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.

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.

Pre-service drama teachers enter teacher training with established ideas and beliefs about teaching. These beliefs, based on experience, are informed by many hours spent in schools, and the pedagogies – both effective and ineffective – utilised by their teachers. This research explores the influence of some of these prior experiences on pre-service drama teachers’ beliefs about teaching drama, this being important in the way that not only shapes their practicum experiences, but also what will then influence their own teaching of drama. Individual interviews with four pre-service drama teachers revealed the complexity and dynamics of these participants’ lived experience with narrative portraits constructed as part of the process of inquiry. This process not only built on the ways that knowledge is constructed, and the beliefs and values that underscore these, but also how these are shared and made known. Three key beliefs emerged. First, drama both provides and creates a sense of belonging: belonging being key for students and integral to the work of drama teachers. Second, drama education can promote self-discovery and personal development, having therefore the potential to transform lives. Third, effective drama teachers are valued as hardworking, highly skilled professionals dedicated to bringing out their students’ potential. This paper emphasises the importance for pre-service drama teachers to be aware of how their beliefs and subjectivities both influence their own experiences, and consequently have influence over the ways they work with students in the drama space.

Arts education in Western Australian primary schools consist of learning opportunities outlined by mandated curriculum. However, assumptions underlying this curriculum involving access, resources and support impact schools’ capacity to implement the curriculum without them being adequately addressed by the written curriculum. Drawing on the policy enactment theory of Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012), four contextual variables (situated contexts, professional cultures, material contexts and external factors) are used to highlight the differences between the written published curriculum and the implemented, practised curriculum. Drawing on interviews with 24 participants across four schools issues of geographic location, use of arts specialists, appropriate learning spaces and the stresses associated with mandated literacy and numeracy testing are reported as contextual pressures by this study. This paper details the disruptive interference of these contextual pressures that we describe as ‘noise’. The provision of a better understanding of this contextual landscape brings schools and teachers away from the ‘noise’ of disruption and closer to curriculum harmony.

This article reports critical reflections on the history, evolution and future of drama in education In New Zealand and Australia by two veterans of its history. Robin Pascoe and Janinka Greenwood have both been actively involved in national developments and International collaborations for over 40 years and have each played central roles in shaping international dialogues and in evolving national platforms for practice and debate. They engaged in a series of on-line dialogues and report a distillation of their discussions and emergent theorisations of community, history, place, pedagogy and evolving personhood as they are manifest through our lived experiences in the field. In this article they report on the following related areas of (1) drama teacher education and drama curriculum implementation, (2) cross-cultural needs, doubts and possibilities in drama education and (3) the value, and perhaps danger, of diversities in knowledge and practice from international engagement.