Journal of Drama and Theatre Education in Asia (DaTEAsia)

Since the launch of the third wave of early childhood curriculum reform in the 1980s in Mainland China, significant changes have occurred in China’s early childhood education, pedagogies and teaching ideologies. With the import of early education pedagogies and curriculums from the West, Western drama
education models have been introduced, practiced and developed in Mainland China. This paper, adopting secondary data analysis, begins by the role of games in China’s early childhood education. It then provides an overview of the reform in China’s early childhood education, with a focus on pedagogies,
children’s play, as well as aesthetic education. Meanwhile, this paper explores the trajectory of Western drama education in China’s early childhood education, aiming to outline its transformation from “children’s play” to “drama education” since 2000. The opportunities, trends and challenges of adopting drama education in China’s early childhood education are also discussed.

In 2021, the revised Law on the Protection of Minors defined bullying for the first time in legislation in China and clearly stipulated that schools must establish mechanisms to prevent bullying. However, how to establish a working system still needs to be further formulated. This study implemented a semester-long anti-bullying Forum Theatre in a Chinese rural boarding middle school and conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses. Based on the actual conditions, the project introduced the social-emotional learning (SEL) framework as a tool for teaching and assessment. Results showed that bullying had significant negative correlations with SEL. Forum Theatre improved students' SEL, and can be seen as a bridge between learning and doing of SEL. Anti-bullying Forum Theatre is effective and feasible in Chinese education context and needs to be supported by the psychological and personality development of students.

Distances are created by geographical locations, fixed ideological cultural construction as well as social classes, race, nationalities and gender. However, facing the drastic climate change and continuous natural disasters brought by typhoons, flood and over-exploitation of natural resources in Asia, community theatre practitioners in the Philippines and Taiwan, located in the global south, tried to bridge the distances between countries and within their own societies. They reflect on and combat the impact caused by these challenges with community-based theatre praxes and musical praxes consecutively.

Editorial: Drama Opens Up Endless Possibilities Po-chi Tam Over the past few decades, in the context of economic globalisation, creativity has been an essential element in fostering institutional, technological and product developments and enhancing the global competitiveness of a country/society. Many developed countries focus on nurturing a creative talent pool and labour force, which often gives a justification and purpose for the development of applied theatre as well as drama education. Nonetheless, in the current times of wars, pandemics and natural disasters, the impact of creativity on bringing hope to...

今年七月，我到英國華威大學參加了第十屆國際教育戲劇研究所（International Drama in Education Research Institute，下稱IDIERI 10）這國際會議。本文分享個人在當中的觀察和反思。

This paper aims at exploring how the cross-disciplinary teachers in arts and humanities work together through discussions and workshops to design and develop the interdisciplinary place-based and art-and-humanity based courses and curriculum mainly starting from perspectives of drama education. The main objective of the project of Sailing of Art and Culture: The Fantasy Journey of Whale Islands is to cultivate the teachers’ community executed by National University of Tainan. We also hope to develop and figure out the logic and connection among these different theories involved in the new curriculum development to apply them into our course design and teaching pedagogies. These related theories include post-modern art education theories, cross-disciplinary curriculum development theories, place-based education, narrative ability research as well as inquiry-based educational pedagogy research. The paper also tries to analyze the developing and discussion process in building the two new courses by the teachers’ community. Furthermore, it aims to develop the innovative educational pedagogy and strategies to teach and evaluate students’ growth in their various narrative abilities. It also hopes to investigate the learning impact and effects of these place-based general education courses in developing the students’ creative abilities to help the local cultural and economic development for more teachers and students to adapt and learn from in the future.