Editorial
Welcome to this special issue of Drama Research!
https://doi.org/10.64741/145958xvjozp
This special issue has arisen from the request by the organisers of the Dorothy Heathcote Now Conference 2024 to publish contributions from that Conference in this journal. We welcome the opportunity to feature such a range and quality of articles. The themes of that conference, which took place at Goldsmiths, University of London in November 2024, were ‘Agency and Empowerment’ and the articles in this edition reflect these themes, which are so relevant in the world today, with forces at work that are intent on denying human rights: even the right to live.
It is to be expected that an edition of a journal which has originated from a conference focusing on the work of Dorothy Heathcote will contain a body of work which reflects this focus: and so it does. And it is also not surprising that the work of this great educator fits very well with these themes: so much of her practice enabled both agency and empowerment in all those that she worked with.
The keynote of the Dorothy Heathcote Now Conference 2024, delivered by Brian Edmiston, is reproduced here as an introduction to the themes and to some features of the work of Dorothy Heathcote. In Humanizing Teaching with Dramatic Inquiry Brian Edmiston outlines five ‘Big Ideas’: Humanizing Dialogue; Managing an inquiry project to learn about aspects of life in another world; Directing an ensemble; Leading an ensemble on a journey; Mentoring individuals to accomplish more than they could alone. His keynote is a very personal account, drawing on his own experiences to illustrate these ideas and how they relate to aspects of agency and empowerment, especially those that were manifest in the teaching of Dorothy Heathcote. One episode, described in the ‘Leading an ensemble on a journey’ section took place when he worked with Dorothy Heathcote at Earl’s House with a group of SEND adults:
When Dorothy believes that they are ready for a more intense encounter she nods at me, and I appear as King Herod brandishing my grandfathers’ blackthorn stick.
I’m yelling
Where are the babies?
Tom and others leap forward to get between Herod and the women holding the babies.
They yell at him to go away.
There are cheers when I-as-Herod slink off.
This little episode vividly illustrates how an imagined context can create opportunities for agency and empowerment for those in society who rarely get such opportunities: classic hallmarks of Heathcote’s work.
Tim Taylor further illuminates Heathcote’s practice in The Different Voices of the Teacher in Mantle of the Expert: Developing Community and Student agency. He identifies three key voices that are available to teachers in Mantle of the Expert contexts: teacher as facilitator, teacher as narrator, and teacher in role. His article draws on the workshop he delivered at the conference to illustrate these different voices by inducting the participants into a Mantle of the Expert scenario aimed at creating a museum to celebrate the work of a nineteenth-century businessman and philanthropist named Henry Milward. His article emphasizes the importance of what Heathcote referred to as ‘inductive language’: the art of inviting students to engage with situations rather than dictating terms of engagement. His article explores the pedagogical tension between maintaining coherence and allowing student agency in Mantle of the Expert.
This balance between agency and structure is central to the approach. While students make choices and take on responsibilities within the fiction, the teacher ensures that these experiences align with the curriculum.
It is this ‘inductive’ approach to teaching and learning that inspired Nikki Doig to first explore the value of using Mantle of the Expert. In her article, The impact of Mantle of the Expert on pre-service teachers’ pedagogical drama confidence in primary education, she refers to an introductory course by Tim Taylor:
What resonated with me most during that initial introduction was that, rather than the imposition upon pupils of a teacher-constructed narrative, the foundation of dramatic inquiry in Heathcote’s models, including Mantle, is an agreement ‘to work through invented and agreed fiction’ (Heathcote 2002: 1).
Her article describes a research project she has carried out with her Primary students in Scotland, a country which, unlike England, features Drama as a discrete subject in its curriculum. Despite this,
the quality of the delivery of drama within Scottish primary education can be varied, with many teaching students observing no drama at all on school placements (Killen and Cooney 2015; McNaughton 2015).
The lack of confidence that her students expressed about teaching drama became the springboard for her research, which produced some interesting and positive results about the efficacy of Mantle of the Expert in remedying this, in what she acknowledges was a limited sample.
By way of contrast, in Dorothy Heathcote: From ‘Learning About’ to ‘Learning From and For’ the Other David Allen and Agata Hendry take a view on Heathcote that is not about, or through, the filter of one of the ‘models of co-constructed knowledge’ like Mantle of the Expert. Their article
proposes a re-reading of Heathcote’s work through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, often described as the philosopher of the Other.
Their article makes the case that they share a central pedagogical orientation:
both of them saw education as a form of ‘laboratory,’ dedicated, not to shared meaning-making, but to exteriority: to ‘the “elsewhere” and the “otherwise” and the “other”’ (Levinas 1979: 33).
The authors provide quite a comprehensive, and useful, outline of the complexities of Levinas’s philosophy and how it relates, for instance, to the educational outlook of Vygotsky and others; and contrasts with the neoliberal agenda for education with its promotion of managerial theories and practices. In their search for a, clearly desirable, Levinasian model for education, ‘in which the aim is not the transfer or co-construction of knowledge, but the creation of conditions for ethical encounter’, they evaluate Heathcote’s philosophy and practice, particularly through the examples of the ‘Gardeners of Grantley’ and ‘The Treatment of Dr Lister’ projects, and affirm that her work is an expression of just such ‘ethical encounters’. Their conclusion has implications for drama educators:
For those involved in drama education, Levinas’s philosophy offers more than an abstract ethics—it provides a guiding orientation that can fundamentally reshape pedagogical practice.
Ihsan Metinnam’s article A Comparison of Brian Way and Dorothy Heathcote’s Approaches to Theatre: Stanislavski and Brecht offers a historical overview of the influences on Brian Way and Dorothy Heathcote and
seeks to clarify both the divergences and the commonalities between these two seminal figures.
Using printed, auditory, and visual documents about the two practitioners as his source, the author gives an overview of the field from the earliest pioneers, Harriet Finlay-Johnson and Caldwell Cook:
While Johnson and Cook initiated drama as a pedagogical method within the classroom, Slade and Way foregrounded the role of drama in fostering individuality and personal development. Heathcote, in turn, introduced a paradigmatic shift by emphasising drama as a process of inquiry grounded in social, political, and critical dimensions.
The author features this shift in graphically in a table identifying a ‘Development oriented model’ (Way) with a ‘Dialogue-oriented model’ (Heathcote) and gives a succinct summary:
The development-oriented model reflects a more romantic, introspective perspective that prioritises individuality and difference, while the dialogue-oriented model represents a more extroverted, collectivist perspective that emphasises shared perceptions of the external world.
The article is a comprehensive and valuable comparison of these two pioneers of drama education, and concludes
it is evident that the development of these pioneering approaches has been deeply shaped by the socio-economic, cultural, and political needs of their respective historical moments.
One important feature of Heathcote’s practice is, of course, teaching in role. In Two Minds and Two bodies: what happens when we think in role? Amanda Kipling seeks to analyse the process of ‘thinking in role’. Her study has as its centre the remark of one of her ex-students, anonymised as ‘Kiara’ who reflected on her drama lessons:
Drama helped me escape my reality and face it at the same time.
Why Kiara made that statement is revealed in a recorded interview sequence with Kiara which is reproduced in this journal:
K…I can’t remember what lesson at drama …but we done something to get into each other’s roles but one person had to be me and I had to be them. I can’t remember what exactly it was but all of us had to be somebody else
AK Hm hm
K and there’s this person acting me and that.. that’s not me I don’t like that… surely that’s not me
AK Really?
K Yeah. I didn’t like that very much so I started to change my ways and my ways of thinking on how I was going to get past that. I didn’t like that person…
Kiara’s disturbance at her student colleague’s performance of her: ‘I didn’t like that person..’ stimulated a journey of transformation through drama for her which enabled her paradoxical statement above. In an attempt to understand the nature of that journey, Kipling calls on theorists from a range of disciplines: Stanislavsky, Vygotsky, Bolton, Heathcote, Hume, O’Neill, and Merleau-Ponty. She provides a vignette for each of them, applying their perceived theory to the ongoing exploration of Kiara’s statement and her predicament in drama. It is a fascinating series of vignettes which act like a series of lenses at work on the material of Kiara’s story.
We are generally familiar with Bolton’s assertion that in drama we are ‘…holding two worlds in mind at the same time’ (Bolton 1984: 141): this article is a further affirmation of the truth of this and an examination of it. The article is a fascinating, original record of exploration of an elusive area of understanding: the power of drama to transform. In Kipling’s conclusion she returns to O’Neill who embraces
all the aspects exposed and explored here by reminding us of the vital and unique learning which drama offers us all – actors, researchers and teachers alike that to engage in drama is to engage in ‘the process of becoming’ (O’Neill 1985: 161).
Another contribution to this edition that takes a story as its focus of discussion is Using narrative analysis to create story drama with Jon Fosse’s fairy tale The Fiddler Girl as example by Stig A. Eriksson. It, too, draws on the practice of Dorothy Heathcote as well as that of the late David Booth and Cecily O’Neill. In this article the author
employs narrative analysis inspired by Russian Formalism to explore content and form of Jon Fosse’s illustrated children’s book, The Fiddler Girl [Spelejenta] (2009).
The story is truly a tale of agency and empowerment: a young child and her violin overcomes great challenges to rescue her father, stranded on a skerry, or small island. Eriksson poses three research questions:
‘How can narrative analysis be employed to identify story structures, character functions and form registers in the tale?’
‘How are elements from the folkloristic fairy tale tradition applied by Fosse in his tale?’ and
‘How can this be applied in creating a story drama?’
One very useful tool in his analytical toolbox is his differentiation of ‘story’ and ‘plot’ or fabula and syuzhet ‘as practiced in Russian formalism’:
Through narrative analysis, I have found the distinction between story and plot to be very useful for a drama teacher (Eriksson 2006).
His article creates a detailed analytical chart for each of these concepts as they relate to the story; and a third chart then gives a detailed analysis of the session he delivered at the conference: a virtual lesson plan ready to be used to develop a story drama lesson. This style of article very much reminds me of his article, ‘Hills like white elephants: a drama conventions approach to short-story’, following his presentation at the Dorothy Heathcote Now Conference 2023 in Aberdeen, where a similar, very attractive, structure of article is employed[1]. His article concludes with a recommendation:
I contend that a text-based approach can be well accommodated within the genre of story drama/process drama. There is still room for improvisation, and the dramatic enactment becomes enriched by enhanced aesthetic quality when based on text material.
In his article, Practitioners’ reflections on dramatic co-creation with children, Bob Selderslaghs reports on his workshop at the conference which was in two sessions: the first session
introduced the participants to a fictional context using a video clip from a 1973 news broadcast about escaped baboons in an animal park (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid 2012)
which the group explored using Heathcote’s system of conventions. The second session engaged thirteen participants in the following questions about co-creation:
In what observable behaviours do agency and empowerment manifest in children?
What do you do to enable co-creation with children (personal actions)?
What hinders co-creation with children?
What questions and/or uncertainties do you have regarding co-creation with children?
These questions were then explored using The Nominal Group Technique, a structured system which is designed to achieve group consensus and action planning. Participants started individually and in silence with their own reflections, then moved on to various stages of group sharing on large sheets of paper, which the author photographed and features in his article. What was most remarkable as a result of this process of analysis is that
By far, the most dominant theme in barriers to co-creation was fear (7 votes), with associated concerns spanning students, teachers, institutions, culture, and performance expectations
While acknowledging the limitations on the study with such a small sample the research reflected in the article suggests that there are lessons to be learned about how to encourage agency in young people:
If fear is indeed a dominant barrier to agency, then reducing high-stakes assessment pressures, increasing institutional flexibility, and fostering teacher autonomy should be prioritised.
Whether such priorities will happen is, of course, another question altogether.
One fear that parents commonly have in thinking of their child’s future when they are choosing their options for GCSE and A Level is that the Drama option ‘won’t help you get a job’: better stick to ‘less risky’ options. But is that true? Christina Zourna’s research project, reflected in her article, Drama in Education in Career Guidance and Counselling: enhancing teenagers’ agency and empowerment set out to question that assumption, which students often make themselves. Her project sought to explore three questions:
a) What is the impact of Drama in Education on career decision-making self-efficacy?
b) What is the impact of Drama in Education on career decision-making skills?
c) Which career skills can be developed through Drama in Education and how?
The research of these questions was conducted with high schools in Eastern Thessalonika, Greece, where 40 students were selected to participate in two groups: an experimental group, which engaged with Drama in Education as an exploration method of career issues, and a control group. The research followed a ‘mixed method’ (part quantitative, part qualitative) paradigm, processed by open-source software in each case. The experimental group worked in teams of four: each team selected career issues that its members unanimously decided to explore through drama and devised social or work scenarios for the other members of the group to participate in. The author reports:
the students of the experimental group developed many career skills at a statistically significant level: self-appraisal, career scheduling, goal setting, risk taking, crisis, time and stress management, problem solving, social skills, leadership skills, being out of comfort zone, public performance, digital skills, information gathering about the self and the others, and decision-making skills.
Not only does this research, conducted with schools in Greece, endorse the claims of Drama to support the agency and empowerment of secondary school students, but also this significant research outcome seems to provide teachers with a powerful argument why Drama may well be the best subject option for students to choose ‘to help them get a job.’
Another international study that affirmed the efficacy of Drama to foster agency and empowerment, this time in a higher education setting in China, is Theatre Education in ShanghaiTech University: A case study of Liberal Arts Education in China by Shuangshuang Cai. While there is an ancient tradition of liberal arts education in China predating Confucius, whose Analects of Confucius emphasised ‘education without discrimination’, the author observes that ‘theatre education is notably absent’:
Chinese higher education increasingly resembles what John Henry Newman critiqued as a ‘factory’ (1873/2013: 145), where students specialize solely to secure post-graduation employment.
Zourna’s article has an echo in Cai’s reflection on the status of theatre in Chinese Universities:
This narrow focus neglects holistic development, dismissing modules like theatre as useless for future careers.
Her research questions for her study at ShanghaiTech University were:
Does theatre education help university students explore and enjoy the joy of liberal arts modules? Does theatre education still effectively stimulate university students’ imagination and cultivate their enthusiasm for creativity and expression? Is there a need to innovate the form and content of higher education in China? If so, can this module serve as a reference model?
The author outlines her Performing Arts module, providing examples of interactions with students, lecturers and audiences and the evaluation scheme and tabulates an impressive success rate regarding student satisfaction with the course. The article provides a rare insight into the challenges to the development of drama/theatre education in that country and demonstrates a plucky determination to continue asking questions of its system of higher education and trust that her work in the field will
act as a revolutionary precursor to broader educational reform.
I round off my editorial by introducing The Mythological Onça Pintada: A Process Drama with Children about Threatened Brazilian Biomes by Renata Ferreira da Silva, Flávia Janiaski, Heitor Martins Oliveira, Mariene Perobelli and Wellington Menegaz.
This article presents the potential of drama in primary education (6-7 years old) to foster a connection between children, teachers, and researchers with nature, imagination, and the wisdom of traditional Brazilian cultures.
The process drama project it describes involved three Brazilian universities and took place between 2023-2025 in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, a state that is notorious for
wildfires, deforestation, attacks on Indigenous lands and peoples, heavy agrochemical use, unregulated agricultural expansion, mercury contamination from mining, and water shortages in Indigenous communities.
The leaders of the project devised a pre-text: the Onça Pintada of the title is a mythological jaguar, guardian of the Guarani Aquifer, a huge underground reservoir of clean water.
The temperature of the water in this immense aquifer, considered one of the largest on the planet, is rising, endangering all living beings on the surface. To protect the aquifer, the Onça Pintada seeks help, especially from children, who must care for nature. For this reason, it rises to the Earth’s surface.
The article records a step-by-step account of a fascinating process drama project in two episodes with children aged 6-7 years at the Municipal Rui Barbosa School in the city of Caarapó. The adults facilitated the drama by working in roles of local animals: Rattlesnake, Capybara, Macaw, and Onça Pintada; and as an audiovisual crew producing a documentary about the appearance of a mythological Onça Pintada in the city; and the children acted as investigators and guardians of nature. Their drama adventure empowered them at every turn: each animal they encountered invested them with a special power until they finally encountered the Onça Pintada:
The children reassured Onça Pintada that they wanted to become guardians and do their part to preserve natural resources. Together, they performed a circular dance that transformed into a spiral, symbolising their commitment to this partnership.
For the children in that ecologically threatened region the project offered them
[an] invitation to recognise other forms of existence as equally legitimate, sensitive, and essential to the continuity of life on Earth.
It is an invitation that is most welcome and appropriate in an issue which takes as its theme Agency and Empowerment. So, I invite you to enjoy immersing yourself in this issue’s rich store of articles on these themes.
[1] Eriksson, Stig. A. (2023) Hills like white elephants: a drama conventions approach to short-story. Education in the North. Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen. https://doi.org/10.26203/7b49-jt95
Chris Lawrence
