Melanie Peter, Senior Lecturer in Education and Early Childhood at Anglia Ruskin University, argues that the ability to engage in narrative stems from early interactive play formats and is essential for perceiving patterns and sequences in life--the fabric of social understanding. Developing themes set out in her earlier work, this article…

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and…

This paper discusses the use of applied drama within the microblogging platform "Twitter" as a method to increase students' social media and news literacy. Online news sites are increasingly using "Twitter" as a source for eyewitness accounts of events or public opinion. "Twitter" offers users a simple way to publicly…

At the level of policy the relative "value" of subjects is determined by their official curriculum designation, creating a hierarchy of learning within which particular subjects are categorised as optional to the educational experience of young people. This situation is well-illustrated by the marginalised position of drama in the…

This paper begins by raising a question about the purposes of research in drama in education and reflects on aspects of discourse in the past concerning how and why writers about drama in education choose to describe its aesthetic processes. Whilst it recognises the debate about drama in education's place within the umbrella of applied theatre, it…

This paper illustrates research on the effects of "process drama" to enhance intercultural awareness for learners of Italian as an Additional Language. To validate the potential synergy between "process drama" and intercultural language learning, I created six "process dramas" to explore some contemporary Italian…

The use of psychodramatic action methods in academic supervision is examined through the detailed description of a session between a supervisor and a supervisee working on a PhD in the field of Information Systems. The psychodramatic emphasis on spontaneity, reciprocity, and the use of dramatic production have various advantages for post-graduate…

"Tragedy," both in what the author calls the strict and nuclear ancient Greek sense of the term (which does not imply that tragedy is clearly and distinctly defined, even in ancient Greece) and in the looser, derived sense of the word, has a long and compelling history. It is not only true that tragedy as practice and performance has a…

This original account is based on the author's experiences with incarcerated girls participating in "Girl Time", a program created by a theatre company that conducts playwriting and performance workshops in youth detention centers. In addition to examining the lives of these and other formerly incarcerated girls, "Girl Time" shares the stories of…

Twentieth-century Russian literary critic and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin developed an emology that linked carnival, authority, and laughter. Drawing on his work, the author investigates hidden parent-child interactions and children's discourse in early-childhood play. She argues that Bakhtin's ideas of carnival and its discourses apply to young…

The widespread turn towards "collaboration" in qualitative research methodologies warrants careful and continuous critique. This paper addresses the possibilities and the challenges of collaborative methodology, and in particular what happens when the line between pedagogy and methodology is blurred in classroom-based ethnographic…

Performance is a key tool in emergency preparedness and the rehearsal of professional response, simultaneously raising questions about the practice of cultural assumptions in this context. Usually the actors in preparedness exercises are civil servants who perform the work of the nihilistic imagination in often-apocalyptic fictional scenarios,…

This study was presented at the American Educational Research Association 2012 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The study explored how action research of arts-based teaching (ABT) impacted at-risk students in three urban public schools in southern California, USA. ABT was defined as using arts, music, drama, and dance in teaching other subjects. A…

There is now an accepted need for initiatives that support older people's health and well-being. There is increasing evidence that active engagement with music has the potential to contribute to this. This research aimed to explore the characteristics of older people who participated in active music making with a view to identifying the groups…

The teaching of classical Greek dramas is integral to drama education at the University of Pretoria. In the past few years these dramas increasingly faced the danger of becoming "foreign"/irrelevant to modern day students. The introduction of performance practice to teach these dramas brought a whole new dimension to teaching and…