Drama Education Research Articles

Reimagining consensual engagement in drama education: the possibilities of intimacy choreography in a “post”-COVID-19 world

COVID-19 has brought forth new risks for students and teachers as they navigate how to engage safely with each other. It becomes necessary to consider the role of consent as a daily practice in “post”-pandemic life and explore what consent may offer young people as agents of their own bodies. In this paper, I consider how the emerging field of intimacy choreography (IC) illuminates new possibilities for engaging ethically with others. I situate this exploration in the context of drama education, guided by the following questions: how may IC provide practical tools for fostering consensual interactions amongst students, their peers, and their teachers? How may IC shed light on new ways of living more ethically with others?
 This paper discusses the potential of IC through the five pillars of rehearsal and performance practice identified by Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (Percy, 2020), supplemented by IC scholarship and professional literature (Ates, 2019; Lehmann, 2018; Morey, 2018; Pace, 2020; Purcell, 2018; Sina, 2014), and reflections on my experiences as a drama teacher working with an IC apprentice and high school students to share observations of how IC promoted consent in rehearsal. This paper will conclude with suggestions for how IC can help teachers support students in a “post”-COVID-19 context.

Experience, Imagination and Integration: Creative Drama for Values Education

Values education is one of the most significant ways to promote cognition of individuals and even the sustainable development of human beings. It helps people make appropriate valuative judgments and selections. With the advancement of society, values education should not merely point to the inheritance of tradition and the uniformity of collectivism, but also adaptability to the future and heterogeneity of individual well-being. Catherine Elgin believed that students should be taught to deliberate about how to choose with broad purviews, various angles, and tight relationship between individual and community. Based on her perspective, in this article creative drama is proposed as a potential approach for values education, which includes three key dimensions. Experiencing multiple situations broadens people’s horizons and gains more potential choices. Imagination promotes people’s competence to consider further and to develop adaptability for the future. Integration of the real and unreal helps them to continuously reflect on themselves and reconstruct their relationship between individual and community. This article provides a general theoretical framework to explore the relationship between creative drama and values education, as well as how it promotes values education; however, this still requires further study in practice.

Play-based pedagogy for oral communication in early grade and preschool classrooms

Background: Teachers are responsible for developing and enhancing communication skills amongst young learners. Unfortunately, the overly structured pedagogy which many teachers adopt inhibits the optimal development of oral communication skills. Hence, the researchers investigated ways of strengthening group-work play-based pedagogy to stimulate oral communication.Aim: This research aimed to find out (1) what prior knowledge, skills and classroom practice teachers have and how they demonstrate their competence in implementing group play-based pedagogy; and (2) how a professional development programme assists teachers to implement play-based group pedagogy to develop oral communication skills in young learners.Setting: The study took place in the Owerri Education Zone in the eastern part of Nigeria.Methods: The researchers implemented a participatory action research (PAR) design. Nine participants were purposively selected from a cohort of teachers who taught the 5–9-year age group. Teacher participants responded to the semistructured interviews and observational schedules used as tools for data collection. The researchers used inductive thematic data analysis techniques to make sense of the data. This was performed in three phases: sorting the data and organising them in data sets, after which the analysis process commenced.Results: Findings from the study showed that although the participants had a fair understanding of play-based pedagogy, they did not know how to operationalise their understanding of play-based pedagogy directed at oral communicationConclusion: The participants gained expert knowledge of play pedagogies that require children to increase oral language use in interaction with each other, using vocabulary and phrases introduced by the teacher as scaffolding for their communication.

In Limbo: Piloting a Pandemic-Based Documentary Theater Project

A drama teacher in Connecticut adapted aspects of verbatim theater and facilitated online rehearsals to help students develop a series of monologues about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reclaiming Playful Learning: Exploring the Perceptions of Playful Learning among Early Childhood Preservice Teachers

Despite a deeply-rooted tradition that recognizes the value of play-based learning in early childhood education and care (ECEC), there has been relatively little research into adult playful learning in the higher education sector. This study explored the perceptions of play and playful learning among early childhood preservice teachers while they learned through play with reflection at a public university in the United States. An analysis of their reflective journals revealed that engaging in play activities promoted positive affect and a sense of learning community which, in turn, elicited playfulness and joy. Additionally, the study highlighted the value of hands-on, playful learning, challenging the participants’ preconceived notion of play and internalizing playfulness, thus gaining a stronger personal commitment to enact play pedagogies in their future endeavors. Considering that play-based pedagogy has increasingly been marginalized both in ECEC and higher education, the findings suggest a need to reclaim play and playful learning in teacher education programs.

Adaptive Education System for Drama Education in College Education System Based on Human-Computer

Drama has key skills to develop creativity, speech, trust, communication, teamwork, and language. Regular access to the classroom develops capabilities, intelligence, emotional, critical thinking, and higher-order abstraction skills. A serious problem is the lack of confidence and administration. However, building student societies are now taking the initiative to change teaching methods in colleges and independent organizations. Several physical action human-computer interaction (HCI) competitions designed to improve interest, sentiment, and visual coordination will be presented in this article. The lack of professional teachers within the area is a further problem in teaching a particular course. In this article, the artificial intelligence-based dramatic social organization material (AI-DSOM) framework has been proposed to solve the challenges faced in drama education. Developing children's first language is fundamental to cognitive development because it provides new language opportunities. Data analysis technique can be applied to evaluate, understand, and analyze the problem to provide a cognitive awareness object considered inanimate. Furthermore, grammatical evaluations using deep learning are an effective and efficient technological solution with A.I. technology used to regulate and automate resources. The adaptive difficulty-based system aims to keep players interested in their games. Children with hearing impairments are being used as part of an ongoing project to develop adaptive educational systems based on HCI. These combined chores of method eliminate loss of time and energy in teaching by drama method. Simulation results show that proposed method enhances performance, knowledge, vocabulary, and efficiency compared to existing models.

지난 여정의 지도에서 내일을 보다

The Korean Society for Teaching English Literature (KSTEL), founded in August 1992, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year in 2022. At this point, it will be meaningful to look back and reflect on the past journey of KSTEL and to anticipate and prepare for the future. For this purpose, ‘archiving’ academic achievements of KSTEL so far is a course that must be taken in preparation for the future, and will be a necessary step at this moment of time when the past and the present meet and, at the same time, the present encounters the future. This paper aims to survey the ‘English drama education’ articles published in The Journal of Teaching English Literature of KSTEL from the first issue in 1996 to the 2021 winter issue, and to track changes and trends in pedagogy as well as research methodology and themes during the period. In addition, while commemorating the 30th anniversary of KSTEL, it also intends to serve the purpose of ‘archiving’ the scholarly research and achievements in English drama education papers published in The Journal of Teaching English Literature, as a work of looking back on the past journey of KSTEL and subsequently creating a map for future travel.

‘In drama you can be anything … ’: student perspectives on drama teaching and school performance in Icelandic compulsory education

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to shed light on how students experience drama lessons and school performance when drama is part of the school curriculum. Within a sociocultural framework of understanding, an ethnographic study was conducted on the culture and context of drama implementation in two schools in Iceland. The students talk about drama being their favourite subject, and they believe that they are learning a lot. The students are affected through embodied learning, and the popularity and qualitative dimensions of perceived learning and perceived satisfaction of drama lessons and the teaching are documented at both schools.

A Case Study of Drama Education for Indigenous Children in The Alternative Classroom

A Case Study of Drama Education for Indigenous Children in The Alternative Classroom

Is an Online Creative Drama Lesson Possible? Preschool Prospective Teachers’ Opinions on the Effectiveness of Online Creative Drama Lessons

This study aims to determine the opinions of preschool pre-service teachers on the adequacy of online drama lessons throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. A descriptive survey model of the qualitative research methods was used and online drama lessons were run over a 12-week-period. Participants of the research were 64 pre-school prospective teachers who studied as senior students at a Turkish state university. In order to investigate the online applicability and effectiveness of practice-based drama lessons during this critical COVID-19 pandemic time, lesson planning has been avoided, considering that the elements that should be included in formal drama teaching should also be included in online drama. In the process of data collection, prior to online lesson, objectives and outcomes of online drama practices were designated with senior pre-service teachers in the department of pre-school education at a state university. The three researchers administered online lessons devised in accordance with the determined objectives and outcomes to eighty pre-school students. And they focused on the alignment of the dramatic structure constituents with function and the adequacy of the activities in the preparatory stage for the transition to the dramatization stage. Furthermore, activities in the dramatization stage and evaluation stage were examined in terms of adequacy in meeting the outcomes. Lesson plans were structured with the consideration that elements that are present in the formal drama instruction must be included in online drama practices, as well. Regarding the results obtained in the end of the study, it can be concluded that all the said elements were successfully reflected in the lessons. So, teachers can apply drama processes online in their classes and drama researchers can conduct studies regarding the effects of online drama lesson on different learning stages.

The intellectual whakapapa informing the New Zealand Drama Curriculum

Underpinning drama education in New Zealand is the desire to improve the lives of individuals, communities and societies by catalysing embodied learning in and through the art form of theatre. Learning in drama is intended to foster well-being, social cohesion and active citizenship. Put another way, drama education in New Zealand has always been about more than training actors for the theatre stage. It has been about fostering the development of actors who engage in, on and with the world. This determination has led to the particular pedagogical and curricular response that frames how drama is taught in New Zealand.
 In drama education in New Zealand we have focused for a generation on working practically to explore the nature of drama as a meaning making tool. Students not only study theatre by passively watching, they actively partake in framed fictional worlds and reflect on these embodied experiences. By engaging students in dramatic encounters, we argue drama education bears the potential to engage in critical and creative engagement with pivotal social issues in the real world (Anderson & O’Connor, 2015). The nature of the meaning making has seen a deliberate privileging of non-naturalistic forms of drama presentation and representation. Progression is understood in the curriculum as moving from exploration of narrative through imagined and social play at junior primary to understanding how to use conventions as dramatic structuring devices (Ministry of Education, 2007). This can be understood as a conventions approach (CA) to drama education. In this article we consider the pedagogical and theatre traditions that informed the New Zealand curriculum to contextualise the planned curriculum refresh in 2023.

‘This made me feel honoured’: a participatory action research on using process drama in English language education with ethics of care

ABSTRACT This study investigates English as a foreign language learners' emotions and questions the authenticity of the communication in language classrooms in Turkey. To become more aware of learners' emotions and to make a speaking module more engaging, the teacher-researcher decided to utilise process drama as a participatory action research intervention. The data were collected over a three-week process drama. Drawing on ‘ethics of care' and ‘social and emotional learning', the findings demonstrated that authentic communication empowered learners when the content was relevant to their emotion labour. When learners’ emotions are scrutinised explicitly through drama-in-education, they feel respected and more engaged.

A Sisyphean task? Doing drama online with Year 9 students in a COVID-19 lockdown

Using the allegory of Sisyphus from ancient Greek mythology, we examine the problems that arose while teaching Year 9 drama classes online during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in Aotearoa, New Zealand. At times we have felt like Sisyphus, forced to push a boulder uphill forever. We became adept at using the school’s chosen online platform, in this case, Microsoft Teams. For all teachers, this meant that students were no longer in an actual classroom with their peers but met in a virtual space as a series of little icons on a screen. For drama, this disrupted the very essence of the praxis. Drama is, at its heart, an embodied, interactive “subject”, requiring collaboration, cooperation and participation. Like Sisyphus, we have, at times, felt the task of teaching drama cannot be truly accomplished. In this article, we focus specifically on the Year 9 drama students, the youngest year group at secondary colleges in New Zealand. They are part of the generation defined as Gen Z (Beresford Research, 2022), “digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones” (Parker & Igielnik, 2020., para. 4). We compare the expectations and interactions of a traditional drama classroom with those online. We explore the approaches we took to encourage student participation in this new forum, trying to find dramatic strategies to mitigate some of the problems that arose. We discuss the consequences and outcomes of teaching drama remotely. Unlike Sisyphus, can we learn from successes and failures, or are we as drama teachers doomed forever to roll a large rock uphill?

Connect, converse, collaborate: Encountering belonging and forging resilience through creative practice

This paper is a dialogue between two colleagues who teach drama and performance in Higher Education. Our work here has developed across a series of formal, semi-structured and informal discussions about our experiences of teaching and supporting students within the Drama and Performance department at University of South Wales. Instantly we connected on our commitment to prioritising student needs and our intentions to co-construct reflexive learning spaces. Within the disciplines of drama and performance, we (Allinson and Crews) see practice, collaboration and dialogue as equally important and core to all learning environments and encounters. Because of this we continually question how to hold a space for students through focusing on individual needs and difference, whilst simultaneously attempting to find connection through shared intentions and practices. Acknowledging individual and collective anxiety in learning environments is important because, left unchecked, these individual anxieties risk generating collective frustration, resistance to the creative process and fatigue. Openly discussing and agreeing on how to create spaces and structures for feeling heard and seen fosters belonging and in turn resilience, both in ourselves and our students. Here we propose that working within creative practices and exploring dynamic ways of holding space for ourselves and for students generates repeated experiences of successful encounters that build resourcefulness and resilience. This allows educators and students to collectively and mindfully encounter future situations and engage with them transformatively.

Mask Usage and Drama Teacher Understanding in Australia

This paper presents the research and findings of how some Australian teachers of Drama engage with masks in the classroom. It is part of a larger research project looking at the potential impacts for masks and education in the Australian curriculum. With masks both synonymous with Drama, and multiple resources available for teachers to engage with masks in the classroom, there was no empirical data on if and how teachers in Australia engaged with masks in the classroom. This research asked teachers to self-report on both their skill level in mask usage and to the extent that they engaged with masks in the teaching of Drama in the classroom. Findings note that whilst the majority of teachers did engage with masks; some quite extensively; many staff indicated their own limitations in training and in foundational theory. In addition, many staff used their own time and resources to upskill themselves, placing an importance of the potential for mask usage with children. This has implications for university education courses, as well opportunities for systems and professional development providers in supporting teachers of Drama in their skill base. Keywords: masks, drama, education, teachers

Integrating Indigenous perspectives in the drama class: Pre-service teachers' perceptions and attitudes

Currently, educational bodies are recognising the importance of integrating Australian Indigenous cultures in education to promote intercultural understanding and improve outcomes for Indigenous students. In drama, learning about Indigenous perspectives can be integrated through sharing cultural stories, with this integration mandated by the Australian curriculum. However, teachers are struggling to achieve this directive due to a lack of knowledge in Indigenous content and concerns surrounding permission and cultural appropriation. This qualitative study used a focus group interview to determine non-Indigenous pre-service drama teachers' perceptions about integrating Indigenous perspectives in their praxis. Inductive analysis of the data revealed participants strongly believed in the importance of embedding Indigenous perspectives yet felt apprehensive due to a range of challenges, including a lack of adequate training. These challenges and the participants' recommendations provide compelling evidence for initial teacher education to specifically embed learning experiences in Indigenous theatre and to provide opportunities for pre-service drama teachers to collaborate with Indigenous communities. The significance of this research points to the importance for pre-service drama teachers to be given tools to ensure that their praxis breaks the generational cycle of insufficient teaching of Indigenous perspectives in Australian schools, a cycle that has disadvantaged Indigenous children since colonisation.

Applied Theatre and Drama in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Scoping Review

Background: Thematic arts have been integrated throughout various undergraduate medical education programs to improve students’ clinical skills, knowledge, and behaviours to be clinically competent physicians. Applied theatre and drama use theatrical performances and exercises respectively to guide education. Several medical schools across Canada and the United States have incorporated applied theatre and drama within their curriculums, but there is currently no compilation of these initiatives. Methods: Using Arksey and O’Malley’s methodological framework for scoping reviews, the two authors searched journal databases for articles pertaining to theatre/drama activities being used in undergraduate medical education in Canada and the United States; search terms revolved around applied theatre and undergraduate medical education. Twenty articles were read in full, 14 were included in this review. The articles were subjected to content analysis to understand how these studies connected with the CanMEDS framework to understand the impacts and merits of applied theatre and drama in undergraduate medical education. Results: Content analyses generated three parent-categories of how theatre and drama can help medical students improve their communication skills, creative medical learning, and aid their professional development. These three categories touched upon all seven aspects of the CanMEDS framework, indicating the values of drama being included in medical education. Conclusion: This scoping review illustrates the intersections of thematic arts in undergraduate medical education by highlighting how applied theatre or drama activities connect to the entire CanMEDS framework. This review provides insights to current theatre and drama initiatives to aid medical faculty with their undergraduate medical curricula developments.

Convening the International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) Conference: Past, present and futures

Since its inaugural conference in 1995, the International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) Conference has become one of the prominent research meetings in the field of drama education and applied theatre. Held triennially, the IDIERI Conference has brought together leading academics and practitioners to share practices and deepen their critical engagement with research. Recently, though, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health and international travel, as well as growing concerns around lowering carbon emissions, has thrown the purpose of academic conferences into existential uncertainty. In July 2022, the University of Warwick is set to host the tenth IDIERI Conference as a ‘hybrid’ live in-person and virtual conference with accompanying ‘local’ modes of workshop facilitation. This article offers a timely retrospective informed by reflections from past convenors and related literature. We analyse IDIERI’s role in the research community, focusing on its scope, its shifting boundaries and intersections, its internationalism and diversity, as well as its significance in the future sustainability of our evolving discipline.

Creative Drama and Forum Theatre in initial teacher education: Fostering students’ empathy and awareness of professional conflicts

Two studies examined the impact of a programme that used Creative Drama and Forum Theatre on the social, emotional, and ethical skills of student teachers. The first study qualitatively analysed 49 teaching conflict situations devised by 280 students. The second analysed the programme's effect on 626 students’ empathy and perception of their teaching-learning processes. The types of conflicts, contexts, and ethical dilemmas involved were categorised. Pedagogical tools and their effect on self-knowledge, perspective-taking, and socio-moral sensitivity and reflection were favourably assessed. The emotional understanding component of empathy significantly improved. The results support a more comprehensive training of future teachers.

Reimagining Conflict Management Pedagogy through Fantastical Role-Play Simulations

Abstract Research demonstrates that simulations encourage students to apply their understanding of theories and content, navigate problem-solving processes with peers, support student motivation for learning, and reflect afterward to enrich their comprehension of course materials. Peacebuilding and international relations scholars have implemented simulations to improve student learning and understanding about complex dilemmas, such as collective action, structural inequality, post-conflict reconstruction, climate change, disaster management, and terrorism. However, studies of real-life-based simulations also indicate that they may entrench, rather than subvert, students’ extant bias, perpetuate cultural misrepresentation, and pose logistical challenges for instructors and students. We thus add to scholarly debates about the utility of role-play simulations in internationalized pedagogy settings by asking and answering: Do adult learners perceive fantastical role-play simulations as effective teaching and learning tools for cross-cultural negotiation? We bridge disparate literature on (1) simulations as active learning tools, (2) real-life simulation approaches for teaching cross-cultural studies, and (3) creative play pedagogy to investigate the utility of fantastical simulation as a pedagogical approach for teaching cross-cultural negotiation theories. While we examined the perceived effectiveness of fantastical simulations for adult learners in a graduate-level course, more research is needed to understand their utility in other classrooms and disciplines.