Dramatic Approaches to Teaching

Join me at The Kennedy Center? I am looking forward to doing this workshop in person once again.

To register, visit this link: CETA Workshops | Kennedy Center (kennedy-center.org)

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Spring 2024 In-Person CETA Workshops

I am so pleased to announce that The Kennedy Center will once again offer a two-session online version of my teacher workshop, Dramatizing the Content: Curriculum-Based Readers Theatre! There were several years in which I frequently presented this series of online sessions based on the in-person workshops, residencies, and college courses I’ve taught, so it’s great to be back.

The two sessions will be held during on Tuesday evenings, November 28 and December 5 from 7:00 – 8:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. Please share this information with colleagues – nationwide and even worldwide. And the price is right – only $20.

This link, Changing Education through the Arts workshops, will provide you with detailed information about The Kennedy Center’s professional learning opportunities 

Scroll down and you will see my workshop, as described in the image above.

To register, visit this link: 2023-24 Kennedy Center Professional Learning Opportunities for Teachers

Click on the Register Now button.

Two years ago, I submitted a manuscript to the Journal for Learning through the Arts. This article was the result of research I had done to present within my university’s Research Day in 2021. A year later, I learned that my work had been accepted for publication and now, finally, the article itself is part of the journal’s volume 18. 

The complete article, “Scripting the Curriculum: A History of Students Dramatizing Content Information” is available online. Here’s a little information on its content:

Because my own work in arts integration beginning in 1995 evolved into a focus on writing and performing scripts about curriculum content with students in grades 3 – 12 (Curriculum-Based Readers Theatre), I wanted to examine the history of the use of script writing as an educational tool.

My research question was:

“How have educators (primarily in the United States) documented their use of student-written scripts as learning tools in K-12 classrooms?” 

I searched for articles and books written by educators who described the script writing that they implemented in classrooms. The earliest article I located was published in 1903, so the time frame of this research extends from the start of the 20th century to the present. 

My goal for this article is to share the great variety of classroom activities I collected by including specific examples and the language, as much as possible, of each writer. I wanted to avoid lengthy parenthetical references to authors and dates that substantiate findings but offer the reader little more than a name and title to look up if they want to learn what was done. I sought to go beyond just an overview of names, dates, and synopses of arts integration (even if the term was not used) activities and tell the story of what these educators and their students did, how they did it, how they described it, and share whether they encountered any complications and why they endorsed script writing as a classroom learning activity. 

Between 2022 and 2023, six MATEs (Master of Arts in Theatre Education) earned their degrees. They finished in the fall, spring, and summer sessions. The two pictured with me attended the Commencement ceremony in May. Of the six graduates, three completed their coursework and requirements completely online.

Below are descriptions of the final projects that the graduates within this group designed and submitted during the final semester of their studies.

Observing and Learning from Professional Actors as they teach High School Students. I will attend all sessions of the High School Drama Institute pertinent to my future work as a high school theatre teacher and program director. I will take detailed field notes on what I observe--teaching techniques or methods, class activities, program scheduling, management, games, activities, and any other resourceful information I would need to create a strong theatre program and be a quality teacher. I will then turn it all into a useful document or set of documents and photos and videos for my work. A portion of my work will aim towards creating a program or set of documents for college prep for homeschool students. 

Radio Drama with Middle School students. Utilizing knowledge learned from the Audio Drama course, I will be teaching one of my 6th Grade classes (24 students) from the Spanish Immersion program (where students are taught completely in Spanish in their Core classes, but not in their Creative Arts courses) at my Middle School about the history of Audio Drama, voice acting, sound effects, and script writing in order to help them create a new, original Radio Drama play that they will be able to record and gather/create effects for. By allowing students to write, record, and perform their radio drama, they can make an easily accessible art form that they will be able to share with their friends and family, eliminating several accessibility issues that may have prevented outside audiences from experiencing it before.

Voice & Choice… Not Just for Characters: Student Agency in the Blended Theatre Classroom. This high school class meets face to face for one hour each week and the remainder of class time/classwork is completed asynchronously online by students independently. I will explore how I can personalize the classroom experience for students so all students feel that they not only master learning outcomes, but also meet personal learning goals. Building student agency is something I am passionate about and hope to focus on and increase through this study. In my years of teaching, I have noticed how students will both grow and shrink in their engagement, creativity and outcomes depending on an assignment, project, or performance. I will restructure the sequence of activities, considering how to give students choice in how they share their growth and learning, exploring student goal setting, working on better incorporating National Arts Standards, and more. In the final presentation of the study, I will include a comparison of the original plan and the new plan I have worked on. The goal here goes beyond “good teaching.” The goal is to build a theatre curriculum where any student feels they have ownership of their learning and enjoys the process. This project will allow me to explore best practices not just for theatre education, but also online and blended delivery of any curriculum.

Develop two guidebooks for a middle school extracurricular Drama Club. In my district, drama club is a separate activity from the spring musical. It has been run as more of a class/workshop on a weekly basis over a period of ten weeks. It is a place for students to learn about the basics of acting and become more comfortable on the stage, but there is no specific plan or curriculum for this. I would like for the activity to have more consistency, as well as an overarching goal for the students to meet. The guidebooks would be something that I could use, but also something that anyone else who may lead the activity in the future could use as a major resource. I will develop one guidebook for seventh grade and one for eighth grade, both to provide a plan on how to instruct this ten-week activity. Activities for seventh grade will be more introductory, while eighth grade will be slightly more advanced. Although the eighth-grade group will primarily consist of students from the previous year, there will still be a need for repetition of some activities (particularly in the early sessions) from the previous year as there are usually several students who are new to the group. Each guidebook will include a course timeline, appendix of instructional resources (books, videos, and websites), warmups and icebreakers, activities that pertain to the weekly goal, instructional methods for the activity, simple assessment tools, and extensions to the activity.

Musical Theatre Dance. Dancers are often told that the only path they have as a dancer is to join a professional ballet company. However, there are many different opportunities for professional dancers and musical theater offers one such path. I will be working with accomplished student dancers of varying ages (11-17) who attend a school of ballet. This project allows me to “create” my own curriculum, lesson plans, and materials that can be used to help other teachers with their own lessons. I will be dissecting the approaches and styles of well-known musical theatre choreographers like Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Jerry Mitchell, and Andy Blakenbuehler. I plan to teach the students about eras within musical theater—the productions, choreographers, and the dances that made these musicals famous. I will then teach them sections of the actual choreography used within a production number and video their work.

Coming soon! I am excited to be one of the presenters at this well-organized and worthwhile conference for theatre educators sponsored by the…

MARYLAND THEATRE EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

Our mission is to connect, support and empower theatre educators through professional development and advocacy opportunities.

MTEA THRIVE Conference is a theatre educator empowerment conference with experiential workshops that are designed to give theatre educators the opportunity to explore their craft.

Attendees will experience the joy of reconnecting with their craft as theatremakers, tools and tips to apply to their own classes, and a unique opportunity to connect and network with theatre educators and organizations from across the state of Maryland.

Click here for the link to the reservations page.

None of the MATE students finished in time for the main university commencement in 2021, but throughout 2021 and 2022, seven MATEs earned their degrees. Above is a photo of the four who attended the commencement ceremonies. And one of them—drum roll please—is the very first to ever earn her degree completely online! In fact, graduation day is the first time she set foot on campus!

Below are descriptions of the final projects they designed and submitted during the final semester of their studies.

A look at best practices for the direct teaching of theatre skills found in the drama/theater classroom, rather than the indirect, supportive position theater skills take in an arts-integrated classroom. I feel very confident in my teaching practice as a Teaching Artist but less confident when the only learning objectives are in theatre skills. I will use my time as an intern in in the CUA High School Drama Institute to observe career theater skills teachers teaching and giving feedback to learners, examine how instructional methods vary, how informal assessments are carried out, how feedback is given, how rehearsal or class time is managed, and how student participation (casting) is managed when the sole learning objectives are in theater skills

Applying the elements of devised theatre to educational theatre production where the process becomes the product, and the goal of the product is empathy and community. One of the most beautiful authentic experiences of humanity is sharing in the community of theatre. This experience, however, has been diluted by the commercialization of mainstream theatrical entertainment, the de-emphasis on the arts in education, and the reckoning over the systemically racist development of American humanities. As theatre audiences continue to stagnate in their diversity and age, it’s time to look to the future generation of artists and audiences to re-invent and re-invigorate the trajectory of the theatrical experience.

Although still considered “experimental,” devised theatre has been steadily gaining traction as the applied theatre movement grows in academia. Younger students, however, are not exempt from the social stimulus that feeds these movements. Not only do these young minds need an outlet for exploring social topics relevant to their lives, but these social movements also need these young minds to carry on the change. I believe that by introducing process drama to students in middle and high school, we can empower them to examine themselves and their society, empathize and advocate for social change, and create a more equitable and accessible theatre for the future.

An exploration of the history of Musical Theatre through an Educator's point of view. I will pick one iconic show from each decade between 1920 and the present day and dive deeply into the stories of 10 musicals and why each is important. I will create PowerPoint presentations which include images and videos to serve as teaching tools to share with Theatre educators. I will also look at the original Broadway choreography from each show and create teaching videos of my own choreography, influenced by the original production.

Directing a middle school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Much of the work in putting this play together will be selecting activities to help students get familiar with the plot, Shakespeare’s language, and the unique characters that represent a variety of different backgrounds (high class, low class, the supernatural). Additionally, there is the other challenge of familiarizing students with theatrical technique since there will be such a wide range of skill levels. The school has not had a theatrical performance in over two years, so while some students have sought out theatrical opportunities outside of their school for many of them this will be their first foray into stage work. Another benefit to working on this project is that this play is in the school’s academic curriculum, which will not only add some much-needed buy-in from the students, but it will also mean that I will have support from administrators and faculty.

Using Drama in Homeschooling. My project will consist of researching, planning and theorizing how the use of drama integration in a homeschool setting can provide value in the learning and teaching process. This research will assist many parents who plan to embark on a homeschooling journey but are afraid that it will not be engaging enough for their children or do not know how to go about integrating drama into the curriculum at all. One goal of project is to give parents the confidence to implement arts integration into the lessons for homeschooling their children and other children in a home school pod, a group of like-aged homeschooled students who gather to learn under one teacher/parent on a regularly scheduled basis. Keeping homeschooling interesting and engaging for the parent/teacher and the child/student is important and I believe that introducing drama and arts integration across all subjects is a way to achieve that.

Directing After School Elementary School Theatre Productions. I will direct three groups of young students and think outside the box about tackling set design, costumes, and props, especially on a budget. I will implement and then report on what I learned by doing the work, especially in the following areas:

-Teach basic blocking notation -Collaborate with students on costumes -Build three sets with a budget in mind -Collaborate with students on dialogue -Instill memorization skills in students -Secure rights the plays -Creating a rehearsal schedule for each group -Communicate with parents

A Two-Pronged Approach to Developing Student Directors. I will be exploring two avenues by which to develop students’ directing skills: first, by working with my student Assistant Director on our mainstage production of Little Women and second, by developing a curriculum for the directing portion of a course I will teach next year, Advanced Acting and Directing. Previously, working with my student Assistant Director has been free-form and undefined, but this semester I am codifying the role more to give the student greater responsibility and, hopefully, a more fruitful learning experience. I will be documenting this experience as we mount the musical together.

Alongside this, I will create the curriculum for a new semester-length course I will be teaching next spring, Advanced Acting and Directing. In this course students will choose an acting or directing track and work together on high-level concepts through their chosen lens. Specifically for this project I will create the curriculum for the Directing track, including learning objectives, unit breakdown, collaborative projects, and lesson plans.

Label this one “uses time wisely during a pandemic!” So, as long as I had to figure out how to transform what I do with students in the classroom, I figured I would write about it and seek to get it published. Mission Accomplished. Some highlights from this article:

[R]eaders theatre "plays to many students' strengths: they want to do well in school; they like to be involved; they like to be "on stage"; and they like to have a voice in their own learning" (Schneider, 2019, p. 45).

I gave them this direction as I modeled it: "Position your head and body so that you are visible on the screen from just below your shoulders, but do not cut your head off!" We practiced getting into "screen acting position" and looked at all the actors via grid/gallery view to ensure they could be seen as requested. 

Here’s some official information...

They Turned Their Cameras On! Readers Theatre Inspires Young Distance Learners

Flynn, Rosalind M.

Distance Learning; Greenwich Vol. 18, Iss. 4, (2021): 19-22.

...and an official citation:

Flynn, Rosalind M. "They Turned their Cameras on! Readers Theatre Inspires Young Distance Learners." Distance Learning, vol. 18, no. 4, 2021, pp. 19-22. ProQuest, https://proxycu.wrlc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/they-turned-their-cameras-on-readers-theatre/docview/2653342976/se-2?accountid=9940.

“Every student I have ever had in a Theatre Methods course believes that a high school theatre course must include Theatre History. The challenge for these future teachers always is—How do you make a Theatre History unit as active and engaging as your other units?”

These are the opening sentences of my newest article—Active Theatre History—Published in ArtsPraxis, Volume 8, Issue 1.

“Praxis” means the practical application of a theory—practice, as distinguished from theory—so I thought that this journal seemed like a good place to share one innovative way to make Theatre History a dynamic experience in which students are active creators.

More than just a brief paragraph describing the assignment, this article offers a detailed description of an active learning project—and it’s available online! Also available online are downloadable, printable PDFs of the assignment materials to aid and accelerate implementation and assessment.

Like graduates nationwide, the 2020 MATEs had to celebrate individually and virtually. Seven superb students earned their Master of Arts in Theatre Education degrees this year. I meant to honor them sooner, so now that it’s the start of the Fall semester after they graduated, it’s high time I wrote about them.

Six of them are theatre teachers and directors in public and private middle and high schools. One MATE is the Director of Learning and Community Engagement at a professional theater. All of them submitted final projects that, even when interrupted by school and business closures, showed remarkable initiative, creativity, and scholarship. Here are the topics that they researched and documented:

Directing a High School Production of the Theatre for Youth one-act A Thousand Cranes by Kathryn Shultz Miller. This MATE graduate directed in the style of Bunraku, a traditional form of Japanese puppetry, and generated a production notebook that included historical analysis, design concept, rehearsal plans, and puppetry mechanics, as well as lessons that provided students with background knowledge on Japanese history/culture, movement in Japanese Theatre, and puppetry construction/practice.

Guiding High Schools students with language and learning disabilities, autism, and intellectual disabilities in writing original dramatic pieces on a given theme. Their 3 poems, 7 monologues, and 4 partner scenes were merged into a Theme Theatre script that was then performed by the school’s drama students.

Building Trust and Proficiency in a Secondary Foreign Language Classroom through Drama Education Strategies. This Action Research Study explored these questions:

How can incorporating drama strategies in the classroom build trust among students in order to allow them to take more risks in speaking Spanish?

How can incorporating drama education strategies in the foreign language classroom act as a conduit for the content?

Building a strong foundation of more student leadership and involvement in a High School drama program. The goal for this project and the theatre program is to give students more ownership, creative direction, and pride in their productions by working to have students design and assist in all aspects of a production.

Directing Theater in the Round (also known as Arena Staging). The activities and lessons learned in this project provide advice and examples for middle and high school teachers. How can teachers who lack a permanent stage and seating temporarily repurpose a space for a performance? How can they direct and benefit from productions staged in the round?

Redesigning an Introduction to Acting High School course curriculum. Using knowledge and methods gained through MATE courses, this graduate created units and lessons based on course goals and objectives that incorporate modern theatre education theories and best practices. She produced a detailed curriculum that includes unit lesson plans, classroom activities, primary texts, online resources, journal reflections, and assessments. This redesign resulted in a structured plan that for use in future semesters and a plan that can be used by future theatre teachers at her school.

Making the Move to Online Learning: Stories Make the World. This action research project that explored how to move a set of workshops for elementary and middle schools online. How do you help young people create, refine, rehearse, and present an original story? How do you provide the learning opportunity when the experience suddenly has to be offered as an online series?

The Drama Department is truly proud of the accomplishments and scholarship of the MATEs of 2020. We will miss them, but we know that they will continue to make great contributions to the world of educational theatre.

The production was cast, the students were in rehearsal, and then...the theater and the world were closed. Ours is not the only cast dealt this blow. Schools, colleges, universities, professional theaters, and even Broadway faced the same fate.

The head of our Drama Department, Professor Eleanor Holdridge, was the director for our last production of the year—Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. She did not even know how to do a screen recording on her computer, let alone create a digital version of a stage play with cast members located all over the United States. But she decided to try.

This article in BroadwayWorld.com -“Catholic U Presents Shakespeare Virtually” – tells more about the process and eventual production.

"With so much stress surrounding us right now, it's been wonderful to keep going and working together. This is not the experience we had planned. But we are making it work, and work well. My caution now to the students is 'Let's not get too good at this.' Theater communities across the country are longing to get back in the room to create our art in person."                                                                Director Eleanor Holdridge

So, if anyone is looking for a terrific example of how students and their director and designers moved a cancelled main stage production to a digital format, I am so proud to share what our Drama Department at Catholic University accomplished over that past 6 weeks. (I know the students and the staff, but I was not involved at all in this production, so I feel that I have the right to brag and share!)

Take a look—even just at the first part of Part 1—and I think some of you may want to use this as a (temporary) template or even as an assignment. No one involved wants to have to do theatre this way, but everyone felt great about their creativity during Covid-19.

Measure for Measure: A Digital Production Part 1

Measure for Measure: A Digital Production Part 2

Here is a video I made based on what I have learned about designing and delivering synchronous online classes since 2012. I hope that my tips and ideas are helpful to others just starting this online journey!

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Graduate Drama in Education Course Completely Online

Graduate Theatre Education Online - Once again

More Learning Online

I believe that I am in possession of a collector’s item. It is a paper copy of Volume 1, Number 1 of the only issue of a journal published in 1987 by the American Association for Theatre in Secondary Education. If you have never heard of this association, that is because it no longer exists and actually only existed for a short amount of time. The reason why I have the journal is because it published one of the first articles I ever wrote: “A Performance Evaluation that Works.”

The issue is only 14 pages long and contains three articles:

"Current Trends in High School Productions" by Patti Gillespie

“Theatre History on the Road” by Dennis J. Picard

“A Performance Evaluation that Works” by Rosalind M. Flynn

Gerald Lee Ratliff was the editor. Now, some 30+ years after publication, I find my article to be an interesting artifact of the initial attempts to create theatre performance rubrics. The field of assessment in theatre has, of course, progressed, so please do view the article as a historical document!

I use my article and the others in this issue in my graduate course The History of Drama and Theatre in Education offered online in the summers as part of the Catholic University’s M.A. in Theatre Education or Graduate Certificate in Creative Teaching through Drama program.  

Every so often, I have done an Internet search to search to see whether the journal or my article exists online. Nothing has ever turned up, so I decided to scan this singular issue’s pages and post them here.  I think that the journal is an interesting item in the history of the field and it is worth making available. I do not think there is an issue of copyright violation. (If there is, I will take it down.)

While I am on the subject, Educational Theatre Associations in the United States have had many names and acronyms. Here is a list:

American Educational Theatre Association (AETA)

Children’s Theatre Committee” (CTC)

Children’s Theatre Association (CTA)

American Theatre Association (ATA)

National Children’s Theatre Association (NCTA)

Children’s Theatre Association of America (CTAA)

American Association of Theatre for Youth (AATY)

American Association for Theatre in Secondary Education (AATSE)

American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE)

Educational Theatre Association (EdTA)

International Thespian Society (ITS)

Visit this site for a compact overview of the history of some of these associations:

https://www.aate.com/history.

For a history of EdTA, please visit:

https://www.schooltheatre.org/about/history.

Before summer ends, here is a look back at the 2019 Catholic University High School Drama Institute (HSDI) through the lens of each of the two M.A. in Theatre Education students who were this year’s graduate Teaching Assistants. In July, they spent 3 weeks with our 22 high school students, taking classes, taking attendance, observing instruction in action, trying out theatre games, coaching student actors in their monologues and scenes, and assisting with the final showcase production.

Because the MATE degree program is a part-time program with courses in the evenings year-round so that students can still hold full-time jobs, this opportunity is the only “scholarship” offered. Two MATEs at the end of their degree programs work weekdays in the High School Drama Institute. The position comes with a tuition reimbursement for one MATE course.

Here are the MATEs’ reflections on their experience:

Liz: HSDI was a perfect culmination to my time as a MATE student. As a graduate assistant, I was able to participate in workshops and master classes taught by a diverse array of talented Catholic University faculty members. CUA's approach to the assistantship is flexible, allowing the MATES to be as hands-on as they wish. For some, watching and taking notes is the best way to learn, for others (like me), participating in the games and activities helps us learn these new tools for our teacher toolboxes. I came away from this summer with a plethora of new approaches, activities and exercises to try in my drama classes-and even some for my Spanish classes! No one ever said teaching was easy (well, some people do say this, but those people are wrong), and this first year of teaching felt like a marathon that left me crawling across the finish line in June. Spending three weeks working with dedicated theatre kids and experienced professors reminded me what all the hard work has been for, and made me so happy that I chose this path for myself.  Thank you HSDI for reigniting my passion and reminding me why I do what I do!

Kelsey: Working as a TA for the HSDI was a real cherry on top of the MATE program! Not only were we able to watch the professors and master teachers in action, but they graciously took the extra time to provide us with materials, exercises, and other tips that we will be able to use in our classrooms and rehearsals in the future. Watching how the teachers condensed whole units into just a few weeks was also informative, and will certainly impact my own future lesson planning. Plus, it was fun to spend full days at Catholic U, and feel even more connected to the Drama Department and campus!

And here are the lucky students who got to work with them:

Here are the 2019 graduates of our M.A. in Theatre Education program(MATE). Six of them showed up for Commencement in person. The seventh graduate teaches at the American International School in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and could not make the trip to join us, so we carried her “pic on a stick” and included her in the photos. (Third from the right)

Our graduates are all currently working in positions that are fully or partially focused on Theatre Education. They are secondary school theatre teachers and directors, elementary school theatre teachers and directors, and teachers or professionals who use drama strategies to enhance and deepen the work that they do with young people and adults. They live in New Jersey, Florida, Massachusetts, Virginia, and (as you already know) Saudi Arabia.

Although some of them attended in-person courses during two summers, most of their courses have been completed online. Our exit interviews with MATE graduates provide us with endorsements like the following:

“I was hesitant about taking classes toward a Master’s degree primarily online, especially in drama. However the course that were offered online were highly engaging and I learned a lot. I really enjoyed the live class format and being able to discuss and try things together through the online platform. It was more than I had originally hoped and I was able to get to know the students and the professor. It felt like we were all in the same room together even though we were in different states or countries even.”

The main ingredient for our success is, I also believe, the fact that we actually do meet via videoconferencing. Our courses are not the “glorified independent study” kind of courses that generally comprise online learning.

The students and I (or another professor) sign on at the same time and meet for 2-hour sessions in which I guide them through instruction, share photos and videos, and we discuss readings and respond to questions—all in real time.

Over the years, I have collected lots of videos of the instruction in the drama strategies with real students in real classrooms and many of those videos become required viewing for completion of assignments.

In my courses that focus on practical applications, the students are then required to try out various drama strategies and photograph or video themselves in action with their students—and then share them with the class.

Here are the Drama courses we currently offer online during the academic year and in the summers:

DR507, Drama in Education, Part 1

DR509, Drama in Education, Part 2

DR524, Acting/Directing Workshop (Being re-named because this is more of a course about planning for the work of an after school theatre director)

DR526, The Teaching of Theatre

DR 575, Theatre Topics III - Asian Theatre

DR603, Western Theatre and Culture (Also offered as a hybrid course—online and in-person)

DR607, The History of Drama and Theatre in Education

Last week, DR507 – Drama in Education – met online and in person. Seven students attended the class session in the classroom in the Hartke Theatre complex and eight students signed on from as far away as North Carolina, Arizona, and Saudi Arabia. (The students are in the Catholic University MATE or Graduate Certificate in Creative Teaching through Drama programs.)

The newest addition to the success of this hybrid class meeting was a computer microphone I purchased. In the past, the students attending online had trouble hearing everyone in the classroom. I am pleased to report that my new microphone solved the problem beautifully! They could hear all of us and we could hear each of them. The interaction among all of us was clear and immediate.

Another solution I came up with for allowing our off-site attendees to see more of the classroom activities was to position an iPad at the back of the classroom and use that as an additional video camera. (See third column, middle photo.)

These photos show what the students on the screen looked like and what they and the in-person attendees looked like. This inspiring triumph of technology today only gets me wondering what the future holds for reaching students wherever they are!

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Just published—my article "A Dramatic Approach to Learning: Teaching in role!" I have been waiting since October to see the article in print and share the news. The Australian journal Literacy Learning: The Middle Years issued a call for manuscripts on the topic “Literacy and the Arts,” so I gathered all of the materials I created for teacher workshops and for my graduate Drama in Education courses and forged them into an article.

The journal holds the copyright on this new article, so I cannot share a link here, but I will share the abstract:

The discussion is dramatic. The teacher and the students are animated and focused, but they are not quite themselves....  This scene is brought to you by the process drama strategy Teacher-in-Role. Most instructions to teachers for using drama in the classroom are overwhelmingly minimal: ‘Have students act out…’ ‘Create a skit to illustrate…’ Successful use of effective drama strategies such as Teacher-in-Role by non-theatre teachers, however, requires far more than a one-sentence instruction. This article seeks to provide classroom teachers with a greater understanding of the many facets that contribute to the successful and manageable use of this drama strategy that supports and enhances literacy goals.

Within its 10 printed pages, my article (which appears within the journal’s PRACTICAL STRATEGIES section) details the planning, preparing, and playing of roles by teachers and students as a way to infuse drama into the exploration of curriculum topics. This is process drama—not the study of theatre or acting. This is process drama—an alternative and active way to deepen students’ understanding of texts and topics.

Anyone with access to a university library system can obtain a PDF of the article. Others can contact the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association.

My hope is that this article is a helpful contribution to the field of educational drama and an addition to the many other publications on Teacher-in-role.

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Teacher-in-role Article and Video