Drama Tuesday - What is drama education?

I am responding to a question from drama educators in China: How to determine the appropriate form of teaching (for example, DIE or TIE, or the ordinary form of drama education? 

It echoes a question I had once in a conference plenary session in Beijing where a confused drama educator asked what was the difference between creative dramatics and drama in education and theatre in education and Applied Theatre and … the list continued.

It seems that there are many different names for the broad field of drama education (See the list at the end). It must be confusing for many people particularly if they are trawling through the literature of the field in translation. Despite the efforts of many writers and researchers to clarify confusion, it is clear that the claims and counterclaims for defining the field of drama education still bedevil easy resolution. 

Writing in 1984, O’Hara observed, “drama is marked by diversity of practice, with those involved in the area appearing "unable or unwilling to speak for themselves with authority and unity in both academic and practical terms" (Norman, 1971)”. In 2007 Gavin Bolton in the International Handbook of Research in Arts Education titled his contribution A History of Drama Education: A Search for Substance. In 2016 Mages wrote  an overview of a number of prominent forms of educational drama and theatre designed to introduce educators, who are not drama or theatre specialists, to the paradigms and merits of educational drama and theatre. 

Towards resolving this issue

There is a need for our field of drama education to acknowledge the issue and to find a useful yet clear definition and explanation that works for teachers. Putting the problem in context:

• Drama education is the term for the broad field.

• Within drama education there are different terms with histories, traditions and practitioner points of view.

• These different terms can be confusing (particularly in translation)

To help address this confusion I begin by establishing some principles:  

1. There is a continuum and relationships between Play / Drama / Theatre.

Play is the broad field term for activities that are pleasurable and intrinsically motivated. Neuroscience research shows the role of play in human development particularly in imagination, language, visual and symbolic expression. Drama is a specific form of play based on symbolic representation of people and situations. Drama occurs within the broad field of Play. Within Drama there is Theatre, the specific forms of Drama focused on presentation to audiences.

The relationships show how Theatre is nested within Drama and Drama is nested within Play. The boundaries between Play, Drama and Theatre are porous and often there is overlap and blending.

2. Within the many differently named approaches to drama education there is a commonality of purpose: engaging people with the embodied experience of taking on role and acting out dramatic action. In doing so they learn, understand and work with identified Elements of Drama, Principles of Story, Forms and Types of Drama and use the Skills and Processes of Drama

3. It is helpful to think about three overarching categories of drama education (which can be used to group the many different approaches.

Terms for creative drama and similar or related constructs (Mages, 2008) 

Acting-out stories Paley, 1978 Child drama Davis and Behm, 1978, 1987 

Creative drama Cooper and Collins, 1992; Davis and Behm, 1978, 1987; Kardash and Wright, 1987; McCaslin, 1996; Vitz, 1984; Wagner, 1998 

Creative dramatics Cullinan, Jaggar, and Strickland, 1974; Strickland, 1973 Drama Brown, 1992; Conlan, 1995; Cooper and Collins, 1992 

Drama in education Brown, 1992 

Dramatic play Galda, 1984; Smilansky, 1968 

Dramatics Niedermeyer and Oliver, 1972; Paley, 1978 

Dramatization Fein, Ardila-Rey, and Groth, 2000; Kirk, 1998; McNamee, 1987; McNamee, McLane, Cooper, and Kerwin, 1985; Warash and Workman, 1993 

Educational drama Wagner, 1998 

Fantasy play Saltz, Dixon, and Johnson, 1977; Smith, Dalgleish, and Herzmark, 1981; Smith and Syddall, 1978 

Fantasy reenactment Pellegrini, 1984 

Group-dramatic play Christie, 1987 

Guided drama Davis and Behm, 1978, 1987 

Imaginative drama Paley, 1978 

Imaginative play Marbach and Yawkey, 1980; Saltz and Johnson, 1974 

Improvisation Brown, 1992; Conlan, 1995; Niedermeyer and Oliver, 1972 

Informal classroom drama Wagner, 1998 

Let’s pretend play Yawkey, 1979 

Make-believe Christie, 1983; Singer, 1973; Smilansky, 1968; Yawkey, 1979 

Play Fein, 1981; Galda, 1982; Silvern, 1980; Yawkey, 1979 

Play enactment Saltz et al., 1977 

Play tutoring Christie, 1983; Smith et al., 1981 

Pretend play Fein, 1981; Harris, 2000; Nicolopoulou, 2002 

Pretense Fein, 1981; Leslie, 1987 

Process drama Montgomerie and Ferguson, 1999 

Reenactment Nielsen, 1993 

Role enactment Fein, 1981 

Role play or role playing Brown, 1992; Cullinan et al., 1974; Fein, 1981; Strickland, 1973 

Role-taking Levy, Wolfgang, and Koorland, 1992

Shared enactment Fein et al., 2000 

Social role enactment Fein, 1981 Sociodramatic play Saltz et al., 1977; Saltz and Johnson, 1974; Smilansky, 1968; Smilansky and Shefatya, 1990; Smith et al., 1981; Smith and Syddall, 1978; Warash and Workman, 1993; Wolf, 1985 

Story dramatization Brown, 1992; Cooper and Collins, 1992; Levy et al., 1992; McNamee et al., 1985; Vitz, 1984 

Story-acting Nicolopoulou, 1996; Richner and Nicolopoulou, 2001 

Symbolic play Marbach and Yawkey, 1980; Saltz and Johnson, 1974; Silvern, Taylor, Williamson, Surbeck, and Kelley, 1986 

Thematic-fantasy play Pellegrini, 1984; Pellegrini and Galda, 1982; Saltz et al., 1977; Saltz and Johnson, 1974; Silvern et al., 1986; Williamson, 1993

To this list you might add role drama, applied theatre, theatre in education, story drama. 

The list goes on.

Is it any wonder that teachers in classrooms are confused?

Bibliography

Bolton, G. (2007). A History of Drama Education: A Search for Substance. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts Education (Vol. 1, pp. 45-62). Dordrecht: Springer.

Mages, W. K. (2008). Does Creative Drama Promote Language Development in Early Childhood? A Review of the Methods and Measures Employed in the Empirical Literature. Review of Educational Research, 78, 124–152. doi:10.3102/0034654307313401

Mages, W. K. (2016). Educational Drama and Theatre Paradigms for Understanding and Engagement. R&E-SOURCE http://journal.ph-noe.ac.at Open Online Journal for Research and Education(Special Issue #5, September 2016, ISSN: 2313-1640). 

O'Hara, M. (1984). Drama in Education: A Curriculum Dilemma. Theory Into Practice, 22(4 Teaching the Arts), 314-320. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/1476387

Music Monday - Mismatched

This evening, Robin and I, with friends, attended the final performance of Mismatched in the Perth Fringe World Festival. The photo, taken after the show, is of me with the show’s pianist, Tommaso Pollio, who makes a reasonably average electric keyboard sound almost as good as when he (more often) plays the Fazioli grand piano at WAAPA. The final note on piano in tonight’s Maria, (more important in the score than the final sung note in my opinion), was every bit as evocative as you’d expect to hear in the Bernstein orchestration. Bravo Tommaso!

Mismatched describes itself as ‘a musical celebration of unlikely couples, starring cabaret veterans: Penny Shaw, Robert Hofmann and Tommaso Pollio’. It’s a slick and musically satisfying hour. The singing is top shelf from both singers, with just the right amount of operatic tone to please the audience. It is suggestive without being sleazy. It is middle of the road rather than edgy. The audience loved it, as did we. 

One line in the show particularly resonated with me. Penny Shaw talks of leaving a UK season of Phantom of the Opera to follow a relationship to Perth, Western Australia. She talked of being happily married here now for 20 years and asks the audience, “Who would have believed me twenty years ago, if I’d said that in 2021 there would be more work for singers in Perth, than on Broadway, the West End and the rest of the world combined?” 

Strange times indeed. 

Perth, one of the most isolated capital cities in the world (and to a large extent because of that) feels almost normal during this Fringe.

And so, we must remind ourselves again, that the rest of the world is far from normal.  As far as we can, we must work to support our fellow artists, not only here, but across the world. Otherwise, they may not be there when the pandemic ends.

We arts workers are not ‘essential workers’ but (again quoting from the show), we are where essential workers seek escape when they finish work.

Music Monday - Happy New Year, Happy New Anthem?

Happy New Year to all music teachers. May this be a year which slowly improves on 2020 and may we all resume choir singing and directing without fear of spreading Covid-19.

Over the past few days in Australia, discussion has again started on our Australian national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. It’s a bit of a dirge musically and the words have long been seen as inappropriate to Indigenous Australians as well as those who have come here from all over the world. Our conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced that as of 1st January 2021, one word of the anthem would be changed – from ‘For we are young and free’ to ‘For we are one and free’. Almost as though this simple change will solve the many other issues with the text of the song. And to be honest, in a crowd singing the changed line, who would really know? 

I took another look at the complete verses of Advance Australia Fair, written by Peter Dodds McCormick in the 1870s. Verse 2 is particularly irksome, especially to Aboriginal Australians, the original custodians of this land:

When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d,

To trace wide oceans o’er,

True British courage bore him on,

Til he landed on our shore.

Then here he raised old England’s flag,

The standard of the brave;

“With all her faults we love her still

Britannia rules the wave.”

In joyful strains then let us sing

Advance Australia fair.

Surely we can do better than this? 

Personally, I think an obvious time to change the anthem would be at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign – when I hope we will finally become a republic. In the meantime though – is a one word change enough?