The traditional academic research paper isn't always the best form in which to judge student writing. When students are given a choice in form and genre, their true talents and creativity can be unleashed. Miller offers up classroom examples and ideas on how to let students express their creativity in writing literary papers, research papers, and…

This article compares and analyses factors that impact when creating a network on both online and live networking platforms, designed as spaces for artistic and critical engagement both within Africa and beyond. As I draw on the African Womens' Playwright Network as my example, I consider how we can acknowledge the materiality of the processes and…

In this study, analysis of video recordings of 5-year-old children's use of language and nonverbal modes of communication (e.g. gaze, action, gesture, and proximity) is used to examine how children contribute to sociodramatic play narratives and participate in the classroom peer culture. In their dramatic play at a restaurant play center and at a…

The participants in this study are 9-year-olds who demonstrate signs of incipient alienation. Even with an experienced teacher who had a positive relationship with her students, some students describe school as boring. The arts may provide a path away from alienation when learning is embedded in the students' cultural knowledge and when the…

In this article, I outline and theorize about a series of three lessons on playwriting I conducted in a secondary English Literature classroom in Singapore using drama improvisation strategies that I name drama-based playwriting, or DBP. I advance the argument that this genre of creative writing is best taught through the medium of drama so as to…

The theatre classroom is necessarily a space in dialogue with myths about the marginalisation of theatre as an art and theatre audiences as a public. It is precisely "because" theatre is a marginalised discipline that curricula should incorporate the processes by which the labour of theatre artists changes value and joins the mainstream;…

Edgar manages to invert the subordinate function of generally accepted objective indicators of membership of a particular national group--language, religion, common history, and territory--into the essential mode of imperative distinction shaping the unique national identity. In other words, it is the fresco and the value assigned to it that…

Eighteenth-century actor and playwright Eusebio Vela, long thought to be born in Mexico but actually born in Spain, dominated Mexico City's Coliseo theater for decades and has been variously interpreted as a creole patriot or as a Spanish propagandist. Vela's four extant plays, which treat the fall of Spain, Telemachus's wanderings in the…

In the United States, we tend to understand linguistic systems as separate and autonomous, and by this understanding, bilinguals are people who speak two different languages and switch between them. This understanding of bilingualism, however, does not reflect the reality of the way many bilinguals use language. Rather than "code-switch"…

"Dragons at the Snack Table" explores Magic Realism in relation to lived Applied Theatre spaces.

This paper explores an example of applied theatre and praxis learning in an Australian classroom with drama students aged 16-17 years which took the form of "real fiction" or social theatre monologue writing. It presents monologue responses from nine participants, altered by the researcher to protect identities and to tease out issues…

This article investigates how playwriting served three middle school Black girls within a larger practitioner research study seeking to better understand the literate practices of girls of color. It delves into the ways that playwriting provided the girls in an afterschool writing club opportunities to explore both their knowledge and ways of…

The following article explores how one researcher blended verbal and visual literacies to disrupt conceptualizations of traditional qualitative research. Engaging visual modalities as a research tool, the author invites readers into an a/r/tographical multimodal post qualitative journey that deeply explores the power and value of visual research.…

This article suggests how teaching artists can develop practical coursework in audio playwriting. To prepare students to work in the reemergent audio drama medium, the author created a seminar course called Radio Theatre Writing, taught at Arkansas Tech University in the fall of 2014. The course had three sections. First, it focused on…

The concept of the 'creative' in creative writing has a vexed history. This article explores the myths surrounding creativity and how they have influenced the way teachers have approached playwriting pedagogy. It reports on research into the teaching and learning experiences of students and teachers in secondary schools, focusing on the…