When such safety exists, play becomes more than an educational technique – it evolves into an embodied ethic of care, extending compassion both toward children and toward oneself.

4.5 The Collective Dimension

After the training, several preschools chose to extend the experience beyond the teachers that took part in the trainings. One participant told us, “Teachers have shared what they learned with each other, and that brings joy – the knowledge continues to live throughout the institution.” The training’s effects rippled outward, transforming not only personal attitudes but also the collective learning culture. The playful methods introduced during the training sessions became part of a shared vocabulary and practice, and started to circulate informally in everyday conversations, including references to “roles,” “scenes,” “emotions,” and “basic needs”. Professional language – often dominated by administrative or educational terms – made space for more affective and relational dimensions.
This transformation of language is significant. As anthropologists have long noted, words do not merely describe reality; they shape it. By normalising new terminology, teachers collectively redefined what counted as professional competence. Emotional expression, spontaneity, and reflective dialogue were no longer seen as optional extras but as integral components of interaction with children in their groups. Psychodramatic methods thus provided both the structure and the permission to share vulnerability, laughter, and insight in professional contexts; emotional literacy and creative risk-taking became communal values rather than isolated practices.

4.6 Embodied Space and Ritual Objects

Observations and interviews revealed that physical space profoundly shaped how play unfolded. Teachers became acutely aware of how the arrangement of rooms and objects could either invite or restrict imagination. Boxes of fabrics and a dedicated “creativity room” filled with costumes and props were described as especially valuable – objects that carried emotional and symbolic meaning, serving as cues for comfort and engagement. Teachers noticed that when children knew where familiar props were kept, they entered imaginative play more easily and felt calmer. The predictability of these spaces provided security, while the multifunctionality of materials – scarves that could become wings, capes, or blankets – encouraged spontaneity and invention. These things worked together to create meaning in the classroom, demonstrating that learning is as much about atmosphere as instruction.
Within the preschool context, such props often became ritual objects (Turner 1982), marking a transition from ordinary activity into the liminal space of play. Draping a scarf or stepping into the creativity room signalled a shift in mode and mood, preparing both body and imagination for exploration. Recognising and intentionally shaping these transitions became part of teachers’ evolving professional awareness. Ultimately, the layout of space, placement of objects, and small rituals surrounding their use formed what might be called the embodied architecture of imagination. By attending to these subtle material and spatial details, teachers learned to cultivate environments where play could naturally take root and thrive.

4.7 Limits and Realism

While teachers praised the transformative power of play, many also acknowledged its boundaries. One participant reflected candidly, “Sometimes there is aggression or physical conflict… a playful solution doesn’t help.” While play can open emotional doors, it cannot resolve every situation, especially those rooted in behavioural disorders or structural stress. Such awareness protects against what might be called the romanticisation of play: the assumption that creativity and imagination can heal all wounds. Teachers noted that certain behavioural crises demanded firmer boundaries, clear routines, or individual interventions. Playfulness remained a valuable tool, but not a universal cure, echoing Moreno’s own insistence that psychodrama is a disciplined method requiring certain boundaries, timing, and sensitivity.
From an anthropological viewpoint, this recognition of limits is equally instructive. It mirrors the fieldworker’s awareness that not all social tensions can be “solved” through participation or empathy alone. Just as ethnographers must sometimes step back to protect themselves or others, teachers learned to calibrate when engagement became counterproductive. Their discernment represents a form of situated ethics – knowing when to act, when to pause, and when to seek alternative forms of support. Accepting that play has limits does not diminish its value; rather, it situates it realistically within the complex ecology of educational care. This capacity to balance creativity with responsibility is perhaps the deepest mark of growth the training inspired.

4.8 Regional Nuances

The quantitative findings revealed subtle but meaningful regional differences. Teachers in southern Estonia reported slightly higher job satisfaction and motivation, while those in the north showed greater self-efficacy but also more fatigue. Though modest, these contrasts reflected distinct social environments: southern teachers described their workplaces as close-knit and supportive, whereas northern teachers more often mentioned isolation and heavier workloads. From an ethnographic perspective, these differences highlight how well-being depends less on individual coping than on relational networks and shared meaning. Community cohesion functioned as a quiet form of social capital, sustaining motivation even under pressure. Educational interventions, therefore, never occur in a vacuum – their impact is shaped by local histories, workplace cultures, and collective ethos. Where solidarity is strong, new practices take root more easily; where it is weak, enthusiasm fades. Change, as these findings suggest, is never merely psychological but profoundly social.

5. Discussion: Anthropology and Psychodrama as Parallel Practices

The study revealed that psychodrama and anthropology share a striking methodological kinship. Both are rooted in doing rather than merely observing, and both rely on participation, imagination, and embodied reflection to generate insight. The following table summarises some of the key correspondences between their core principles:
Psychodramatic Principle Anthropological Parallel Shared Function
Role Reversal Participant Observation Understanding the other through embodied experience

Mirroring Reflexivity Seeing oneself as seen by others
Scene Building Thick Description (Geertz 1973) Contextualising behaviour in social meaning
Spontaneity Field Improvisation Responding ethically to unpredictability
These parallels are more than metaphorical – they describe shared epistemologies of experience. In role reversal, psychodrama invites participants to step into another person’s position and feel the world from within it. Likewise, participant observation requires the anthropologist to cross experiential boundaries, learning by inhabiting the rhythms, rituals, and emotions of others. Both demand empathy that is not sentimental but analytical: an attempt to understand through being affected.
Similarly, mirroring and reflexivity both involve turning perception back on oneself. In the psychodramatic sense, mirroring allows participants to see their own gestures and emotions reflected by others, creating space for self-recognition and insight. In anthropology, reflexivity operates as the methodological equivalent – acknowledging how the researcher’s presence shapes the field and how observation is always reciprocal. Both practices cultivate awareness of one’s influence within a shared emotional and social field.
Scene building mirrors the anthropological craft of thick description. Both aim to contextualise behaviour – to place actions within the dense web of relationships, symbols, and meanings that give them significance. Just as a psychodramatic scene re-enacts a social world in miniature, ethnography reconstructs that world through narrative and interpretation.

Finally, spontaneity in psychodrama corresponds to field improvisation in ethnographic work. In both, practitioners must respond ethically to the unexpected – whether to an emotion that surfaces in the circle or a situation that unfolds in the field. Spontaneity here is not impulsiveness but responsiveness: a capacity to act with sensitivity in dynamic, uncertain contexts.
Together, these shared practices cultivate what Turner (1982) called communitas – a momentary suspension of hierarchy that allows genuine connection. Within the preschool setting, this took the form of collaborative learning and emotional safety: teachers and children engaging as co-players, not as subjects and authorities. The findings support Wulf’s (2013) view that education is inherently performative. Teachers constantly model the cultural scripts children internalise, and through psychodramatic play they can actively rewrite those. By reclaiming spontaneity, teachers learn not only to teach differently but to be differently, transforming both their classrooms and themselves into spaces of renewal and mutual learning.

6. Implications and Recommendations

1. Timing of training. Conduct workshops rather at the beginning of the academic year, when teachers have the energy and openness to integrate new ideas into their daily routines. Starting early allows psychodramatic methods to become part of classroom culture rather than an end-of-year experiment.
2. Integration of theory and practice. Psychodrama is best understood through experience. Workshops should balance short theoretical inputs with active exercises that allow teachers to feel the impact of role-taking and spontaneity firsthand. When educators embody the method before analysing it, understanding shifts from cognitive to experiential – a key principle in both anthropology and psychodrama.
3. Whole-team participation. The most meaningful change occurred in preschools where multiple staff members attended together. Shared participation creates a common language, allowing colleagues to remind, reflect, and support each other once back at work. Involving entire teams also prevents the isolation of “one inspired teacher” whose ideas may fade without collective reinforcement.
4. Sustainability. Psychodrama, like any embodied practice, needs continuity. Regular follow-up sessions or informal “play evenings” help maintain the sense of spontaneity cultivated during training. These short exchanges among peers can refresh energy, prevent burnout, and keep play alive as a professional habit.
5. Parent education. Teachers suggested extending the spirit of the training to families, which was implemented in some of the preschools. Simple games or role-playing exercises shared with parents could normalise playfulness in adult-child relationships and bridge the cultural divide between home and preschool. When parents witness how play supports emotional growth, the trust towards teaching methods also grows.
6. Digital resource bank. To sustain learning across time and geography, a shared online repository of recorded games, warm-up exercises, and classroom examples could be developed. This resource would serve as both inspiration and memory aid, helping teachers revisit activities and adapt them to their own contexts.
Taken together, these recommendations echo the teachers’ own voices and embody an anthropological ethic of co-creation rather than top-down intervention. They suggest that psychodrama’s true value lies not in instruction but in shared exploration: a collective process through which educators, children, and communities rediscover the human power of play.

7. Conclusion

Conducting this impact study confirmed my belief that play is both a research method and a healing practice. When teachers step into roles and scenes, they do more than imitate children – they enact the very empathy that anthropology seeks to understand. In this way, psychodrama gives anthropology a language of action, while anthropology offers psychodrama a language of context. Together, they reveal how knowledge is created not through detachment but through participation, imagination, and shared vulnerability.
In the education sector, where emotional fatigue and bureaucratic routines often silence spontaneity, reclaiming play as a form of professional competence can be transformative. The training reminded teachers that creativity and empathy are not innate traits but skills that can be practised and renewed. As one participant put it, “You cannot play when you are tired, but sometimes play restores your energy.” This paradox captures the essence of the project: play is both fragile and restorative, demanding presence yet replenishing it in return.
Across the findings, we saw how psychodrama bridged theory and practice. It turned reflection into movement, transformed classrooms into laboratories of human interaction, and taught teachers to see the children (and themselves) with fresh eyes. Play fostered self-awareness, strengthened professional communities, and opened vital spaces of joy in the midst of institutional fatigue. The study also revealed that sustainable change requires time, collective reflection, and community support. Psychodramatic insight cannot be imposed; it must be nurtured through trust and repetition. Where solidarity was strong, the practice of play endured; where isolation prevailed, enthusiasm waned. These dynamics underscore a wider anthropological truth: transformation is never purely individual but profoundly social.
Ultimately, the “Play More, Stress Less” project showed how psychodrama can re-humanise educational work. Bodies in motion became sites of learning and care – reminding us that professional growth begins in the lived body, not in the abstract mind. In a world that prizes efficiency and control, this project offered a counter-narrative: that understanding, empathy, and renewal emerge most powerfully through play. If anthropology seeks to interpret the meanings people make, and psychodrama seeks to enact them, then their meeting point may hold one of the simplest yet deepest lessons of all: the way back to ourselves, and to one another, is through play.

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Information about the author:
Saskia Pumaar is an anthropologist working across qualitative research, community engagement, and public participation. Anthropologist skilled in: qualitative research, interviewing, service design, (social) inclusion and co-creation. She works at the Estonian Anthropology Centre, and studies how communities in various Estonian parishes perceive upcoming wind-energy developments – a key topic in Estonia’s environmental and energy future. She has also worked on projects in development cooperation, gender equality and environmental protection.