This essay considers the performance context and aesthetics of "Journey Woman", a play devised to initiate a week-long rehabilitative groupwork programme for female prisoners. Although Geese Theatre UK are one of the country's longest-established companies specialising in drama work within the criminal justice sector, this 2006 piece is their…

When we speak of quality in drama education, we apply different educational and aesthetic criteria. For example, improvised drama practices such as process drama, are closely associated to John Dewey's constructivist philosophy. What makes a drama qualitatively "good" within such a framework differs radically from criteria that are familiar in…

In July 1999, the Wedding Community Play was performed in Belfast. A much-celebrated event at the time, the Wedding Play took audiences into private houses inside Loyalist and Republican estates, then on to a public venue for the performance of a cross-community wedding. Gerri Moriarty has already written about some of the difficulties encountered…

Recorded footage of counselling sessions with real clients can be a valuable educational resource that gives training counsellors the opportunity to analyse the theories and practices they encounter in their education. However, the use of such material raises complex ethical issues: what are the safeguards against the misuse of the material? Can…

In this paper, the authors consider early results from their ethnographic research in urban drama classrooms by parsing the aesthetic and social imperatives at play in the classroom. Moved by the observation that teachers and students alike seem to be pursuing elusive aesthetic and social ideals, the authors draw on Judith Butler's notion of…

This article juxtaposes the recent work of Peter Brook with a Bristol-based mental health service-user collective--Stepping Out Theatre Company. Informed by field-work with the company, this chapter explores the aesthetic and political relationship between professional, experimental theatre work and community-based performance practice. Drawing…

In the autumn of 2007 and spring of 2008 the author performed an adapted version of Dario Fo and Franca Rame's one-woman play "Peace Mom" (retitled for Canadian audiences as "Peace Mum") about American mother and peace activist Cindy Sheehan. The play was performed for University of Victoria Applied Theatre students and also in a number of…

The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah (the Blahs) have been working in youth centres since 1985 and over that time the Blahs have experimented with ways to make theatre for young people in this environment. A youth centre can be a hostile place to take a piece of theatre. Many of the youth centres the Blahs have visited have been in areas of social…

In September 2008 the author created an encounter between herself and Rick Walker, the Director of Cartwheel Arts, a small community arts company in Rochdale, in the North West of England. As one of the three founding workers of what was then Cartwheel Community Arts in 1984, she hoped to create a conversation which recollected or traced some of…

About 60% of Nigerians live in rural areas with poor access roads and health facilities, near-absent communication media, unemployment, alienation and disempowerment by the political leadership. This scenario has excluded the rural Nigerian from meaningful participation in development action. A bottom-up participatory approach to…

This address was given as the final-day keynote of the Sixth International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) in Sydney, 2009. Using the Institute's title as his theme, O'Toole briefly surveys the growth of drama education research of the last two decades, and the changing landscape of practice and research. He then conducts an…

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…

This paper, delivered at the International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) conference in Sydney in July 2009, explores the outcomes of a project designed to apply the applied theatre techniques developed for the Acting Against Bullying programme to the specific problem of covert or hidden bullying by adolescent girls. Conducted in a…

The research reported here brings together three settings of conceptual and methodological inquiry: the sociological setting of socio-economic theory; the curricular/pedagogic setting of educational drama; and the analytic setting of ethnomethodolgically informed analyses of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Students…

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…