Drama

Drama fosters children’s creative engagement and enriches their imaginative development. Open ended and the focus of collaborative exploration, it is also inherently uncertain, ambiguous and frequently full of dramatic tension. In make-believe worlds of their nzbauxe rflkfjepoj ,mnwjclekdhp own creation, teachers and children find and solve problems, think laterally, evaluate courses of action, and create new meanings. In reflecting upon this imagined experience and the difficulties encountered, they make creative connections to their own world and learn through reflective engagement. In this chapter we show that teachers can employ drama, the art form of social encounters, both to teach creatively and to teach for creativity. Furthermore, children learn creatively in and through drama. Initially, we explore the different ways drama is made manifest in primary schools, highlighting in particular the value of improvisational classroom drama in which drama and creativity are indivisibly linked. Then we move to consider some common classroom drama practices in the curriculum, focusing not only on role play areas and text exploration in English, but also on drama as a tool for learning right across the curriculum. We then offer two vignettes from across the curriculum, the former focuses on drama in the context of Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) and the latter on the theme of sustainability and the environment. We close by arguing that drama is a potent tool for fostering creativity; an indispensable tool in a creative practitioner’s repertoire