- Title
- To the syllabus and beyond: Young people learning through theatre making in Australian schools
- Creator
- Walsh, Katy; Hatton, Christine
- Relation
- Routledge Companion to Theatre and Young People p. 353-368
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003149965-1
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- The practice of making theatre with young people has long been a cornerstone of Australian drama pedagogy, particularly in schools and other educational contexts such as youth theatre. The development of devised drama in schools runs parallel with the broader development of drama as a curriculum subject in recent decades. When positioned inside the school curriculum, ‘playbuilding’, or ‘devised theatre’, is often placed centrally as one of the key processes necessary for learning in drama. In the Australian curriculum context, drama is a school subject that privileges student-centred experiential learning. Students’ experience of being ‘in’ and creating the work is central to learning dramatic skills and concepts, and understanding the art form. This is in contrast to the more literary approach to studying plays as printed texts in English, where they are often conceived as text types, separated from the liveness of the stage, the audience, and the context that informed the plays. In Australian drama classrooms, the learning is active, embodied, and shared as collaboration drives the experiential work. In many countries where there is a prescribed drama curriculum, there is a consistent emphasis on co-creation and shared meaning-making, where collaborative imaginative inquiry with students is critical to the unique learning processes of drama. This ‘lived through’ learning experience occurs irrespective of the pedagogical approach taken in drama, whether the focus is devising a play for performance or an experiential process drama, where students work inside the improvised play and its co-constructed fctional context. This imagining together is a critical part of drama learning, part of the ‘social dreaming’ (Bird et al. 2017) of the experience of learning in and through drama as an art form. The doing and co-creating are often core to drama learning. So, in this sense, we would argue that ‘playbuilding’, as it is termed in the New South Wales drama curriculum, or ‘devised theatre’ as it is described elsewhere, is often central to students’ drama learning experiences. In their drama subject learning, a ‘play’ of some kind is collaboratively made, shared, and experienced. In the New South Wales formal drama curriculum, students are also assessed on their creative and critical capacities to ‘make’, ‘perform’ and ‘appreciate’ drama throughout their classroom playbuilding projects.
- Subject
- youth theatre; drama; curriculum; learning
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1476023
- Identifier
- uon:49723
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781003149965
- Language
- eng
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