This article reflects on the ethics and process of writing and performing the play "This Is Us" with a group of rejected asylum seekers from Deportation Centre Sjaelsmark in Denmark. Positioned within larger frameworks of political and media hostility, the group pushed for a more radical approach of 'not just theatre', but called instead…

In this commentary, summarized from a recent interview, the author shares insights and memories from a career devoted to drama and performance studies. He enthusiastically recounts events, initiatives, and collaborations that have helped sustain his lifelong passion for performance.

This article describes how dramatic writing and performance practices can be used to reshape qualitative interview data into a verbatim theatre performance with the intent of drawing attention to social movements in education. The performance described in the article reveals the consequences of a punitive educational policy agenda and addresses…

The traditional academic research paper isn't always the best form in which to judge student writing. When students are given a choice in form and genre, their true talents and creativity can be unleashed. Miller offers up classroom examples and ideas on how to let students express their creativity in writing literary papers, research papers, and…

"Dragons at the Snack Table" explores Magic Realism in relation to lived Applied Theatre spaces.

This paper explores an example of applied theatre and praxis learning in an Australian classroom with drama students aged 16-17 years which took the form of "real fiction" or social theatre monologue writing. It presents monologue responses from nine participants, altered by the researcher to protect identities and to tease out issues…

This article suggests how teaching artists can develop practical coursework in audio playwriting. To prepare students to work in the reemergent audio drama medium, the author created a seminar course called Radio Theatre Writing, taught at Arkansas Tech University in the fall of 2014. The course had three sections. First, it focused on…

My privileged opportunity to work with renowned Drama theorist, Dorothy Heathcote, in Melbourne in the 1970s, set a foundation for what I now call Theatre as Education research. Formerly a teacher of Secondary Drama, I became very experienced at creating plays with my students, based on their own ideas, or inspired by the stories of the community.…

We discuss an innovative task used in teacher education--Lesson Play--that involves presenting a lesson in the form of an interaction between a teacher and students. We describe the motivation for the development of this task and, through specific examples, describe the iterative design process in which the task was refined and improved. We…

When the lights come up on College of Menominee Nation's theater productions they illuminate the stories that students want to tell. These stories have traveled from the campfires, to classrooms, and then to the stage. They are original in execution but build on a long tradition of Indigenous storytelling. The stories are specific to the students,…

This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" and Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" can be combined to support…

The application of drama strategies which focus more on meaning than on form can provide an impetus for ESL learners to be more confident about speaking, thereby increasing the quantity of their spoken English. This paper discusses existing research and the author's own experiences in an attempt to highlight the positive effects of improvisations,…

If educators want students to practice and prepare for challenges they might eventually face, there are a number of useful strategies to connect academic learning to the "real world." One is to ask students to complete what are variously called "performance tasks," "case studies," "simulations," or "project- or problem-based learning units."…

In the twenty-first century the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country. While the numbers of incarcerated males far outnumber incarcerated women, there are still great concerns about the growing female prison population. This fixation with incarceration and building prisons has trickled down to America's children as…

In some ways, the project which the author's class had undertaken--creating collaborative plays about issues important in students' lives--was going very well. The students, 20 high school seniors, seemed engaged and invested in the work, from brainstorming and improvising to writing and revising. The class had read and watched a variety of…