John O'Toole

Acting against conflict and bullying. The Brisbane DRACON project 1996–2004—emergent findings and outcomes

In 1996, the authors were invited to join an international research project, DRACON (=DRAma + CONflict), into the use of drama for assisting conflict management in schools, with a particular initial brief to investigate the cultural components. The Brisbane DRACON project has been based at Griffith University in Brisbane, and has incorporated sites throughout New South Wales and Queensland. The aim of the Brisbane project has been to use drama to assist young people in schools towards a cognitive understanding of the nature, causes and dynamics of conflict and bullying, in order to give them the tools to take control of their own conflicts and conflict agendas, personally and in the context of the school community, rather than relying on externally imposed and hierarchical conflict management programs. The project has been embedded throughout within the normal school curriculum, and the eventual goal is to change the ethos of schools by creating new networks of understanding and support. The Brisbane project has so far entailed nine annual cycles of action research centred on secondary school students in Queensland and New South Wales (NSW), and also incorporating primary school students. Fifteen high schools have taken part, with between one and five classes of students involved in each school, and from Cycle 4 onwards, a total of 16 primary schools connected with those high schools have also been included, each with between one and five classes involved. From Cycle 2 onwards, the aim has been pursued using a combination of two equal and integrated strategies: drama and whole-class peer teaching. Cycles 4–6 focussed particularly on cultural aspects of conflict, and Cycles 7–9 on bullying. This paper sets out to tell the story and emerging outcomes of the research.

Ex‐citing Writing: re‐evaluating some practices in writing about drama and its research

Abstract This article is a plea for a more varied, direct, confident, artistically structured and aesthetically pleasing approach to writing about drama research, formal and informal. It is my (no, not ‘the authors’), perception that a great deal of writing in this field is constrained inappropriately and sometimes ruthlessly by scholastic conventions which are not appropriate for writings beyond the genre ‘university thesis’. I briefly canvass the reasons for this. Further, I contend that subjugation to those constraints frequently provides misleading subtexts or indicates subtextual irrelevancies, such as a residual insecurity in our craft as researchers and communicators, or a thinly concealed egotism. A list of bad habits, and practices that can easily slip into excess, is provided, with explanations and examples. There are a few riddles and paradoxes in the text for the sharp reader, and some slightly inflated rhetoric‐it is a plea, after all.

Young audiences, theatre and the cultural conversation

The focus of this chapter is on how teachers can and do play a critical role in selecting, scaffolding and sustaining theatre attendance for young people. Both the potential for developing less experienced young people’s understanding of theatre form and the extension of the responses of more experienced young theatre goers are explored in this chapter.

Enhanced Forum Theatre : Where Boal's Theatre of the Oppresssed meets Process Drama in the Classroom

Abstract This paper examines an innovative adaptation of Augusto Boals Theatre of the Oppressed that was developed over nine years of action research into the use of drama to address conflict and bullying management in a large number of schools in two different states of Australia. The paper documents the development of Enhanced Forum Theatre and analyses its functioning and its impact in the research projects.

Beauty and education

Incorporating examples across the curriculum, Winston argues that a due consideration of beauty in education can address some of the more fundamental problems that bedevil policy and practice. With its clear style and wealth of practical examples, this book will be of great interest to academics and teachers.

Writing Everyday Theatre: applied theatre, or just TIE rides again?

The centre of this article is a critical description of the development and production of Everyday Theatres performed pretext, called replay@timeout, including a detailed account of the devising process and the programmes content. The programme is located within the history and traditions both of theatre in education (TIE) and process drama, as well as contemporary practice in applied theatre. The author demonstrates that the principles and practice underlying all the decisions, aesthetic, pedagogical and logistic, consciously sprang from, and occasionally differed from, these interwoven and complementary traditions, in a complex blend. The opportunities given to the team, and some of the strengths of the programme, are identified, along with some of its constraints, weaknesses and casualties. Together with the companys director, the author identified the programmes essential aesthetic and pedagogical principles, and these then had to be realised through negotiation with the company since the programme was group-devised. How the content and activities for the interactive audiences emerged, and how they relate to those principles and the sponsors briefs forms the main story of this article, embedded in the wider context of applied theatre and TIE.

Drama for Development and Expression

This chapter explores our second Paradigm of Purpose, the expressive/developmental: the many-faceted claims and the often-implicit assumptions that drama can be used as an instrument of personal and social development, and the expression of ‘self’ or ‘selves’. This entails going back to early childhood. The first chapter of this book started with a brief exploration of dramatic play. The idea that dramatic play is important to the development of particularly the young child is accepted virtually without argument by psychologists, educationalists and of course drama educators. Maisie Cobby was a 1950s British drama adviser and passionate advocate of the idea that teaching drama is making plays – namely formal theatre (a contested notion that we shall hear much more of). However, she is clear about what is important at the start: