Process drama

[Adam Blatner]

Dear Peter, 
      In preparing my anthology of different approaches to drama (Interactive & Improvisational Drama), one component was applications in education. There are five streams I've discerned:
     1. Role playing in education.
     2. Creative Drama, involving teaching kids how to imagine, spontaneity training, leading to theatre games.
     3. Theatre-in-Education, with professional actors or a trained troupe putting on a show and then (often) interacting with the audience.
      4. Process drama. Numerous books, mainly out of UK, a thread of pioneers, Brian Way, Dorothy Heathcote, especially; Gavin Bolton, Cecily O'Neill, others. The teacher sets up an imaginary situation and draws the students along in order to teach them about history, science, planning, integrated other subjects. Some support from the late Richard Courtney and others in Canada. There are a number of leaders today in Australia! 
       5. Actual sociodrama for education---about which I've recently published a paper---more aimed at college classes or graduate or adult studies.

  There's a big conference in Hong Kong this summer put on by the International Drama in Education Association (IDEA). I went to their last conference 3 years ago in Ottawa. Mainly process-drama kinds of folks, with an admixture of some other things. A little drama therapy, or its influence.

      My latest thinking, deriving from my editing experience, is that overall the greatest potential for Moreno's work is for it to influence, fertilize, enrich, and deepen the aforementioned approaches, plus its applications also for folks doing other kinds of drama--- Playback Theatre, bibliodrama, Theatre of the Oppressed, museum theatre, and so forth. Psychodrama doesn't need to be kept together as a single package, to be bought or not only as a whole complex. Role theory, sociometric methods, improvisational theatre, etc., all have a potential to be applied creatively and mixed creatively with other approaches, and thus have far broader of an impact.
      
        So, in summary, I'm not clear about your final question--- levels experience of teachers.. 
  People are teaching process drama in some schools of education. There is no getting into the personalities of the students, no psychodrama. Yet I imagine that there might be room for enriching that process by adding doubling (in role), role reversal, and some other component techniques, etc., as in bibliodrama. 

        warmly, adam
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Peter Howie 
  To: list at grouptalkweb.org 
  Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2007 8:40 PM
  Subject: Process drama


  Hi all,

  I've recently come across the term "process drama" used in educational contexts and wondered if others were more familiar with it. It seem to be a sociodramatic process and I am thinking in terms of the levels experience of teachers directing this and whether or not there are training opportunities for some. 

  Cheers

  Peter Howie
  Brisbane, Australia 


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