In this paper, I explore German playwright Bertolt Brecht's conception of the art of acting, and his views on the new actor's conduct towards their craft, as a pedagogical model for Brechts' broader view on how we should live our lives. Drawing on his key writings -- most importantly, his famous street scene essay -- I will show that Brecht's…

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…

Drawing from six-months of action research with spectacle theatre-makers in Chicago, this study explores multimodal, expeditionary practice of teaching artists who apprenticed girls through Redmoon Theatre's Dramagirls program. Concepts of new literacy design and aesthetic experience illustrate teaching in socio-semiotic and material worldcraft,…

This paper explores the use of performance in a college-level course that teaches education majors how to use drama, dance, and music in their instruction. Students engage in drama activities such as improvisation and playbuilding in an effort to experience firsthand the benefits of such practices for their future classrooms. The essay shares some…

In this article, I outline and theorize about a series of three lessons on playwriting I conducted in a secondary English Literature classroom in Singapore using drama improvisation strategies that I name drama-based playwriting, or DBP. I advance the argument that this genre of creative writing is best taught through the medium of drama so as to…

The paper suggests that phenomenology, the anthropology of the senses and of embodiment, performance theory and multi-modal pedagogies offer a rich set of theoretical ideas with which to consider children's expressive repertoires as overlooked forms of social participation and critique. Four case studies in relation to children's photography,…

I propose a conceptualisation of drama in school education as improvisation within a framework that has a number of fixed but changing structures. I examine how the "drama in schooling" practice of one country, New Zealand, might be seen as a group improvisation in which, through dramatic negotiation, participants evolve their goals,…

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…

The aim of the study was to examine how drama fosters children's everyday creativity, its relationship with creative pedagogy, and what teachers can provide for children's development in creativity in an Asian context. A series of drama lessons were designed and taught to two six-grade (11-12 years old) classes by involving pedagogical strategies…

Applied theatre often draws upon critical pedagogy and constructivist methodology as a way to bring participants into direct engagement with their own learning experiences. As learners, adults bring a wealth of perspectives that further affect how they interact with an applied theatre experience. "Drama for Schools" (DFS) is a…

It is argued that a primary goal of a theatrical production is the making of meaning by the audience through the vehicle of multiple media (i.e. staging, design, sound and lighting effects and so on). Effective rehearsal of these elements affords the greatest opportunity for a coherent interpretation of the text. Although individual rehearsals…