Kelly Freebody

The Dol Project: The Contributions of Process Drama to Improved Results in English Oral Communication

This paper reports on the Drama and Oral Language (DOL) research project, Singapore, 2004, which investigated the impact of process drama on the oral communication results of Normal Technical students in four schools.

Exploring teacher–student interactions and moral reasoning practices in drama classrooms

The research reported here brings together three settings of conceptual and methodological inquiry: the sociological setting of socio-economic theory; the curricular/pedagogic setting of educational drama; and the analytic setting of ethnomethodolgically informed analyses of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Students from two schools, in contrasting socio-economic areas, participated in drama lessons concerned with their future. The study found that process drama allowed them to overcome the rhetoric and abstract nature of the theorising of controversial issues by allowing them to become actively involved in testing theories, developing ideas, and finding solutions to controversial problems through their work in the dramatic context. Within this paper three aspects of the study are drawn out for particular attention: the settings for such an inquiry, the varying kinds of talk found in drama lessons, and the key contrasts and similarities between the two research sites. These three aspects highlight the particular ways in which talk in drama classrooms may have powerful implications for the ways in which moral reasoning is built and shared by students.

Discourse in drama: Talk, role, and learning in drama education

Abstract In the 1970s and 1980s John Carroll published three papers concerned with analysing talk in drama classrooms. It was Carrolls belief that “Drama, by its very nature as a creative force, demands a different sort of discourse from both teacher and pupils in the classroom” (Carroll, 1988). According to Carroll, the act of role-taking in the classroom is central to this. Carroll used socio-linguistic analysis to discuss the particular way in which role-taking affects classroom dynamics and the effect drama has on student learning. Since this early work from Carroll, the detailed analysis of talk in drama has received little attention. In this paper I aim to draw on both this early work by Carroll, and my own recent work using conversation analysis (Freebody, 2009, 2010) to continue the discussion around the significance of drama, role and talk in education.

Theories of Change: Cultural Value and Applied Theatre

This chapter provides a context and history to the relationships between applied theatre practice, scholarship, evaluation and theories of change. To this end, we aim to attend to the long intellectual legacy of the concept that the arts have an impact socially on communities and audiences. Despite the breadth and growth of applied theatre practice in the last two decades, Kershaw notes that “applied theatre, community performance and related forms apparently have attracted few historians” (Kershaw, B., Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016, p. 16). This chapter will draw on work that established historical considerations of the role of applied theatre, and the arts more generally in society, its relationship to theories of change, social policy, and the sovereignty of doing good. After a general discussion, this chapter explores the politics and history of change in relation to one area of practice – prison theatre –which has grown up in an era of managerialism and measurement. The chapter tracks the scope and diversity of prison theatre discourse and explores the need for greater precision in articulating theories of change.

What Is Applied Theatre Good for? Exploring the Notions of Success, Intent and Impact

This chapter aims to be both critical and provocative. It set the scene for the a volume concerned with how applied theatre practitioners, researchers and advocates understand change. The main purpose of the chapter is to give a sense of where applied theatre is located with regard to its definitions, contexts and relationship to social change. A key goal of this book, introduced in this chapter, is to provide a critical perspective on the field of applied theatre; to raise concerns, problematize representations, question conceptualisations of theory and practice, and to try to begin a detailed discussion about the effect of different perspectives and practices. This chapter also outlines the purpose, methodological approach and informing principles of the research from which the first half of this book has emerged and previews the diverse perspectives presented in chapters throughout the book.

Values, Intentions, Success and Impact in Applied Theatre Documents

The chapter aims to present a clear and robust, but relatively common-sense, ‘everyday’ view of the extent to which the themes of value, intent, success and impact were evident, and the ways they were used, in 139 documents about applied theatre. Our aim in this chapter is to develop a sense of how the documents assembled and recruited change as an understandable, usable or knowable concept related applied theatre. To achieve this, we explore how the documents collected for this project draw on, and represent a variety of themes that seem to be informed by, or to inform the idea of change in applied theatre.

Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre for Social Change: Defamilarising Key Words in the Field

A key aim of the research project reported on in this volume was to broadly explore texts related to applied theatre and map the intentions, values, understanding of success and references to change. In exploring the recruitment of these themes in 139 documents related to applied theatre, there emerged a repetition of key discourses – social justice, community, education, and participation. The repetition suggests orthodoxy in certain ways of thinking about applied theatre. It is clear that contemporary rationales for applied theatre have developed and depend upon these kinds of ideals. In this chapter we take stock of these repetitions in order to ask critical questions and interrogate the logics at play in the field. Essentially, we are interested in how and why dominant ideas in applied theatre make sense. The discussion presented here attempts to understand the ways representations of applied theatre work in public documents (evaluations, academic papers, websites and so on) produce ‘truths’ and therefore, in turn, exercise power (Ball, What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes, The Australian Journal of Education Studies, 13(2), 10–17, 1993).

Building New Social Movements: The Politics of Responsibility and Accountability in School-Community Relationships

This chapter provides both a response to Reid’s chapter “Public diversity; private disadvantage: schooling and ethnicity” and an extension of the discussion to explore the relationship between schools and the communities they serve. Particularly focused on schools in low socio-economic contexts, the chapter will reflect on issues of diversity and disadvantage by drawing on data from a research project investigating the importance of teachers researching their communities. Drawing on this data and the heretical discussions presented by Reid, this chapter will challenge generally accepted notions of parental involvement in schools, schools’ understandings of, and attitudes towards the communities they serve, and the extent to which policies and movements, such as school choice, shape current school-community relationships.