A comprehensive guide to drama education, ensuring a solid foundation for supporting effective learning and teaching.

MasterClass in Drama Education explores drama teaching, drawing directly on international research and practice, presenting effective and engaging approaches for drama learning and focusing on the skills, knowledge and understanding needed by researchers teachers and Master's-level students. Anderson also draws on the history of drama education to create a foundation for effective learning and teaching. Topics covered include: - The foundations of drama learning - Planning - Knowledge and skills - Assessment MasterClass in Drama Education will be essential reading for all studying the teaching and learning of drama on PGCE and Education MEd/MA courses.

THE STORY: Maria Callas is teaching a master class in front of an audience (us). She's glamorous, commanding, larger than life--and drop-dead funny. An accompanist sits at the piano. Callas' first victim is Sophie, a ridiculous, overly-perky soprano, dre

Drama and Education provides a practical, comprehensive guide to drama as a tool for teaching and learning. It is among the first practical drama and performance textbooks that address brain-based, neuroscientific research, making the argument that creativity is necessary in our lives, that embodied learning is natural and essential, and that contextual learning helps us find our place in society in relationship to other peoples and cultures. As well as a historical and theoretical overview of the field, it provides rationale and techniques for several specific methodologies: linear drama, process-oriented drama, drama for social justice, and performance art. Each approach is supplemented with sample lesson plans, activities, ideas for differentiation, and extensive bibliographies. The topics are discussed from five key angles: • Historical and theoretical foundations • Curricular applications • Practical toolkits for a range of classrooms and learning environments • Different strategies for lesson plans • Extension options for longer workshops. Alongside these core methods, the integration of other innovative forms—from performance art to Theatre of the Oppressed—into drama-based learning is explored, as well as the pragmatic concerns such as assessment, planning, and advocacy for arts learning and arts education partnerships. Drama and Education is the comprehensive textbook for teachers and students on Applied Theatre and Theatre and Education courses.

This edition collection showcases the increasing intersections between drama and applied theatre, education, innovation and technology. It tunes in to the continuing conversation that has been a persistent if not prominent feature of our drama education since the advent of accessible computer based technologies. The chapters in this book consider how technology can be used as a potent tool in drama learning and how the learning is changing the technologies and in turn how learning is transforming the technology. This collection includes contributions from leading scholars in the field on a range of topics including digital storytelling and identity formation, applied drama and micro-blogging and the use of Second Life in drama learning. The chapters provide a potent collection for researchers and educators considering the role of technology in drama education spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance.

If it is a good thing to use drama for education, there must be something specific about drama that makes it good for the purpose. It has power of some kind: it makes things meaningful that would otherwise be meaningless, or things memorable that would otherwise be forgettable. Or perhaps it enables independent thought in an area that would otherwise become mere rote learning. Many practitioners believe that drama has the power to develop learner autonomy, or even to give learners power over their lives. In the last twenty years, a widespread view has developed that this 'something' that creates the benefit of drama is 'aesthetics'. There are many views of aesthetics, but what unites them is the special significance that art has for our lives. This book is about the relation between aesthetics and education in the use of drama. Within it, philosophy appears as the essential connecting discipline between the practice of arts-based education and our advancing knowledge of the interrelations of cognition, emotion, and embodiment. Matthew DeCoursey argues that the power of dramatic art is to be found in its bodily, emotional nature. Drawing on recent work in the aesthetics of theatre, he shows that much of the power of theatre can be attributed to a specific range of ideas and techniques, notably including double meaning-making, aesthetic focus and dramatic tension. Finally, the author relates different forms of drama education to different educational results, holding that the conventional improvised forms are neither superior nor inferior to scripted theatre, but merely serve different purposes. Among those educational results discussed are the emancipation sought both by Rancière and by many practitioners of applied theatre, but also curricular areas, including language education.

‘Here’s a knocking indeed!’ says the Porter in Shakespeare’s Scottish play (Act II, Scene 3) and immediately puts himself into role in order to deal with the demands of such an early call after a late night of drinking and carousal: ‘If a man were porter of hell-gate...’. But what roles does the porter of curriculum-gate take on in order to deal with drama’s persistent demands for entry? Ah, that depends upon the temperature of the times. We, who have been knocking for what seems to be a very long time, know well that when evaluation and measurement criteriaare demanded as evidence of drama’s ef cacy, an examiner stands as gatekeeper. When the educational landscape is in danger of overcrowding, we meet a territorial governor. And how often has the courtesan turned out to be only a tease because the arts are, for a brief moment, in the spotlight for their abilities to foster out-of-the-box thinkers? In this text, we meet these ‘commissionaires’ and many more. The gatekeeping roles and what they represent are so familiar that they have become cliches ́ to us. We know them by their arguments, ripostes, dismissals, their brief encouragement and lack of follow-up. And we know that behind each one (however rmly they think they keep the keys) is a nancial and political master whose power controls the curriculum building and everything in it.