TEFO Resource Hub

Theatre in education (TIE) is a form of applied theatre that concerns the use of theatre and drama for educational purposes. It is interventionist in nature, and deploys different modes of audience participation to engage its audience within or out of the dramatic acts to explore the issue at stake. Students are invited to revisit and reflect on the knowledge they received and rethink what they have taken for granted. Then a crucial question that follows: What would make the most useful methods of analyzing audience responses in a TIE programme? What is the learning process through theatre like? This paper discusses these questions by drawing findings from a study of TIE programme, 1894 Hong Kong Plague, conducted in Hong Kong in 2014. The programme intended to offer an alternative discourse to the local plague history by utilizing a stylized form of theatre performance and a set of pre- and post-performance activities. In light of Anthony Jackson’s framing in educational theatre and Stuart Hall’s encoding-decoding theory of communication, the paper analyses what attracted and distracted the young audience at 1894 Hong Kong Plague programme. It examines the process through which the students negotiate their live aesthetic encounter and their understanding of the history at issue. At the end, the paper reflects on the implications of the case for TIE audience study. 　　

Most research on the teaching of Shakespeare in school settings has focused on how active approaches can foster learners’ motivation and confidence. While this point is essential, the value of collaboration among learners remains a relatively neglected area of study despite its significance in determining the quality of the learning process. This article explores how ensemble-based learning can enable the process of knowledge construction through collaborative work among learners. In doing so, I designed and facilitated six drama lessons exploring Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a Y8 drama class in England as my pilot study. Adopting Vygotskian socio-cultural approaches to the development of knowledge and Jonothan Neelands’ principles of ensemble, the study draws on analysis of qualitative data. Overall, the preliminary findings suggest evidence to support the conclusions of previous studies that ensemble-based learning can (1) generate an “open space” which fosters an inclusive environment through mutual trust and collaboration among learners; (2) bring learners to the centre of collaborative sense making with teacher serving as a facilitator to support autonomous learning; and (3) create a stimulating dialogue through collaborative work and creative exploration.

Since 2004, there has been a Taiwanese trend of applying drama, theatre, and performance to corporate training, and this trend has yet to be thoroughly explored in scholarship. This research focuses on the investigation of this new phenomenon in the organizational and cultural levels. It analyzes the organic interplay among one characteristic of Taiwanese corporate culture (innovation), one feature of Laozi’s Taoism (creativity), and one principle of performance (imagination). As a practitioner-researcher, the author suggests that the purpose of applying drama, theatre, and performance in corporate training is not to enhance acting skills, physical techniques, or technical competences, but to explore organizational dynamics through embodiment and to enrich management-related knowledge such as innovation and creativity. The author provides thick description and participant observation. The author interprets Taoism tradition in Taiwanese corporate culture, reviews the Western scholarship in theatre and performance studies (particularly performative pedagogy). In addition, the author reports and analyzes the Taiwanese practices. In conclusion, the author provides two future research directions and hopes this article can encourage cross-cultural research and facilitate better communication between academic and business contexts.

I was propelled to review the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Conference 2015 partly because of my trainings in both cultural studies and drama education, and partly because of the few amazing drama and theatre works presented in the conference.

This fifth IACS Conference was organized by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society in collaboration with University of Indonesia and Airlangga University. The three-day conference drew together more than 350 scholars and practitioners from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan to share their practices and to discuss and analyze urgent issues emerging in Asia.

This is an action research project of using “Enhanced Forum Theatre” to explore how this theatre form helps the participants to reflect on their parenting experiences. The research aims to offer opportunity for parents to reflect on their parenting problems and explore feasible ways to deal with their problems by means of “Enhanced Forum Theatre”.

The result shows most of the parent-participants were able to reflect on the parenting issues, some have new understandings on their parenting skills and a few of them even show changes in their perspective and actions.

In Hong Kong, early childhood educators have progressively emphasized the importance of play. However, it happens that play has long been seen not to be taught explicitly, or other it just to be taught to fulfill academic goals. Moreover, the promotion of play is also further hindered by socio-cultural factors and other general constraints in town. The authors, the teaching practicum supervisor (A1) and her student teacher (A2), believe that education reform should begin with teachers’ self-improvement, reflection and exploration of their classroom teaching practice. This paper has reported their collaborative inquiry on teaching strategies for children to play theatre games. The authors have borrowed the theories of movement instruction to tackle the children’s discipline problems arisen in the theatre games classroom. After reviewing and practicing the revised strategies, the authors, in turn, offer solutions to improve theatre game instruction in a new light by two strategies, namely decomposition of rules of games and the use of structured classroom discourse. As regard the student teacher, this collaborative inquiry has promoted improvement in relation to designing, demonstrating and skills guiding children to play theatre games, and other relevant teaching theories. At the same time, the author (A1) has been placed at a better position to comprehend the problems faced by novice and frontline teachers when using theatre games, from which she has further examined the content and methods of her teacher training.