This paper follows the author's trajectory as he collaboratively experimented with ethnodrama (theatre scripts generated from interviews, media artifacts, and written media) and devised theatre performance (theatre collaboratively created with a group), culminating in the analysis of a performance with high school students combining elements of…

Most students meet Shakespeare in middle or high school, on a page in a book in an English classroom. This first encounter is a disservice to the students themselves and to Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays are works of both literature and theatre, and should be taught as such. A performance-based teaching approach not only provides high school…

The goal was to assess the effects of a Theatrical Improvisation programme on students' motor creativity. 163 Secondary Education students participated: the experimental group, who experienced a Theatrical Improvisation unit, and the comparison group, who experienced a Drama in Education unit (based on the current Spanish educational law). A…

Helping second language (L2) learners to enhance their oral skills is vitally important, and pedagogical approaches are often seen as challenging when offering learners chances to successfully develop them. This article shares the experiences of a class of final-year high-school Italian learners (n =10) who learned English using theatre plays both…

All disciplines have particular ways of knowing, common practices, and means of using language that mediate and potentially support engagement with the discipline. For multilingual learners, language demands of a discipline can be a closed door or a facilitated entryway. Drama and theater arts, the focus of our article, are often marginalized in…

In this article, we take a strength-based approach to understand how applied theatre as a vehicle provides opportunities for embodied voices to have a positive influence on the well-being, and attitudes to health, of young people who have been "pushed" to the margins. We begin by explaining the concepts of well-being, embodiment and…

This article explores the way gender resonates in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" through an active study of live performance. Combining pedagogy with performance as an interpretive methodology, this research focuses upon using my unique classroom situation, teaching ultra-Orthodox Jewish adolescent females, as a platform for analysis.…

This article describes responses of a group of adolescent student actors and actor alumni involved in anti-bullying skits arising from a critical case study of the Tolerance Troupe from a small rural and suburban borough in Pennsylvania. Seventeen active members and 19 actor alumni participated in semi-structured interviews focusing on what the…

This arts-based, qualitative teacher-researcher study considers how a group of mostly white high school students worked with their white facilitators to consider whiteness using Youth Participatory Action Research in conjunction with playbuilding and drama pedagogy. First, the author locates his reflexive stance. Then, relying on critical race…

No matter how disturbing, it is common to hear "that's so gay" or "you're such a fag" echoing through the halls of a high school, but when the high school is an international school in Uganda, those words have a newfound potency. As an American teacher working abroad, the author often struggled over her responsibility for the…

Forum Theatre (FT), a participatory improvised theatre form, raises consciousness, enables debate and critical reflection, and encourages a democratic form of knowledge production that engages the audience in their own learning and unlearning. I used FT as a platform to understand how 15- to 18-year-old learners, in a co-educational school in the…

Both theatre artists and educators believe the theatre has many advantages as a vehicle for the promotion of social and political issues. This study examines how the Israeli theatre represents the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and promotes peace and tolerance among young people. The study, conducted between the years 2005 and 2007, included 26…

When one says "writing about teaching artist practice," what exactly does that mean? In the first two sections (EJ1039315 and EJ1039319), the authors considered different ways to frame a story by either zooming in closely to a specific moment or zooming out to provide more context in an effort to address complex issues. The stories in…

Every year the author and his colleagues take their grade 12 English students to see four plays at one of Canada's major theaters. Chatting about the series on the last day of class, his students asked him if he had seen "the blue glow from the back row." Laughing at his bewilderment, they told him that during the performances so many…

In the foreword to "The Politics of Genocide", political theorist Noam Chomsky writes that denial of the American Indian holocaust is a potent force in the United States. He argues that "the most unambiguous cases of genocide" are often "acknowledged by the perpetrators, and passed over as insignificant or even denied in retrospect by the…