This essay examines learners' understanding of how they use role. It draws upon a semi-structured interview with five Year 7 students, which took place after their first lesson exploring "Darkwood Manor," a gothic sequence of drama. Considering the elements which shape how they adopt roles in the classroom, I interrogate the students'…

Oscar Wilde was described by W. B. Yeats as "a man of action, a born dramatist." Although people did not recognize him as a serious playwright until the 1890s, Wilde had managed to find other outlets for his theatrical passion, for example in writing fiction. In this paper, it is argued that Wilde incorporates metadrama into his 1888…

Play is essential to the healthy growth and development of children. As children play, they explore new roles, try out new ideas, and bond with each other. Play increases language, cognitive, and social skills. How can the power of play be harnessed and shaped for educational purposes? How can teachers infuse play into the classroom to improve…

The efficacy of tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) as an educational and therapeutic asset in schools has been extensively studied, with many middle and high schools employing these games as extracurricular activities because of their positive impact around identity formation, empathy, and social skills. More recent iterations of tabletop RPGs are…

Role-play was a popular educational strategy within the American civil rights movement. Many civil rights activists performed the movement in private before performing it again in public. Compared to the scholarship on the role of music in the civil rights movement, the importance of drama has been understudied. The history of role-play as an…

One of the main questions regarding Dutch primary education in our secularised and religiously diverse society--both with regards to public and religiously-affiliated schools--is how to get students acquainted with the symbolic language of religious and worldview-affiliated life narratives. Teaching literacy in symbolic language has become less…

This article looks at the theme of "performing labour" in Look Left Look Right's "Above and Beyond" (2013). In this performance, individual audience members participate as a generic staff member in a fully functioning five star hotel in London. I consider three modes of performing labour in "Above and Beyond":…

This paper is a deliberate effort aiming at sensitising teachers, students, parents and other stakeholders on the basic objectives of civic education in its introduction into senior secondary school curriculum and the need to obtain full potentials for constructivist theory in teaching and learning of the relatively new subject. The introduction…

Constructivist teaching methods such as using drama have been promoted as productive ways of learning, especially in science. Specifically, role plays, using given roles or simulated and improvised enactments, are claimed to improve learning of concepts, understanding the nature of science and appreciation of science's relationship with…

Multimodal learning refers to teaching strategies that involve multiple sensory systems simultaneously. Teachers can create materials for students with different learning styles (auditory, visual, kinesthetic reading, and writing). Multimodal learning keeps students engaged, encourages them to apply what they learn in real-life situations,…

I have spent much of the last two years working in a school in Ramallah, Palestine, supporting new teachers of English. I worked in the classroom, in partnership, sharing the planning and teaching of lessons. This essay is about exploring what happens to texts in a specific classroom context, about how a particularly English text, "Romeo and…

This study has attempted to revisit gender issues presented in the New Literatures of Africa in English to investigate whether there is, indeed, an alternative vision of these issues. In spite of the great contributions of female writers in this literature, it has continued to be a male-dominated terrain. It is from this perspective that we…

Drama is often used as a tool to investigate experience and to assist people to rehearse for change. Dramatic portrayals, however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for a positivist approach to research through drama to contribute to a pathologising of the subject and to limit the possibility of…

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnival theory, this article focuses on specific outcomes of a research project the author undertook in Hong Kong, where drama pedagogy has been recently introduced into the official curriculum. It investigates the ways in which laughter, noise, jokes, frolic and popular literacies commonly appear in classrooms where…

This study began with the supposition that teaching English drama through dramatic performance could enhance English literature students' knowledge of drama at university level. The research was conducted over a whole academic semester with 60 intermediate students enrolled in English drama II courses. They were divided into two groups of…