Teacher education and drama: possibilities, promise, potential.

Abstract

Contemporary discussions about curricula, whether for schools or for higher education, come with demands for change to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability, and 21st century challenge. Core notions of curriculum continue to be contested and indeed are the very concerns that should be interrogated and examined critically in the teacher education setting. The prospective teacher negotiates tensions between knowledge of content and of curriculum, pedagogical knowledge and generic teaching skill, knowing as process and knowing in performative terms, and traverses the challenges of shaping his or her role as teacher and educator for the 21st century. This paper makes a case for the potential that an arts oriented course, specifically drama, holds for helping student teachers to conceptualise their own learning experiences within a teacher education curriculum. The ways of knowing in drama (transformational, embodied, aesthetic) hold promise for enhancing the making of connections across the teacher education curriculum, for understanding more genuinely the potential of drama and the arts in a school curriculum, and for helping the shaping of the teacher’s emerging identity.