In this paper I offer a queer analysis of several key moments during a Mantle of the Expert (MoE) project that resulted in Year 5 children creating performances and engaging with heightened versions of gendered femininity in their primary school. I will refer to theoretical notions of transvestism as a means of challenging the notions of binarism,…

This article reports on an impact assessment study, conducted between 2007 and 2009, of the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario's (ETFO) Poverty and Education Project, an intervention which encouraged educators to challenge their assumptions about poverty and explore collaborative opportunities to mitigate the effects of poverty in their…

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnival theory, this article focuses on specific outcomes of a research project the author undertook in Hong Kong, where drama pedagogy has been recently introduced into the official curriculum. It investigates the ways in which laughter, noise, jokes, frolic and popular literacies commonly appear in classrooms where…

In recent decades a number of Australian artists and teacher/artists have given serious attention to the creation of performance forms and performance engagement models that respect children's intelligence, engage with themes of relevance, avoid the cliches of children's theatre whilst connecting both sincerely and playfully with current…

The rationale for this study is that students' views on their own learning play an integral part in their educational journeys. Students' voice has been gaining recognition as a vehicle for cultivating ownership of learning, restoring classroom dialogue, and developing strategies for school improvement. These benefits echo the pedagogical purposes…

The article chronicles and discusses "A Big Blue Whale's Dream," one of the first major theatre-in-education (TIE) projects commissioned by local and governmental cultural foundations in South Korea. Designed specifically for the non-disabled fifth and sixth graders of Inclusive Classes to enhance their awareness and perception towards the…

When children come together to play dramatically they are involved in the creation of an improvised text. This text emerges spontaneously via the moment-by-moment contributions of individual players who must operate in a highly collaborative way in order to achieve cohesion. This paper reports on a research project involving several groups of 11-…

The context for this paper is an on-going research project that sets out to examine the use of educational drama in the teaching of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the upper stages of primary school. The drama lessons link with some of the key aims in ESD, with a particular locus in the Scottish education system. As 2005-15 has been…

This paper outlines research which examined the relationship between drama and writing, detailing the method of enquiry, theoretical foundations and emergent findings. The study sought to understand the nature of the support that drama offers children as writers and to identify features of writing which regularly surfaced in drama-related writing.…

How do young children learn to write? What types of instruction best facilitate the composing processes of young learners and what role could educational drama play in these processes? In this article, the author argues that the current inquiry into developmental processes of children's writing has neglected to consider both the role and the value…

On 21 September 1999, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan destroyed more than 100,000 houses, causing 2,294 deaths and 8,737 injuries. In the aftermath of the earthquake, a great number of social workers and cultural workers were thrust into Nantou County and Taichung County of central Taiwan, the epicentre of the earthquake, to assist the…

This article reports on research which examined the impact of The National Theatre's Transformation drama project on young pupils' reading, mathematics, attitude, self-concept and creative writing in primary schools. Two of the schools taking part in Transformation were matched to two Control schools in the first two years of the project.…