As youth media creation programmes proliferate, educators and practitioners are learning how to develop stories that interrupt hegemony and point to new ways of being. This research, carried out in an ethnically diverse middle school, highlights the way digital storytelling as an applied theatre praxis brought complexity to student work. The role…

A team of literacy, science, and theatre educators have been working to engage children in an urban public school system in the United States through embodied performances, where students embody and dramatise science ideas. This study focuses on one fourth-grade classroom when instruction was done remotely due to Covid-19. Children in the class…

Theater-based approaches have been implemented globally as a health education and behavior change strategy for decades. Studies have shown that live theater performances can engage an audience and influence the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of audience members. Moreover, literature has shown that adolescents find theater-based interventions…

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and…

What happens when one controversial text meets another in performance? How do diverse audiences from rural and metropolitan areas respond to powerful yet provocative material? The Kennesaw State University Department of Theatre and Performance Studies sought to answer these questions with "Splittin' the Raft," a dramatic adaptation of…

The authors of this article investigate how a performance module was integrated into a graduate course on children's literature to provide teachers with a space to re-enact and challenge the institutional tensions that were impacting their work as multicultural educators. Based on a combined ethnographic and systemic functional linguistics…

The author needed a way to engage her students in the reading process and found one extremely successful strategy: using Readers' Theater. Readers' Theater "dramatizes" literature through a classroom performance and provides visual and oral stimulus to students who are not used to using imagination to appreciate literary texts. It involves a…

This article examines relationships among process, product, and playmaking in a southeastern playwriting and performance program for teen girls, Playmaking for Girls (PFG). The authors have chosen to focus on tensions between process and product. Such tensions are present in the challenges teachers experience when privileging student-centered…

Students in an eighth-grade, urban, low-achieving reading class were introduced to critical literacy through engagement in Image Theatre. Developed by liberatory dramatist Augusto Boal, Image Theatre gives participants the opportunity to examine texts in the triple role of interpreter, artist, and sculptor (i.e., image creator). The researchers…

There are several ways in which aesthetic discourses might be positioned in the field of drama education. While some might locate "aesthetics" in the cognitive or interpretive realm of learning, and others the affective or philosophical realm. In this article, the author has chosen to speak of the discourses of aesthetics as they relate…

It is well known that developing a love of language helps children become successful readers and writers, and one way to teach children to love words is to introduce them to poetry. This article describes the Sallye B. Mathis Elementary School, a challenged urban school in Jacksonville, Florida, is full of children who love words because they love…

The case study of community service learning (CSL) by an interdisciplinary team at a middle school in Springfield (Massachusetts) provides information about what happens when teachers integrate community services into the curriculum as an instructional strategy. Community theater management and environmental lobbying projects illustrate issues in…