Play In Classroom Research Articles

Perspectives on moral ambiguity and character education in the drama classroom

In this paper, I argue that certain drama education practices pedagogically trouble didactic moral instruction and offer open and fertile ground for the exploration of morally ambiguous dilemmas. Referring primarily to the work of Joe Winston, I posit that theories of drama as moral education point to the desirability of an open moral agenda, and particularly that context and cultural specificity are essential when attempting to understand and experience moral issues in the classroom. In order to illuminate this issue I refer specifically to I’m Too Old for a Trike Now, a story drama structure by Carole Miller and Juliana Saxton. This story drama showcases the openness of the dramatic form and its effectiveness for meaningful exploration of moral ambiguities. I contend that it is through open and affective drama pedagogy that critical reflection and a more mature level of understanding is able to develop.

Investigation of Learning in Creative Drama-based Classrooms through Community of Practice

In creative drama-based classrooms, the learners attain opportunities of working collaboratively in performing drama and determining their roles in their learning process through their performance. Also, there exist the opportunities of communication, learning various views, thinking creativity, thinking independently and forming mutual outcomes with the help of their previous knowledge and experience. The purpose of the current study was to examine the processes and the ways of formation of communities of practice in creative drama-based classrooms for preservice teachers enrolled in the departments of early childhood and elementary mathematics education through their learning process. Moreover, the roles of instructors and participants in different drama classrooms and programs in these different communities were investigated. The participants of the present study were composed of 55 sophomore preservice teachers at a university in northern part of Turkey. Data collection process lasted four weeks and included video recordings of the classes and audio-recordings of the interviews made with some of the participants. The qualitative data were analyzed by using community of practice framework. These communities were examined based on three dimensions of communities of practice (CoP), joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire by focusing on their learning of these different communities. The findings showed that Wenger’s CoP dimensions manifested themselves in the classrooms. Also, this framework utilized the understanding of similarities and differences among these different communities for their learning processes.

Performativity and creativity in senior secondary drama classrooms

This article examines the intersection between the senior secondary drama classroom, creativity and neoliberalism. Informed by a research project involving fifteen West Australian drama teachers and thirteen students, it considers the drama classroom as one site where tensions between the performative needs of neoliberal education and the more humanistic desires that drama teachers embody are enacted. This paper suggests that drama education can be a powerfully transformative vehicle for creative and innovative thinking because of its spatially unique classroom environment and embodied nature. However, collisions between rhetoric and reality, social good and economic return, can mean that young people are denied opportunities for choice and the capability development that drama education brings.

Desiring machines and nomad spaces: neoliberalism, performativity and becoming in senior secondary drama classrooms

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture.

Cultivating imaginative thinking: teacher strategies used in high-performing arts education classrooms

This article reports on recent case-study research that examined teacher- and student-level processes in nine Australian arts classrooms. The selected classrooms, based on the results of a connected longitudinal study, demonstrated strong positive links between arts participation and academic motivation, engagement and achievement. The focus here is on how teachers supported their students to conceive, shape and present imaginative work. Although different approaches were apparent in the dance, drama, film, music and visual arts classrooms, patterns were detected in the processes used to transform imaginative ideas into a creative work. The research indicated that important skills were being developed as the students encountered the ambiguity of the creative process. Furthermore, insights were gained into how work drawing on the imagination can be initiated and sustained through the highs and lows of development to become both a work of art and a learning experience that will augment future creative work.

The Influence of Classroom Drama on Teachers' Language and Students' On-Task Behavior

Teacher language and students' on-task behavior were examined in language arts lessons with and without classroom drama in two self-contained third grade classrooms for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Language arts lessons that integrated classroom drama were associated with significantly higher rates of teachers' assertive statements and lower rates of regulative statements. Language arts lessons using classroom drama were associated with higher rates of students' on-task behavior than conventional language arts lessons. The findings indicate that the classroom drama language arts setting influenced teachers' use of assertive and regulative discourse, and students' on-task behavior. The authors discuss the implications of arts integrated instruction for educational practice and research as well as policy.

The Influence of Classroom Drama on English Learners’ Academic Language Use During English Language Arts Lessons

Teacher and student academic discourse was examined in an urban arts-integrated school to better understand facilitation of students’ English language learning. Participants’ discourse was compared across English language arts (ELA) lessons with and without classroom drama in a third-grade classroom of English learning (EL) students (N = 18) with Spanish as their home language (L1) and English as their second language (L2). Students used significantly higher rates of L2 academic language forms as measured by linguistically specific and complex literate language features and language-facilitative speech acts during classroom drama, as compared with conventional ELA lessons. The classroom teacher used more dialogic discourse, as measured by increased rates of requestive and responsive speech acts during drama, as compared with conventional ELA lessons. The findings indicate that the contextualization of ELA content through classroom drama contributed to participants’ dialogic use of specific and complex academic discourse forms over a conventional ELA setting. The implications of arts-integrated instruction for education practice, research, and policy are discussed.

Serious words for serious subjects

In this paper, I create philosophical space for the importance of how we say things as an adjunct to attending to what is said, drawing on Stanley Cavell's discussions of moral perfectionism and passionate utterance. In the light of this, I assess claims made for the contribution drama makes to moral education. In Cities of Words, Cavell gestures towards Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, where Socrates asks what kind of disagreement causes hatred and anger. The answer is disagreement on moral questions. The consequent ethical conditioning of such speech might demand that our seriousness is marked by calm, respectful and open conversation. I argue this might fail to fully reflect how an individual takes his/her life seriously and how passionate speech such as we find in dramatic dialogue could convey this. I develop the register of moral perfectionism that Cavell identifies in Ibsen's A Doll's House in relation to moral seriousness. I argue that the drama classroom can help, not simply by bringing out the inherently dramatic and conflictual nature of moral dilemmas and arguments as ‘hard cases’, but through heightened awareness that the personal voice, the individual's moral presence in his/her thought, is in part located in possibilities of that thought's physical expression.

Creativity in Teaching Different Subjects in English through Drama Techniques

This action research examines the basic concept of creativity, theoretical and practical foundations and implications of drama and theatre as a method for creative foreign language teaching, especially for teaching English as a foreign language to Albanian students at Tirana University and other district Universities. Current research has found that participation in meaningful conversations in the drama classroom helps students develop their conceptual understandings of the subject matter and further develop their creative thinking and learning. Learning outcomes and findings are often shown through descriptions of design interventions that have taken place in ordinary classrooms. In this research, attention has been paid to the use of new creative methods, diverse experiences of individual students within FL classes and what they take away from participation in such discourses. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n2p438

What's so great about drama class? Year I secondary students have their say

This article describes an investigation of three Year I secondary school drama classrooms in one Ontario, Canada, school district. The study adopted a mixed-method approach, using questionnaires and audiotaped interviews to illuminate aspects of the contexts and cultures, processes and products of Year I drama. Although course offerings across schools fulfilled similar mandatory provincial objectives, specific content differed from school to school, as did classroom structures and procedures. Nonetheless, comparable findings emerged across sites, suggesting that core teacher characteristics and classroom task-types, rather than specific course content, lay at the heart of students' ultimate achievement.

Drama: Threat or Opportunity? Managing the ‘Dual Affect’ in Process Drama

In this paper we discuss the construct of ‘dual affect’ and its relevance to drama pedagogy in a foreign language teaching context. We draw on a research project involving a group of advanced learners of Italian using drama-based strategies. We begin with a theoretical discussion of dual affect, aesthetic distance, and protection mechanisms in the drama/language classroom. Next, we contextualise the research study and analyse student-participants’ responses in selected moments of the drama. The analysis suggests that, while some student-participants experienced the dual affect of drama as a threat, others found it a stimulus for reflection and a challenge. We argue that this may have had an impact on their perceived learning outcomes and on their willingness to communicate in the target language. We take this opportunity to reflect on the importance of managing dual affect in the process drama classroom, especially when working with advanced language students who have no prior experience in drama-based pedagogy.

Results Speak for Themselves

The author has undertaken a narrative inquiry that explores the political and cultural positioning of drama education in the English secondary school. The inquiry also serves as both an experiment in and an argument for the relevance of a storying methodology in educational research. The reader is encouraged through the employment of particular expressionistic features, borrowed from the poetic mode, to enter into reflective conversation with the text. This, the author argues, is an approach to research that not only compliments drama pedagogy through its shared values, but that can be regarded as a continuance or widening of the reflexive conversation that begins in the drama classroom.

Talking drama into being: types of talk in drama classrooms

This paper explores the structure of talk in drama classrooms, particularly the ways students and teachers use different kinds of talk to achieve their classroom work and construct shared moral reasoning as the basis of their practical educational activities. The data and discussion presented here bring together the curricular setting of educational drama and the methodological setting of Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis. The transcripts and analyses emerged from a larger study that sought to explore the particular ways students interacted within process drama lessons dealing with future life prospects and pathways. The identification of three distinct kinds of talk has significance for education scholars, teacher-educators and teacher-practitioners as it has the potential to enable a more detailed awareness of the structure of classroom practice and the particular ways students engage with significant ideas in classroom settings.

American Higher Education and Dramatic Literature in(to) English

In 2011 and 2012, I undertook a two-part survey to answer some large questions about the use of plays in translation in the higher education drama classroom in Anglophone North America and to test my ideas regarding the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of translation there. My project here is to report on that survey and to make clear why translation studies is ready to take a prominent role in theatre studies. U.S. colleges and universities constitute one of the largest single markets in the world for drama translated into English. Most U.S. theatre history classes include plays from the world canon, and many specialized classes in theatre departments focus on plays from non-Anglophone cultures. In English departments, where other genres in translation (e.g., the novel) may be approached with caution, drama seems to be offered a “pass” because the notion of being dramaturgically literate depends on some knowledge of a sizable canon of non-Anglophone plays. Yet despite its ubiquity, translation is often so normalized as to be invisible to those who depend on it. As Laurence Senelick notes, “For most students, a work exists wholly in its translated form, spontaneously generated.” Translation, as the survey confirmed, is part of the DNA of theatre studies. As such, I argue, it needs to be brought to the foreground of the field. In saying this, I am not unaware of the rich work undertaken by scholars, editors, and practitioners who are enmeshed in the difficult issues involved with translating plays, which include pressing for greater attention to cultural sensitivity and literacy. My focus here is on the academy and the classroom, where, for better or worse, the vast majority of future dramaturgs and audience members will cut their teeth on a critical mass of plays and where no single language or production entity or publisher can claim pride of place.

In Search of a Modern Confucius for Effective Teaching in Law: A Trial Project to Promote Interactive Learning in Taiwan

This paper observes and reviews the progress of interactive learning in a Taiwan eConfucius Drama Classroom. Based on accumulated findings in a law classroom of blended learning, an innovative pedagogy is introduced to promote conversational teaching with passive students. The Socratic pedagogies may have led the western movements towards interactive learning. Given a different educational heritage in Taiwan, the constructivist teaching value may be realised with culturally situated methods to achieve Socratic ends. The ideas of “guided independent learning” are thus proposed with the back-up of filed findings. In the classroom of a modern Confucius, the teacher remains to be respected, yet learning-centred pedagogies are adopted to lead the students to become active and reflective learners.

Taking it to the Tweet Seats: Using New Technology to Create "Theatre Knowledge-Building Communities" in the English Language Arts and Drama Classrooms

The development of digital technology and the participatory culture it engenders presents challenges to secondary school English and drama teachers keen to expose their students to the pleasures and rewards of live theatre. Within Scardamalia’s notion of the “knowledge building community” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994, 2006; Scardamalia, Bransford, Kozma, & Quellmalz, 2012; Scardamalia, 2002), however, is a framework by which teachers can use educational technology to create authentic, theatre knowledge-building communities that allow students to view themselves as engaged participants in the culture of live theatre while learning valuable 21st century skills.Keywords: theatre; English; drama; educational technology; Scardamalia; knowledge-building community; 21st century skills; youth audience

Between the frames: youth spectatorship and theatre as curated, ‘unruly’ pedagogical space

In this article, we consider the aesthetic, political and pedagogical strengths of a verbatim theatre performance, The Middle Place by Project: Humanity, a play that explores the experiences of shelter youth in Toronto, Canada. This ethnographic study moved from drama classrooms into theatres and charted audience responses to the production, its pre- and post-show programming and the company's curation of the theatre space. Using data from post-performance interviews with youth, we analyse how young people articulate the impact of socially engaged theatre. And pulling from ethnographic fieldnotes and researcher email correspondence, we further illustrate how the mere presence of youth and shelter youth at the theatre altered the ways in which audiences interacted with the play and the extended programming, disrupting the usual social contract of theatre-going. Project: Humanity's intentional mix of social classes and ages among the audience created encounters that have much to teach us about theatre's ability to unleash the ‘unruly’ and to artistically re-create a world highly recognisable to those who inhabit it.

“Listening to the Affective Life of Injustice”: Drama Pedagogy, Race, Identity, and Learning

This article draws from three different ethnographic research projects situated in Canadian urban and suburban drama classrooms in which the student population is highly diverse linguistically, culturally, racially, and ethnically. In each of these classes, as students engage in discussion in and out of role, some of the unsettling events of their lives concerned with the “affective politics” of race come to light. We critique notions of consensus and demonstrate, through our examples, the central importance of the drama classroom space as one that ignites discussion and engages divergent opinions and feelings. To analyze these events, we draw upon Frantz Fanon and Sara Ahmed who acknowledge how different bodies experience the power relations associated with emotion differently.

Discourse in drama: Talk, role, and learning in drama education

In the 1970s and 1980s John Carroll published three papers concerned with analysing talk in drama classrooms. It was Carroll's belief that “Drama, by its very nature as a creative force, demands a different sort of discourse from both teacher and pupils in the classroom” (Carroll, 1988). According to Carroll, the act of role-taking in the classroom is central to this. Carroll used socio-linguistic analysis to discuss the particular way in which role-taking affects classroom dynamics and the effect drama has on student learning. Since this early work from Carroll, the detailed analysis of talk in drama has received little attention. In this paper I aim to draw on both this early work by Carroll, and my own recent work using conversation analysis (Freebody, 2009, 2010) to continue the discussion around the significance of drama, role and talk in education.

The Challenge of an Empty Space: Pedagogical and Multimodal Interaction in Drama Lessons

Problem Statement: What challenges do teacher trainees face in pedagogic and multimodal interaction during drama lessons? Purpose of Study: The challenges of pedagogic and multimodal interaction between teacher and student were examined, thereby developing practices in teacher education of drama. Research Methods: Stimulated recall-interviews were conducted with the help of a video that was recorded during teacher practice sessions in spring 2011. The interviewees (N=7) were students studying to become class teachers. The interviewer and the interviewees watched previously selected video clips together and discussed the classroom interaction. Findings: The study shows that pedagogic and multimodal interaction of a drama lesson is challenging for the teacher trainees. According to the data analysis, class teacher students pointed out five main elements that make interaction in classroom drama teaching challenging: teacher's actions; educational organization; the nature of the subject; students, and resources. The five main categories included several sub-categories. This study focuses on the three first elements: teacher's actions, organization of the educational situation, and the nature of the subject. Conclusions: The teacher trainees found the interaction in drama work to be challenging. Drama work is a free form of education, making controlling the group or individual students more difficult. The interviewees lacked confidence in their own actions, subject knowledge, non-verbal communication and teaching skills. The feeling of inadequacy was also connected to the management of students and the group.