Robin Pascoe

This study utilised Mezirow's Transformative Learning framework to explore drama teachers' and pre-service drama teachers' perceptions of transformation in the drama space. The research specifically examined three core questions: 1. Who are transformed? 2. What is transformed? 3. How does transformation happen? Adopting a phenomenological qualitative approach, we analysed interview data from eight drama teachers and 22 pre-service drama teachers in Western Australia. Findings indicate that participation in school-based drama activities fosters transformations (and perceptions of transformation) in self-confidence, personal values, and willingness to take creative risks. Beyond teaching performance skills, drama cultivates deeper understandings of self and others, offering enduring benefits that reach far beyond the classroom. This research makes explicit the taken-for-granted assumptions of drama as a transformative experience.

In my work in curriculum and teacher education, I have observed that the most powerful change agent for a teacher is another teacher (van der Heijden, Beijaard, Geldens, & Popeijus, 2018). Programmed professional learning and initial teacher education courses, as well-intentioned as they might be, cannot match the power of story of lived experience. Teachers listen to the stories of others even when they are sometimes shared incidentally and anecdotally. Stories are the lifeblood of building effective Communities of Practice. These stories produce purposeful benefits that contribute systematically understanding “quality education”.

This paper argues for using two story-based approaches to enliven and spark reflective change in teachers. Case Stories (Norris, McCammon, & Miller, 2000) vividly told, sitting alongside Critical Incidents (Tripp, 1993/2012) as powerful situated reflection, provide two lenses for teacher reflection and action. Used together they carry similar power and purpose when used with intentionality in changing future practice.

From the mid-twentieth century in Australia there has been a remarkable growth in drama teacher education founded on emerging theory and practice. In this chapter, I explore characteristics of effective drama teacher education, based on my own drama teacher education and my experiences of setting up a greenfield drama teacher education course. In that process, focus groups were used to identify gaps and strengths in knowledge, skills and values. The drama education course designed focused on drama education as field, theory, history and practice. At this point in the twenty-first century, there are signs of shifting priorities in universities and school curriculum implementation that challenge this model of drama teacher education. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic adds complexity. “Traditional” university-based drama teacher education is being tested through innovations observed in Singapore, North America and Turkey. Dilemmas in drama teacher education are contextualised in a discussion of “abyssal thinking” and how drama teacher educators can respond through robust schema for drama teacher education.

Arts specialist teachers have a unique place in primary schools. They are often the sole teacher responsible for an entire learning area and hence commonly provide leadership and drive the curriculum implementation of the arts in and for their school. This responsibility finds us asking questions about the ability of arts specialist teachers to create professional agency in an increasingly challenging school environment. Using a narrative portraiture approach, and seven propositions for professional agency, we focus on a single teacher in order to consider how both individual and structural elements are understood from the perspective of an arts specialist. Conditions explored include relationships, time, purpose and constraints, work-related identity, experiences, and work communities. Challenges such as isolation, ongoing support and the development of community are highlighted as potential difficulties in the process of developing agency. The study contributes to an understanding of the personal cost and potential growth the development of professional agency provides.

The landscape of arts education is changing, with an increased focus on collaborative partnerships between schools and arts sectors for the purpose of creating richer arts education − both process and products. Using a combination of phenomenology and autoethnography, this research explores how one particular form of arts education partnerships function in order to consider the enablers and constraints to working effectively together. The study draws on data from interviews of eight key education (School Professionals) and industry staff (Industry Professionals based at a professional venue) and the first author’s reflective journal conducted over a ten-day period during the staging of a high school musical. The findings reveal how traditional roles and practices are being re-visioned and reshaped to encompass both industry and education values connecting aesthetic quality with educational outcomes. The result of these partnerships at their best, produce not only richer experiences for students, and deep learning, but also closer industry and education relationships that are inclusive, productive and mutually beneficial. © 2019, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. All rights reserved.

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Butler’s concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and heterosexually striated space of the drama classroom. These post-humanist analyses are useful methodological tools for mapping the complexities of student becomings in the space context of the secondary school. We also show how Foucault’s governmentality and Ball’s theory of competitive performativity are particularly salient in the context of immanent capitalism that shapes the desires of its subjects. These frameworks, when combined, can be useful in critiquing neoliberal educational assemblages and in indicating emerging deterritorializations and lines of flight in teachers and students.

Support, professional guidance and modelling of teaching practice offered by quality mentor teachers are important components in preparing teachers for the profession. Yet research confirms the impact of poor mentoring on pre-service teachers’ developing pedagogy. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study with pre-service drama teachers and their mentors as a way of better understanding how mentoring impacts their developing pedagogy, in a learning area that is highly interactive and relational. Data comprised of observations of planning and teaching, participant interviews, journals and field notes representing five pre-service drama teachers’ experience of mentors during an extended teaching practicum. These data revealed the considerable variance and disparities in mentoring styles and quality and the repercussions for the pre-service drama teachers. The discussion addresses the implications of these findings in light of those mentor attributes identified as most conducive to creating competent and confident beginning drama teachers.

In time-poor and pressured teaching environments, some classroom teachers look for immediate and simple solutions to resourcing their arts teaching. Online platforms, such as Pinterest, seem to offer ready-made answers for these teachers, however, a lack of criticality can underscore the unexamined ‘advantages’ of such accessible resources. Accessibility and lack of confidence for time poor teachers are two key issues in understanding why teachers prefer online platforms for the sourcing of arts teaching resources rather than curriculum documents written for them by ‘curriculum experts’. Critically competent curriculum decisions require informed knowing about value and how the decision impacts on practice and student learning and in this way criticality and connoisseurship are important capabilities that constantly need to be strengthened in a digitally mediated world. Combined in an arts context and drawing on interviews with 16 classroom teachers, criticality and connoisseurship are two key concepts used to highlight the systemic issues of context, value and pedagogy that impact on teacher’s practice. Suggestions for increasing teachers’ criticality and connoisseurship are explored as important pathways for improving arts learning for young people.

Purpose, value, and practice are three key concepts in understanding curriculum implementation in arts education. When these three concepts work in harmony, the alignment provides a framework for successful arts curriculum implementation. This study highlights how these concepts are often misaligned with competition between the translation of purpose as stated in curriculum documents, mediated through competing values shown by teachers, principals and the community, the realities of teaching, and the everyday life of schools. Key to understanding the impact of a misaligned arts education is the intersection of purpose––the why of arts learning; value––the beliefs about what is worth knowing in terms of curriculum authorities and teacher’s beliefs; and practice––the actuality or how of arts learning. A purpose, value, and practice framework is explored using a qualitative methodology drawing on the experiences of 20 primary school teachers across four schools in Western Australia. The ways that each of these three key concepts manifest provides insights into what can improve authentic arts learning for young people in schools. Additionally, the centrality of the teacher to the teaching learning process, and time allocation commitments by teachers and schools are discussed as key considerations of curriculum implementation misalignment.