Transforming English Through Drama by Pitfield, Maggie; Coles, Jane;

Short description:

This unique collection promotes 'drama-in-English’, a hybrid pedagogy combining reader response theory with literacy research and educational drama. Drawing on experienced practitioners' insights, the authors show how embedded drama approaches revitalise the English/Language Arts curriculum and motivate young people to connect with learning.

Long description:

This unique collection promotes and develops 'drama-in-English’, a hybrid pedagogy combining reader response theory with literacy research and educational drama. Drawing on experienced practitioners' classroom insights, the authors show how embedded drama approaches can be used to revitalise the English/Language Arts curriculum and motivate young people to make personal and critical connections with their learning.

Readers will find eight reader-friendly accounts exploring how drama-inflected approaches support diverse learners across all aspects of English teaching. Contributors discuss engaging with literary texts through spoken, written and multimodal responses; digital storytelling; embodied approaches to creative and informative writing; developing language competency; and preparation for formal examinations. The research-informed content, rooted in real classroom practice, demonstrates sustainable and fully integrated creative approaches applicable to UK and international contexts.

This essential resource benefits all those working in English/Language Arts education: secondary teachers, teacher educators, trainee teachers, and teachers of English as an additional language.

In Transforming English Through Drama, Jane Coles and Maggie Pitfield have presented an overwhelmingly forceful argument for the enactment of the ‘drama-in-English’ pedagogy formulated in their earlier work, Drama at the Heart of English. This collection of international classroom-based case studies offers powerfully persuasive accounts of the ways in which ‘drama-in-English’ approaches can foster enjoyment and motivation, stimulate creativity and create rich and meaningful learning for students. Coles and Pitfield rightly argue that English is in need of transformation; for all those involved in the subject who share this view, [and who believe in the centrality of effective learning and teaching of English for young people’s development] Transforming English Through Drama should be essential reading.

SIMON GIBBONS: Reader in English Education, King’s College London.

Maggie Pitfield and Jane Coles are to be warmly congratulated on their new edited book, Transforming English Through Drama: Case Studies in Classroom Practice. This wide-ranging collection promises to be an invaluable handbook for English, Language Arts, English as Additional Language teachers and the broader drama-in-education community. Each chapter makes a strong case for embedding drama-rich strategies and experiences in fostering deep and critical literacy learning. An experienced group of researchers and practitioners demonstrate how these inherently inquiry-based approaches motivate and engage learners, nurturing their creativity and imagination while drawing on their own identities and cultural understandings. A very welcome and very timely addition to the field.

ROBYN EWING AM: Professor Emerita, Co-Director, The CREATE Centre, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney.

The push to bring in the 'knowledge-rich curriculum' has swept aside much of the arts curriculum in schools and one victim of this has been drama. Maggie Pitfield and Jane Coles have done a superb job here of building on their previous work by drawing in other practitioners to the cause. Transforming English Through Drama: Case Studies in Classroom Practice is a timely and much-needed book which lays out both the 'what' and the 'why' of collaborative drama work in schools, specifically in subject English.

MICHAEL ROSEN: Professor of Children’s Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London; poet and children’s author.

Table of Contents:

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. Introduction

Jane Coles and Maggie Pitfield

Chapter 2. Adapting Texts, Adapting Practice: Applying Rehearsal Room Methodology to the Study of Novels

Susie Ferguson

Chapter 3. Drama in English: A Decolonial Strategy

Katherine Barber

Chapter 4. Shakespeare on Zoom!

Erin Woodford

Chapter 5. Writing-in-Role: The Significance of Visualising Fictional Worlds Through Drama

Theo Bryer

Chapter 6. Drama-Rich Translanguaging for Multilingual Meaning-Making 

Rafaela Cleeve Gerkens and Julie Choi

Chapter 7. Embodied Approaches to English ‘Exam Prep’ in an Attainment-Driven Climate: ‘Coming in through the pleasurable route.’

Camilla Stanger

Chapter 8. Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Enhancing the Learning of English Through Drama

Vicky Macleroy

Chapter 9. Teaching English Under Occupation: Classroom Fictions and the World Outside

Raja’ Farah, Ghoson Orouq and Maggie Hulson

References

Index