Journal of Drama and Theatre Education in Asia (DaTEAsia)

During the pandemic, conflicts arise readily between homebound parents and children and result in emotional instability. In this article, the author shares how elements of drama can be applied to help children, teenagers and parents regulate their emotions and foster a healthy parent-child relationship. This article illustrates that appropriate application of elements of drama promotes quality parent-child interaction, through which children learn to regulate their emotions.

This article examines the notion of transfiguration and analyses how process drama and arts education can help achieve elevated mental and spiritual states through transforming adversity to something that inspires beauty and deep meanings. This article illustrates this transfigurative function of drama education with an online pedagogical resources project which supports kindergartens with mainly drama education during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The author accordingly points out that drama education can effectively address the emotional, spiritual, ethical and mental needs of teachers and young children in the context of post-pandemic education.

The “subject” of educational drama and theatre is what it is to be human, our focus is on the self. The self of course is socially constructed and as drama and theatre are social art forms, the relationship between self and society and society in the self is at the core of what we do. Form and content is indivisible, meaning making is paramount. How we learn, the philosophy and pedagogy that underpins the art form of drama, and the culture of education that nurtures it is therefore critical to everything we do.

The study draws on the playwriting experience of the play for museum theatre, Battle for Hong Kong 1941, to examine the creation of interactive theatre and the design of the interactive section through the active-inquiry process from the point of view of an implementer. The researcher is also the playwright and the designer of the play’s interactive section.

The research purpose is to explore how to apply Rasaboxes into the junior high school performing arts teacher education and professional development to build a competence-based instruction module. Rasaboxes originates from the Indian performance theory, particularly emphasizing on body experience and emotion expression. Integrated with the Western Performance Studies and Drama Therapy, it has been applied into acting training, counseling, and education.

This paper examines how drama works as a motivational teaching practice and how it enhances students’ learning motivation. Data is collected from eight students, an observer and the teacher-as researcher through action-based research. All sorts of research data sets are triangulated for enhancing the reliability of the study. Interviews of the participants and researcher’s reflective journals are analysed according to the Motivated Strategies for learning (Pintrich et al., 1991) and the Model of Motivational teaching practice (Dörnyei, 2001). The findings show that drama is an effective motivational teaching practice of Chinese narrative writing as a second language for non-Chinese speaking students, and at the same time it also increases students’ learning motivation in terms of self-efficacy, extrinsic goal orientation, intrinsic goal orientation, task value and diminishes learning anxiety.