This article describes a successful teacher-professor collaboration to plan interdisciplinary curriculum and team-teach it in a first-grade classroom. The goal was to use literature and drama to help children learn about and find meaning in African American experiences and perspectives. Writing, staging, and performing three plays about African…

An attempt is made to show how at-risk students can increase their literacy skills through reading film as text by connecting classical Greek and Elizabethan theater to contemporary film. Films that feature violence are utilized by students to increase their literacy skills and also reach a critical awareness of the impact of violence in our…

Teachers from a high school and university collaborated to analyze the obstacles students encountered while understanding the theatre play "Our Town". A description on the activities undertaken to help students approach and appreciate the play is presented.

The author shares activities for use in the primary classroom that require active participation with nursery rhymes through dramatization. The activities involve repeated readings, reading in context, and examining rhyming components, and help to develop young children's phonemic awareness and oral language skills.

This article outlines how group practitioners can harness creative strategies to assist addicted clients in verbalizing and addressing the losses associated with addictive disorders. This article overviews the implementation of an experiential process that includes a warm up activity, a psychodrama, and utilization of empty chair techniques to…

Choreographers working in an educational setting often use student dancers as the instruments of their art. The inherent power dynamic of this relationship generates ethical issues that can affect the choreography and the learning experience of the student. At what point do choreographic decisions infringe upon goals for a moral, student-centered…

In this article, the author demonstrated how recent histories relied primarily on previous accounts and one textbook to characterize George Pierce Baker's work. This narrow assessment of "The Principles of Argumentation" limits one's understanding of his contribution to argumentation theory and pedagogy. Similarly, one has seen the need for care…

The site of the performance is largely a cultural expression defining the physical surroundings and conditions in which the audience and performers interact. Similarly, the character of the theatrical occasion is often shaped by the place designated for the event. In contemporary practice and discourse, the concept of theatre has widened, giving…

The Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development has been interpreted in such a way as to provide theoretical support for particular, Government-sponsored, models of both pedagogy and literacy. This article proposes a radically different interpretation of the ZPD, informed by Bakhtinian understandings of heteroglossia. This alternative…

In recent years, the teaching staff from the Central Queensland school of Wowan State Primary School have been responding to recently released Education Queensland initiatives or whole school literacy planning, "Literate Futures: Reading" (Education Queensland, 2002), and a framework for pedagogical reform, "Productive…

Terence Rattigan is writer of psychological dramas whose unique works focus on the psychological issues and emotional conflicts of his characters. An analysis of three of Rattigan's most popular and influential works--"The Winslow Boy, Separate Tables, Ross"--highlights Rattigan's Romantic Realist focus on universal personal issues and…

This article explores the use of ironic performance in education, particularly around issues of human rights. I examine my own efforts to engage audiences with the history of domestic espionage and sabotage by the intelligence agencies of the United States. This is a history well known to some marginalized counterpublics (see Fraser, 1997), but…

The author decided to minimize the stressful emphasis on assessments in learning in his 11th grade American History and Government classes and put the fun back into teaching. Tired of the repetitive aspects of teaching the required state standards related to the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court cases, the author switched gears from simply…

DRACON (DRAma for CONflict management) is an interdisciplinary and comparative action research project aimed at improving conflict handling among adolescent schoolchildren through the use of educational drama. The main purpose of our research has been to develop an integrated programme using conflict management as the theory and practice, and…

In this article, the author describes a personal teaching experience that led her to incorporate improvisational drama into her English classroom. The author describes justifications for implementing drama into the classroom as well as the possible benefits gained by teachers and students. Also included are several improvisational dramatic…