Master of All Domains? Constructively Aligning Theatre and Learning

Abstract

In “How Do You Know They are Learning?” Thomas Reeves highlights a problem endemic in university education—one to which drama and theatre studies offers potential solutions. Reeves argues that although educational scholarship recognizes multiple learning domains, post-secondary instruction and assessment overwhelmingly focus on only one of them: the cognitive domain. The neglected learning domains include the affective (the domain of aesthetics, values, feeling, and caring), the psychomotor (the domain of perceptual skills and physical ability), and the conative (the domain of willpower and volition). Reeves laments that university courses typically privilege the cognitive, the domain of “knowing,” and even then they often emphasize low-end cognitive skills, such as remembering and understanding. The others, though equally important to lifelong success, are seldom engaged and rarely assessed.