John O’Toole

Emma’s Dilemma

This month, I am supervising a student, ‘Emma’, now in her fourth year of a preservice Early Childhood degree, who is very keen on drama. I work in a faculty with a considerable reputation for drama education (from long before I arrived), where the first specialist drama teachers in Australia were trained forty years ago, even before there was a formal curriculum for them to teach! Drama is core curriculum from early childhood to tertiary entrance, part of the key learning area of The Arts in schools in all States, and in our forthcoming National Curriculum. Most States have established specialist drama teacher training courses, at least for secondary education. The Australian Curriculum Authority senior project officer for arts can state confidently, that “many of us stand strong and successfully in schools... because... we have had quality specialist teachers to teach us [and we] enjoy the status that comes with good curriculum and being valued” (Wise, 2008). Like our colleagues worldwide, we draw from the mature and still-growing bank of both scholarship and practical textbooks, journals and internet resources available to everybody, both from overseas, and from our considerable pool of home-grown expertise. There’s no shortage of top-level resources now available to drama teachers via the touch of a button or the Amazons shopping basket.

Drama for Learning in Professional Development Contexts: A Global Perspective

This chapter details the research carried out using drama strategies in four different cultural and professional contexts. The first was a research study which focused on trainee teachers in the U.K., the second a study using applied drama in Nursing Education in Germany, Jordan and Sweden, whilst the report of the third study explains how drama strategies drawn from DRACON work have been utilized in teacher development work in Kazakhstan, with the final research study focused on patients with dementia and their caregivers. The chapter explains that the research explored four projects in different contexts with a focus on how transformative learning is possible through applied drama practices. The chapter concludes that Drama offers the opportunity to transcend cultural and language differences to uncover and question, to foster collaboration and communication and to seek insight and understanding. Pre-service teachers, nurses, caregivers and their patients and experienced teachers all undertook a journey in transformative learning.

Moving On from the Trauma of Childhood Abuse

This chapter explores the shift in focus of the research from schools, to the use drama and theatre performance in addressing post-traumatic stress and psychological dysfunction in the lives of adults. The subjects of the 3 year action research Moving On project were older adults who had been abused as children in orphanages and foster homes. The project is described in detail, explaining how it was conducted in partnership with professional counsellors, focusing on the extensive use of improvised drama to explore conflict and trauma issues in the past and present lives of the participants, culminating a public theatre performance created and performed by the participants. The chapter also examines the serious challenges encountered in avoiding re-traumatisation of the participants. Finally, the success of the project in enabling the participants to develop a range of effective behaviours and move on in their lives from the trauma of their childhood experiences is explored.

The DRACON Project in Brisbane

This chapter describes the first of a series of research projects in Australia which investigated the use of techniques to empower school students to manage the conflicts they encountered in their daily lives. The research team developed a set of clear concepts intended to make conflict understandable, then experimented with various drama techniques to enable students to explore these concepts. The chapter explains the addition of class-based peer teaching where older students who had learned effective conflict management then taught younger students these techniques and concepts. The effectiveness of these evolving techniques is described, including the fact that the students actually used their new knowledge in real life contexts. Finally, a project in year 3 of the research investigating the use of theatre performance is explored. A class of senior students prepared an interactive show for parents and other students, incorporating some of the drama techniques they had been learning.

Negative Leaders in School: Extending Ideas from the DRACON Project

This chapter builds on findings from initial DRACON research in schools through a project focusing on negative leaders, and marks an extension of DRACON related work into the United Kingdom. Clear evidence of the power of peer teaching as a means of exploring conflict had been established in earlier research, and in the case study described here two adolescent girls who had exhibited challenging behaviour in their secondary school became the drama teachers for a group of primary students. The outcome of the project highlighted significant transformative possibilities and opportunities for wider personal and interpersonal learning on a number of levels for negative leaders. The chapter demonstrates how two young women were able to develop empathy, understanding and self-esteem through peer teaching drama. It maps some of the personal challenges these young women faced as teachers, and how their involvement in the project ultimately led to re-engagement in school and more positive relationships in that context.

Conflict and Bullying Management for Adolescent Refugees

This chapter analyses another application of the Acting against Bullying program, this time in the context of its impact on newly-arrived adolescent refugees being re-settled in Australia. The chapter reveals how the use of formal teaching about bullying, combined with drama, Forum Theatre and peer teaching, was just as effective in empowering these participants as the adolescents in all the earlier projects. The chapter presents the major outcomes of the research, including the demonstrated ability of almost all the participants to not only identify the significant conceptual information they had learned about the nature of bullying, but also to apply this understanding in the use of key techniques to manage bullying effectively. The major constraints that were encountered in developing the conflict and bullying management skills of newly- arrived refugees from Africa and Asia are reviewed, and the innovations and variations that were implemented as part of meeting this challenge are described.

In the Beginning: The DRACON Project

The subject of this chapter is the establishment of DRACON (DRAma and CONflict resolution), the international collaboration that initiated and conducted the first phase of the research. The chapter explains how the project was the genesis of the conceptual framework and many of the techniques that led to the development of the effective, evidence -based programs explored in this book. The evolution of the DRACON project in Sweden, Malaysia and Australia is outlined, analysing the range of steps taken to find effective means of dealing with conflict in schools in the three countries. The chapter also explores how the researchers worked to develop a co-operative process for sharing ideas and strategies. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that school students who were the subjects of the research gained new knowledge about conflict handling by participating in the project, and that adult participants also acquired significant understanding about conflict handling through their involvement in DRACON.

From DRACON to Cooling Conflict

The next 3 years of Australian research (1999–2002) are described in detail in this chapter, focusing on researching conflict management across whole school populations. This phase of the research, named Cooling Conflict, implemented, evaluated and refined the combination of drama and peer teaching techniques developed in the DRACON research, producing increasingly positive results as the techniques were adapted and enhanced to give students and schools more appropriate tools for conflict management. The chapter describes two separate Cooling Conflict projects, the first in a single New South Wales country school, the second in a range of schools in Sydney, both primary and secondary. The chapter notes that a major outcome of these projects was the discovery that they could be life-changing for some of the students involved, and for the ethos of conflict in selected schools. There was also overwhelming evidence that students were learning something they believed was useful about conflict.

Conflict Competency in Nursing Education: An International Collaborative Project

The chapter opens by identifying how health care professionals such as registered nurses, nurse managers, nurse educators and preceptors face conflicts on a daily basis in the globalized world. To be able to manage conflict is a core skill required for functioning effectively as a professional. The aim of the research described in this chapter was therefore to examine the impact of drama in enhancing conflict management for practitioners in the field of Health Care in Jordan, as part of a preceptor training program in Clinical Nursing Education conducted in collaboration with Sweden. The case study data consisted of participants’ diaries for reflection and focus group interviews, and revealed that participating in the program had an effect on the participants’ personal and professional growth, the students’ learning and the quality of health care. The findings from the interviews indicate that the program enhanced the development of preceptors’ competency, including core conflict competency.

Acting Against Relational Aggression and Cyberbullying

In this chapter the focus of the research is on gender for the first time in a participatory case study of female students which investigated the hidden forms of bullying that can be can be widespread amongst adolescent girls. The chapter details how covert social and psychological bullying were revealed as endemic amongst the older adolescent girls in the subject school. The chapter evaluates the success of the four key strategies in producing transformational changes in behaviour in this specific group, with very little reported or observed bullying of any kind amongst the subjects of the research following the project. The chapter also outlines the longitudinal evidence of the impact of the research, with teachers and students describing a change in the culture of the school, so that after the project girls being bullied felt empowered to act, and in particular, to seek help from teachers and students who had been involved in the research.