Theater uses drama and conflict to stimulate audience's emotions taking advantage of the fact that emotions can trigger people to achieve a desired learning result. Creating a theatrical learning environment enables learners to actively participate in knowledge creation in an entertaining environment. In this paper, I will use a conference session…

Many youth struggle to determine their role and cope with overwhelming emotions and imaginative dystopias around combatting climate catastrophe and capitalist greed. In this time when many marginalised youth feel assured of immediate and distant threat, it is vital for applied theatre practitioners and educators to nurture critical hope as a means…

In a span of about three days in the spring of 2023, the author's Instagram feed became inundated with mentions of artificial intelligence (AI), including Chat GPT, text-to-image models, and much more. She would turn on the radio and hear about the controversy surrounding AI, or look at her cousin's social media posts about the injustices of her…

Humour is discussed in this article in relation to drama education in Ireland. Humour is identified as a potentially important feature of children's engagement in drama, and this is explained by an exploration of humour theory. Examples of how humour positively affects the experience of drama participation are also considered. The discussion is in…

If oral communication in a second language (L2) is considered a skill to be prioritized, it is also particularly anxiety-provoking for L2 learners. This is why their willingness to communicate, predicted in particular by the emotions experienced, has been the focus of recent studies to examine its evolution and factors likely to interact with it.…

In this interview, Joe Norris reflects on his early experiences with performance and how he became involved with collective creations and playbuilding. His work has led him to develop and implement qualitative research methods using playbuilding. In his role as artistic director of Mirror Theatre, he has been the driving force behind numerous…

How do we enlarge the space of the possible to encourage our students to notice the educational, social, economic, communal, and political scripts that perform us? Academic performance imagines new ways of performing research. Conventional academic performances have been interrupted. Be aware. We can never take for granted the performance that is…

Tableau Theatre is an instructional method that fulfills two of the most timely needs in developmental education today: enhancing student motivation and providing engaging learning activities. As a form of highly contextualized learning, the use of total body engagement stimulates brain activity, a prerequisite for learning and allows space for a…

When teaching a Drama and Theater class the author's students chose August Wilson's "Fences" to focus on the teaching of "dramatic" texts. As the author reread Wilson's play, she noticed that within the first pages is the n-word, used in conversation between two African American men, two friends, and it became an immediate…

Teacher-researcher, Katherine Macro spent six weeks observing an eleventh-grade Advanced Placement and Composition class at Sunnybrooke Central High School to examine the teacher's use of creative drama to teach Shakespeare. In this article, Macro describes ways the instructor used theater-based instructional strategies, especially a staged…

For the last several years, teacher-researchers Jessica Jasper, Laura Dvorak, Steven Athanases, and Sergio Sanchez have partnered with a program called Globe Education, Shakespeare's Globe London. Practitioners in the program use teaching practices that engage learners with Shakespeare's works and other complex texts through drama practices. Jess…

The theatrical heritage of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the famous Czech teacher, religious thinker, and playwright, has been for a long time underestimated. There is little research on this topic. However, theatre played a very important role within the Pansophic school. The method of theatralisation was not new, but in the age of Comenius it…

This article shares three main lessons the author learned from her correspondence with Vivian Gussin Paley. Early on, the author wrote Mrs. Paley about how she discovered the meaning of story acting for visually impaired children. The act of sharing her thoughts with Mrs. Paley showed her the power of writing to promote thinking. Equally important…

Mantle of the Expert is a form of inquiry learning developed by Dorothy Heathcote that includes drama for learning--so it's active, embodied, imaginative, and aesthetic. It's agentic in that it positions learners as responsible, competent co-constructors of meaning and allows them powers to influence, make decisions, and grapple with complex…

During the fall of 2019, the chaotic American political landscape was charged with scandal, debate, and accusations. As a result, students would often bring local and national politics into the authors' high school English language arts (ELA) classes. Instead of ignoring the students' heated debates in the classroom, the authors decided to embrace…