Drama and Theatre in and for Schools: Referencing the Nature of Theatre in Contemporary New Zealand

This thesis considers the nature of drama and theatre in and for schools and references the nature of theatre in contemporary New Zealand. Drama in schools in New Zealand has developed from the earliest school productions in the 1800's, through its perceived role to enrich lives, to becoming a discrete Arts subject within the New Zealand educational curriculum in 1999. During this development, theatre companies began to tour schools and arguments ensued regarding drama's role in education as a process or performance. This development is charted through a range of historical and current curriculum documents. The thesis references the importance of the Australian UNESCO Seminar on drama in education in 1958 which explored the relationship between the educational aspects of Drama and Drama as an art form, and which inspired New Zealand Drama teachers. The research contains interviews conducted during 2009, with Drama teachers, students and theatre practitioners, as well as considering examples of performances by schools and professional theatre since the advent of the new curriculum. The thesis investigates some of the many kinds of Drama work taking place in contemporary New Zealand schools, including co-curricula and curricula productions concerning a wide range of issues and utilising a range of dramatic styles. These include, an Intermediate School's collaboration and contribution to capital E's production of Kia Ora Khalid, and examples of devised and scripted projects undertaken at Secondary Colleges in New Zealand. The research explores the relationship which exists between schools and professional theatre practitioners, and establishes some of the ways in which the relationship is beneficial for the development of high quality Drama programmes in schools. The contribution of the Auckland Theatre Company's Educational Unit to schools is investigated, as is an example of the Artist in Schools programme at Pakuranga College in Auckland. The introduction of the National certificate in Educational drama in 2001 has undoubtedly contributed to the range and quality of work being undertaken in schools, allowing the contention that their Drama performance work can, and often does, contribute to the cultural welfare of local communities and to a New Zealand theatre identity in general

A Sisyphean task? Doing drama online with Year 9 students in a COVID-19 lockdown

Using the allegory of Sisyphus from ancient Greek mythology, we examine the problems that arose while teaching Year 9 drama classes online during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in Aotearoa, New Zealand. At times we have felt like Sisyphus, forced to push a boulder uphill forever. We became adept at using the school’s chosen online platform, in this case, Microsoft Teams. For all teachers, this meant that students were no longer in an actual classroom with their peers but met in a virtual space as a series of little icons on a screen. For drama, this disrupted the very essence of the praxis. Drama is, at its heart, an embodied, interactive “subject”, requiring collaboration, cooperation and participation. Like Sisyphus, we have, at times, felt the task of teaching drama cannot be truly accomplished. In this article, we focus specifically on the Year 9 drama students, the youngest year group at secondary colleges in New Zealand. They are part of the generation defined as Gen Z (Beresford Research, 2022), “digital natives who have little or no memory of the world as it existed before smartphones” (Parker & Igielnik, 2020., para. 4). We compare the expectations and interactions of a traditional drama classroom with those online. We explore the approaches we took to encourage student participation in this new forum, trying to find dramatic strategies to mitigate some of the problems that arose. We discuss the consequences and outcomes of teaching drama remotely. Unlike Sisyphus, can we learn from successes and failures, or are we as drama teachers doomed forever to roll a large rock uphill