John Carroll - another huge loss to drama education
With great sorrow we report the death of John Carroll, the internationally outstanding Australian drama practitioner whose work provided inspiration for drama teachers around the world.
John, who studied with Dorothy Heathcote, was Professor of Communication Research at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, New South Wales. He was very active in our sister association, Drama Australia, and was a past Director of Publicitions.
He had a particular research interest in drama and mediated performance that focused on the relationship between live and digital performance, especially interactive online forms and his many publications included the influential Real Players: Drama Technology and Education, and Drama education with Digital Technology, both co-authored with Michael Anderson and David Cameron.
The dramas he made with students of all ages combining process drama and technology were quite simply inspirational. His death is a huge loss to our field.
John O'Toole writes:
John was in many ways the senior drama scholar/practitioner in Australia: among the first of us to look much beyond the practice (of which he was a master); the first serious, systematic researcher; the first to hold a PhD (I believe he was Dorothy Heathcote’s only supervisee, and his ‘Dr Lister’ PhD research has become a classic reference point in our movement.
The work on framing he did with Dorothy and since then, elaborating her ideas, is central to the theory and practice of drama education and applied theatre today, and a vital influence on the work. His deep sense of social justice was the spur for numerous admirable projects based on drama and communication with disadvantaged and troubled communities. More recently, he has led the pioneering of the wonderfully promising fusion of drama and IC technologies; I hope his collaborators will take the work onwards to the visions he had for it.
He was still speaking animatedly, passionately and as articulately as ever of those visions last Friday when I visited him – with no idea that the end was so close. Drugged to the eyeballs and weak as a kitten, he was still his usual gutsy self – talking shop for over an hour, including his ongoing research projects, his forthcoming publication, generously and courteously acknowledging my own work and that of others of our colleagues – we chewed the fat about IDIERI 2009, Auckland last year and the forthcoming IDIERI in Limerick.
So soon, ironically so, after Dorothy, who was passionate, articulate and forward-looking to the end too. I hope they meet up somewhere – there’ll be plenty to crack on about for those two well-mantled experts, one with a real ale in his hands, the other with a cup of tea in hers.