Applied Theatre Research - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2015

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

This study attempts to understand the challenges faced by teachers when using drama-based pedagogy in teaching by looking at three secondary schools in Hong Kong. It also examines the consistency between the reform and its implementation by investigating the experience of the three schools. The study is based on the Education for Capability approach pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The research adopted a qualitative approach, with in-depth case studies conducted from 2006 to 2010 in three Hong Kong government-subsidized English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) secondary schools that use drama pedagogies in their daily teaching. Data were collected through document review, observation and interviews with principals, teachers and students. The experiences of these three secondary schools suggest that the promotion of student-focused education by the government has injected energy to the reform and helped to nurture the development of educational drama in some Hong Kong secondary schools. However, internal and external conversion factors inhibited its adoption, making teachers question the practicality and feasibility of a wider use of drama pedagogy in their schools, however much they value – and have reason to value – it.

This article sheds light on changes in the nature and quality of secondary school theatre teachers’ embodied practices. Drawing from ten years of ethnographic research with over 200 secondary school theatre teachers, the article affords the reader an opportunity to eavesdrop on conversations and learn about holistic theatre education practices that place students at the centre of drama/theatre learning and teaching while considering the impact of diversity in language, ethnicity and culture, ability/disability, socio-economic status, spirituality, race and religion on these practices. Teachers’ authentic work in their classrooms and production spaces is rarely documented. Capturing teachers’ stories, insights, philosophies, practices and inspiration in their own voices and through observations in their classrooms and production spaces proved central to authentically identifying and representing teachers’ best practices. The teacher narratives and researcher notes included here reveal ways in which theatre education in the United States is transforming learning processes for the twenty-first century.

The Norad Programme in Arts and Cultural Education was opened up for community arts development at Marangu Teachers College in Tanzania from 2006–11. The project, involving participating students and out-of-school youth, has helped these groups to articulate common positions on issues that affect them. Among these are gender-specific problems regarding women’s status in the community. The article examines the possibilities of stimulating changes in the society by using applied theatre in a community arts context. This article describes the process of developing a theatre performance where drama was used to explore female life conditions in post-colonial Tanzanian society, seeking to find workable solutions that can help improve women’s status in the community today.

The transformative role of drama, theatre and artistic education on the learning outcomes of children has been well established over time. However, while this subject and method of teaching and learning are being advocated and progressively embraced in many regions of the globe, the educational authorities in south-eastern Nigeria appear reluctant to adopt it. Hence the demand for the inclusion of drama as a separate subject in the foundational and basic school curricula remains a contentious issue. In the context of a new curriculum that now includes Cultural and Creative Arts as a subject in the primary and junior secondary schools, this study examines the existing policies on and the current practice of drama and theatre for learning in the sample area. It interrogates the key issues involved and points to a way forward for sustainable and transformative child education in south-eastern Nigeria.

This article is part of a larger study that consists of testing the relevance of drama for 202 Romanian teenagers. The study explores differences in the ways high school students would like to be perceived in the future, their opinion about the importance of drama, and the concept of social acting as an extension of theatricality. The research takes into account three samples: students who practise drama in a dedicated art high school; students from a regular high school with optional drama classes; and students who never engage in drama activities. The study considers theatricality as a concept that belongs at the same time to theatre (at a semantic level) and to everyday life, since human behaviour in different social settings resembles the stage and its instruments (Goffman 1959). The results show a higher level of daily awareness of theatricality for Romanian students who practise drama either in a dedicated acting class or in a regular high school with optional drama classes. Students who do not have any connection with drama activities report that those who behave differently according to their situation are hypocritical, and these students consider acting (as interpreting a role) to be an exclusive characteristic of theatre, not real life. Another key finding in the study was that the interest in engaging in future cultural activities was higher among the students from the regular high school than among those who study at the art high school, who labelled stardom and financial aspects as more important than engaging in arts-related activities for their cultural enrichment. The article offers possible explanations for the diverse responses provided by students.