Drawing on data from an empirical study of three matched subjects in upper secondary school and further education college in Scotland, this article explores some of the factors that result in differences emerging from the translation of the prescribed curriculum into the enacted curriculum. We argue that these differences raise important questions…

While various recent studies have sounded the alarm about young people's civic and political participation, schools are often cited as an important means of counteracting this trend. Not only do schools prepare students for the "real" world but they also provide them with essential resources required for political participation. However, it is not…

This study focuses on 20 mentoring pairs in an Israeli teacher training program in order to determine in which ways matched and mismatched expectations of the role of the cooperating teacher between student teachers and cooperating teachers contribute to different opportunities for learning to teach. Perceptions of learning reported in student…

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…

Drama is often used as a tool to investigate experience and to assist people to rehearse for change. Dramatic portrayals, however, can reinforce rather than challenge limiting stereotypes, and there is the potential for a positivist approach to research through drama to contribute to a pathologising of the subject and to limit the possibility of…

This short paper considers the question: what of the future of drama in education? It suggests that perhaps, because we are artists, the future is already in play. If that is so, then we need to address those questions of value, advocacy and marginalisation more rigorously while, at the same time, addressing the impact of technology on empathic…

This paper offers a brief reading of the history of theatre education and applied theatre as a way to reflect on the principles and values that have informed their development. It argues that a critical genealogy of this history suggests that theatrical experiments in educational and community settings have always responded creatively and…

Drama research poses many challenges, due mainly to its ephemeral and spontaneous nature. Many researchers therefore turn to video to support their investigations, but these recordings are not always capable of capturing the richness of the live event itself. In response, this paper proposes that researchers need to explore ways to enhance the…

The study addressed three goals: (1) to operationalise the theoretical construct of children's appraisal of teacher as a secure base, (2) to examine the association between children's global attachment orientations towards others and their appraisal of teacher as a secure base, and (3) to investigate the contribution of this appraisal to…

In Design and Technology lessons English primary school pupils between the ages of 5 and 11 learn to design and make artefacts with materials and tools. Teachers, mainly non-specialists, are expected to teach specific skills, knowledge and understanding in contexts which are deemed to be meaningful to the pupils. In 1996 a set of primary school…

This study examines the interaction between gender and the effect on student learning of working alone or in either single or mixed-sex pairs. Sixty-eight A-level students (mean age 16.8 years), all attending mixed-sex schools, took part in a task which incorporated a number of basic learning processes. They worked alone or in either single or…