Madonna Stinson

‘Drama is like reversing everything’: intervention research as teacher professional development

This paper reports on a one-year project in a Singapore ‘neighbourhood’ school where the researcher was invited to assist the teachers of two secondary English classes to incorporate drama strategies to enliven their pedagogy. Few teachers involved had any prior experience of drama in schools and none had studied drama during pre-service teacher education. The project was faced with a number of challenges, most significantly the extent of teacher ‘buy-in’ for the research; this was influenced by the hierarchical nature of school administration, teacher resistance, teacher and community pre-conceptions about drama, and the degree of willingness to engage with change practices within the school. This paper discusses the challenges facing long-term intervention research in schools. It addresses issues of teacher commitment to the research, teacher–researcher relationships, and the challenges that impeded significant change taking place in this particular school context. It considers methodological issues for researchers who wish to engage in schooling contexts which are by nature complex, chaotic and diverse.

Not without the art!! The importance of teacher artistry when applying drama as pedagogy for additional language learning

For more than 30 years drama has been promoted as a valuable teaching tool for language learning. Recent research results have reinforced this position. However, these and other earlier studies reveal that the overall success of the work is dependent, at least in part, upon the artistry of the teacher and the quality of the pretext materials used to drive the dramatic action. This article interrogates the notion of artistry in relation to drama pedagogy and second/additional language learning. It argues that where the application of drama strategies takes place in isolation, in an ad hoc manner or without a keen understanding of how dramatic forms, conventions and elements interact with one another, the work can become purely functional. In these situations the teaching becomes artless, resulting in approaches that do little to add value to existing practices or to the depth and quality of the experience for learners.

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.

Working Through the Layers: Curriculum Implementation in Language Education

This chapter presents findings on English Language instruction at the lower primary level in the context of policies for curricular innovation at national, school and classroom levels. The focus is on policies which connect national and school levels, and on how they might be interpreted when implemented in multiple schools within Singapore’s educational system. Referring to case studies in two schools and to individual lesson observations in 10 schools, we found much agreement with national policies in terms of curriculum (i.e. lesson content and activity selection), leading to great uniformity in the lessons taught by different teachers in different schools. In addition, we found that schools had an important mediating influence on implementation of national policies. However, adoptions and adaptations of policy innovations at the classroom level were somewhat superficial as they were more related to changes in educational facilities and procedures than in philosophies.

Drama in the Australian national curriculum: decisions, tensions and uncertainties

ABSTRACT In September 2015, the Australian Federal Government endorsed the final version of the Australian Curriculum arts framework a document resulting from nearly seven years of consultation and development. The Australian Curriculum: The Arts Version 8.0 comprises five subjects: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. This article considers the curriculum development process and highlights interplays between decisions and decision-makers. Now available for implementation in each state and territory of Australia, the nature and structure of the framework remains in question with regard to what aspects of the curriculum will be supported for implementation in each state. At the time of writing, not one state education authority has guaranteed that the curriculum, as written and in full, will be implemented. As a result Drama remains outside the educational entitlement for all children in Australia.

Drama Literacy: (In)definite Articles

Learning in and through drama involves acts of shared imagination as students participate in collaborative, embodied, creative, thoughtful, empathetic and purposeful experiences. These experiences usually require participants to engage as [an]other, at once “not-me” and simultaneously not “not-me” (Woodson, 1999). This chapter discusses the literacies, developed through drama pedagogy involving acts of identification. The author considers the implications for learning in drama of, what Jonothan Neelands has termed, intra-aesthetic and para-aesthetic approaches (Neelands, 2004), whereby the focus modulates, shifts or blurs between orientations leaning, on the one hand, towards the primacy of artistic skill development and, on the other, the personal, social and cultural development of students. She draws on a number of contemporary authors who have considered the nature of drama literacy (cf. Burton, Neelands, O’Toole, Pascoe, Saxton & Miller, Winston and others), as well as recent discussion of the role of emotion in learning to frame an analysis of drama pedagogy. The chapter concludes with a proposed model of practice to support drama literacy development.

Talking About Liveness: Responses of Young People in the Theatrespace Project

Abstract This paper draws on analysis of interviews with over 500 young people who attended theatre performances as part of the Australian TheatreSpace project. The paper focuses on one small but critical aspect of the larger project. Asked what they valued in a theatre experience, a significant number of young people spoke about liveness. The paper addresses the question: what are the key points/ideas about liveness that we can learn from listening to the young people? Our discussion includes a consideration of: the comfort or discomfort of presentness; performer vulnerability, risk and uncertainty; proximity to the live action; perceptions of realness; a sense of relationship with the actors; and intensity of engagement. A brief consideration of the implications for teachers and theatre providers concludes the paper.

Drama as Macro-Curriculum: Peeking Behind the Closed Doors of Drama Syllabus Development

In this chapter, we continue the shift in emphasis from the global to the particular. Globalisation has impacted on education and curriculum development and recently there has been a tendency for curricula to be marketed internationally. It seems that curriculum development can be lucrative. However, the purchasing of a curriculum, which has been developed in another location, especially another country, takes little account of the context in which that curriculum will be implemented. The needs of students and their schooling vary according to distinctive social, economic and cultural contexts and any curriculum must be responsive to these needs. This chapter illustrates the particular process that one systemic curriculum authority went through to develop an arts and drama curriculum for its own specific schooling context: Queensland, Australia. At the time of going to press the curriculum document that resulted is still the mandated syllabus in Queensland schools but, as we will see later, changes are afoot.

Relational pedagogy and the drama curriculum

Trawling through the back issues of RIDE it is evident that articles which explicitly address the notion of curriculum are very thin on the ground. Early volumes contain one or two but in later years, there have only been those that formed part of the Special Issue on ‘Drama for School Education: Global Perspectives’. While research into the reasons for this relative neglect lie beyond the scope of this editorial essay, it is tempting to speculate that the space for contemplating questions relating to drama and the curriculum was usurped by the turn towards pedagogy (cf. Bernstein) evident in educational discourse from the 1990s onwards. The work in this volume draws on a diverse curriculum heritage, encompassing the curriculum orientations proposed by Heathcote, Bolton, Courtney, Spolin, Neelands, Nicholson and Boal. Unlike most considerations of curriculum, these authors considered emotions, aesthetics, values, culture and embodied knowing as central to learning and pivotal underpinnings to curriculum, in contrast to the focus on purely cognitive ways of knowing evident in many other curriculum theorists. What is evident from the articles that follow is the power and influence of local contexts, of government commitment (or lack of) to access to an education in drama, of financial investment by governments or groups, and of the passion and commitment of individuals, alone and collectively, for access to quality drama education. This volume provides a baseline, a mark in the sand, a platform from which discussions of drama curriculum in the twentyfirst century can be based. The term curriculum is variously used to encompass the pre-active (Ross 2000) planned or intended (Pinar et al. 2002), evident in the written documents produced and disseminated by a ministry or education department; the enacted or operational (Eisner 1994a, 1994b) describing the selection of content, activities and assessment from the planned curriculum that teachers actually apply in classroom practice; the experienced or lived (Aoki 2005b) which incorporates the day to day learning experiences of the students; the hidden (Apple 2004; Giroux and McLaren 1989), including expectations of behaviours, gendered or otherwise, and ways of working delineated by the implicit power structures and values enacted within a school community; and the nul curriculum (Eisner 1994b) which refers to content, subject matter, concepts and processes that are not selected as part of the course of study and hence excluded from the field of knowledgemade available to students. Marsh and Willis (2003, 13) define curriculum as ‘an interrelated set of plans and experiences that a student undertakes under the guidance of the school’. We seek to move beyond such technical, prescriptive notions of curriculum as documents or plans and align with Pinar et al., who state that:

Speaking up about oracy: the contribution of drama pedagogy to enhanced oral communication

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider the growing interest in oracy and to propose the pedagogy of process drama as an ideal model for the dialogic classroom. Design/methodology/approach – This paper takes the form of an explanatory case study where the author draws on a successful drama/oracy project in a primary school in Brisbane, Australia, to illustrate the connections between Alexander’s five indicators of a dialogic classroom and the process drama in which the students participated. Findings – The application of this process drama as pedagogy for the teaching and learning of oracy has contributed positively to students’ oral communication skills and intercultural awareness. In addition, parents provide positive feedback about student engagement in school and developing self-confidence because “they have something to say”. Research limitations/implications – There was no formal pre-post test for the oral communication skills on this study, instead the researchers developed a draft “orac...