The Routledge Companion to Drama in Education

Mary McAvoy, Peter O'Connor, Mary McAvoy, Peter O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000536591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Enseignement des arts et des sciences humaines

The Routledge Companion to Drama in Education is a comprehensive reference guide to this unique performance discipline, focusing on its process-oriented theatrical techniques, engagement of a broad spectrum of learners, its historical roots as a field of inquiry and its transdisciplinary pedagogical practices.

The book approaches drama in education (DE) from a wide range of perspectives, from leading scholars to teaching artists and school educators who specialise in DE teaching. It presents the central disciplinary conversations around key issues, including best practice in DE, aesthetics and artistry in teaching, the histories of DE, ideologies in drama and education, and concerns around access, inclusivity and justice.

Including reflections, lesson plans, programme designs, case studies and provocations from scholars, educators and community arts workers, this is the most robust and comprehensive resource for those interested in DE's past, present and future.

PART IBoundaries and contours

1A personal genealogy of the idea of drama education as a force for change

Kelly Freebody

DOI: 10.4324/9781003000914-3

I recently became troubled listening to a conference presentation about the use of process drama in China. According to the presenter, the drama work was part of the citizenship curriculum and aimed to engage students with ideas of responsibility, critical thinking, collaboration, and so on. There was a suggestion that work such as this is valuable as it leads to positive social change. The facilitator was a white, Western academic (as were the majority of people at the conference presentation), and I found myself wondering whether the ‘positive social change’ that we assume is the same as that sought by the participants in China, and whether this again is the same as that sought by the school system the drama was conducted in. I then wondered about whether the lack of reflection about the idea that drama = change means that drama educators can accidentally contribute to uncomfortable agendas, while simultaneously having their work considered as unproblematically aligned with social justice. Asking these questions, I then considered instances in my own work throughout my career where these tensions have played out and could certainly pinpoint moments where reflection on what kind of change, and for whom, was sorely lacking. I, like so many others, believe the rhetoric of our field – that our work is important, that drama gives students a voice, that drama can empower, and that drama can contribute to society in meaningful and just ways. It is this tension, between reflection and rhetoric, that is the catalyst for this chapter.

When I initially wrote the abstract for this chapter, I suggested to the editors that I would engage in a genealogy of drama and social justice. I was inspired by the work of Nicholson (2010), who conducted a genealogy of the term ‘applied theatre’, and also the work of Kershaw (2016), who lamented that the field of applied theatre had no historians and therefore it was difficult to track the development of theory and practice in a way that allowed us to unpick our assumptions about what we do in ways that make us more reflective practitioners and scholars. My intention in this chapter was to explore the history of the idea that drama education is a force for positive social change, the often-assumed relationship between drama and social justice. I particularly wanted to focus on drama education rather than the larger ‘umbrella’ field of drama education and applied theatre combined. Although often conflated with applied theatre, there is a distinctive history to drama education and educational drama that I feel is worthy of exploration.

Having made this ambitious plan, I began to work back through publications to explore the idea and quickly realised that drama education practice globally is too broad to capture in one publication such as this, and also that publications about it appear (or not) in a variety of places; it would therefore be a much larger project to map extensively (although one I am keen to undertake). Rather, in this chapter I offer a more personal genealogy of my understanding of drama education as a force for change, revisiting several papers and books published in the field of drama education, many of which I drew on for my initial PhD thesis completed in the mid-2000s, to engage in a discussion of how my understanding of this idea became so central in our field.

Many years ago, I read The Art of Travel by philosopher Alain de Botton (2014). In the final chapter of this book, he recommends that the reader ‘travel’ around their own home. By doing so, one could reflect on and experience one’s surroundings as if they were a new place. I have drawn on this philosophical idea in this chapter. I have been an academic in the same university for 13 years now, beginning in my mid-20s. I am also the daughter of an academic who had an interest in social justice and education (although he was a literacy specialist). As I look to my bookshelves, many of the books are ones I bought to supplement my reading in my research interests: drama, applied theatre, education and social justice, social class. However, there are also a large number of books that were hand-me-downs from other academics who dropped off boxes of books pre-retirement, most of these in the area of drama. I have units of work and resources developed in the 1970s and 1980s mixed in with old journals and magazines. I have the first volume of the Drama Australia journal, published when I was in my first year of university, now-seminal texts written by drama education ‘giants’ such as Jonothan Neelands, Gavin Bolton, and Cecily O’Neill. I also have shelves of less well-known texts that consider the emerging role of drama in education, many written between 1975 and 1995. So, in this chapter I aim to combine a personal genealogy with a de Botton–inspired travel through my bookshelves. I note with thanks Jenny Simmons, Rosalyn Arnold, and particularly John Hughes, whose names still appear written in the front cover of many of the books, for gifting a new scholar with such a rich history of the field.

A note on theory and method

In my attempt to trace an idea through my bookshelves I rely on my position as a critical scholar drawing on poststructuralist perspectives that encourage us to explore assumptions, common-sense, and taken-for-granted ideas in our field. These perspectives are hardly new to drama education. Brecht attempted to make ideas ‘strange’ for the audience to encourage reflection, O’Neill (1995) (and many others) emphasised the importance of distance and the use of conventions (such as ‘the brotherhood code’ (Wagner 1979)) to allow for this, and O’Connor (2007) refers to drama as a tool for refraction, rather than reflection, suggesting that “rather than clarity, process drama seeks ambiguity: instead of resolving issues it seeks to further problematize and complexify” (p. 8). Heathcote suggested there is at times a shared vocabulary between sociology and theatre because “theatre, like sociology, seeks to examine the nature of social life” (Heathcote 1984).

In this chapter I undertake the exploration influenced by Foucault’s ideas of genealogies as an attempt to understand how systems of knowledge, and the discourses surrounding them, have emerged. A genealogy aims to demonstrate that an idea such as ‘drama is a force for change’ is not self-evidently ‘true’ or morally neutral, but rather has been established by particular ways of thinking, writing, and relating in the field. The chapter is structured around a series of proposals that I make regarding an emergence of the idea that drama is a force for change to consider the notion that drama education relates to social change and social justice. These proposals represent my answers to the following question: What can the publications on my bookshelf tell me about why I think there is an implicit relationship between drama and social change? They are not intended to be exhaustive or authoritative but rather a reflection on the ideas with the intention of beginning, rather than concluding, a discussion in the field.

Proposal one: it begins with youth

My first proposal relating to why change is considered such a common-sense focus in drama education relates to the very practical idea of who it is for: youth. I am arguing that youth and childhood, and the simple fact that drama education takes place for youth, are central to understanding its relationship to change. Many (including me) consider Slade’s 1954 work Child Drama to be a seminal text in our field. Not only did it structure its discussions around case studies of practice, which has since become a common way of publishing in drama education, it paved the way for an understanding of drama as art form in and of itself, distinct from theatre. It linked drama, unapologetically, with a quest for “happy and balanced” children (1954, 105). The idea that doing (not watching) drama made people better is a central tenet of Slade’s text. He also suggests the improvement is not only confined to the child (or, as it is sometimes referred to in the text, the “future adult”) but also teachers, who can become more “sensitive and friendly” (ibid.) through the planning and implementation of drama.

Exploring my bookshelf while wondering about drama’s discursive, philosophical, and practical relationship to youth makes me realise how nuanced and complex it can be (worthy of its own book). Yet because the relationship is assumed, this complexity remains hidden. Some publications did not really discuss children or youth at all, despite writing about drama and schools, but evident in all the arguments they presented was the notion that the purpose of the work is to teach/change students. Many argue directly for the rights of the child or spend time discussing what children need. Very few engage in a critical discussion of the relationship between youth, drama, and education.

A powerful governing idea related to youth and education is that of pre-competence (Austin, Dwyer, and Freebody 2003). Unlike adults, young people who lack knowledge or skill are not problematised as ‘ignorant’ or ‘incompetent’ but rather pre-competent. This categorisation of youth places them in a specific power relationship with the competent adult and makes the development of competence as a defining feature of the transition between youth and adulthood. At that point if a skill is still unlearned, then the ‘incompetence’ label can be applied. Like Slade’s suggestion that drama improves children, pre-competence discourses place a central focus on change, and the common-sense idea that it is the role of a child to change – to learn, to grow, and to become an adult. Placing the idea that drama helps children grow, next to the categorisation of the child as pre-competent, I read Heathcote’s words from a conference in 1980: “I believe that every child I meet understands deep, basic matters worthy of exploration but they may as yet have no language for them” (1984, 103). In terms of how it is understood pedagogically, drama education is often considered to be a way of developing the language (broadly conceptualised) that young people need to express and explore their understanding of the world. This is evident in the discourses around ‘giving voice’ (Freebody and Goodwin 2018), expression (O’Connor 2016), creativity (Harris 2014), and play (Ewing 2012; O’Toole 1992).

Beyond the pedagogical discourses, there is also a strong sociocultural discourse concerning how youth as a social category intertwine with sociocultural issues, and the place of drama education. These writings presented a complex relationship between drama and youth. Some drama is used to teach youth and guide them away from their inappropriate paths (drug taking, sex, partying, bullying, etc.). Some drama is used by adults to gift youth the chance to express themselves artistically and personally, usually couched as in opposition to a cruel and oppressive school system that denies them this opportunity. Some drama is used by youth as a form of activism to take the chance to express discontent. Some drama is used by youth (often facilitated by adults) to represent themselves to adults to say, ‘This is who we are’, to have voice, and to celebrate their ‘youth-ness’. Some drama is done with adults with youth as audience, to engage them in an idea that the adult considers to be important. In many, if not all, of these forms there is often an orientation towards making change, either to change the youth themselves (their knowledge, their behaviour, their ideas) or to incite others to make change about issues that are of relevance to young people.

Proposal two: knowledge leads to change

Evident in many of the writings regarding the use, or potential, of drama education is t...