Desarrollo de la propuesta, sus recursos y actividades

A notable aspect of this study was the diversity of its participants, not only in relation to their route into drama teaching but also in the variety of cultural milieux they had experienced. Denise29, for instance, started teaching in the seventies in the Seychelles which was a one-party socialist state. The students in her extracurricular theatre group, who were 17 to 19 years old, enjoyed the freedom of expression drama offered to such an extent that they decided to stage a show which Denise recalled was ―wonderfully subversive‖.

Many of the participants had come to classroom drama by fairly circuitous routes. Gaynor‘s training, for example, was originally intended for developing performance skills capacity:

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Dramanet, Aug 2007-Nov 2007

29 _{All individual names have been changed to pseudonyms to preserve participant}

GAYNOR: When I left school I went to drama school in England. And then I went on a scholarship to America where I did a B.A. and an M.A. degree in theatre arts. We came to New Zealand in 1972. I got a job with the theatre federation — the New Zealand Theatre Federation — they hold an amateur festival here. I‘ve also taught privately ... they did New Zealand speech board exams. I worked at [name of school] for quite a long time, and I did the school productions and things like that as well - then I worked at [name of school] for a short time and I was actually teaching some junior music which was wildly entertaining.

And I also taught some senior things in sort of self- esteem, and some of those sort of things that you do with senior classes before they go out into the world which have become transition classes now. And then I, I taught some drama to at [name of school] And then in 1998 I was invited to go to [name of school] to do the production for their new auditorium and I‘ve been connected with [name of school] ever since. Then I managed to get fourth form drama. I guess it was all building up here. And gradually, then I got third form

drama, and I still had the sixth form and the seventh

form together, and the only class I wasn‘t teaching was the fifth form. And then unit standards came in and I was like all drama teachers. I was on panels because we were all on panels and things to try and make drama into a legitimate subject. And so then we had unit standards and I remember using that as a leader to our Board of Trustees so that I could get fifth form drama. And with unit standards that was quite important from a drama point of view because suddenly now it was being

looked as a real subject from which you could get qualifications.

Deborah spoke of her experiences in South Africa where she had worked in rural areas from a satellite campus of an established college of education. In an attempt to provide an alternative education to the usual ―chalk and talk stuff‖, they based their practice on the theories of Paulo Freire30_{. Through this experience Deborah became ―well}

versed in the whole co-operative learning, working, learning, discovery, and then using theatre as a means of teaching other subjects as well‖. She also became involved in teaching drama from a community development perspective rather than as an academic subject; for example, using drama to teach people how to vote and in AIDS education. It resulted in a fundamental change in Deborah‘s approach to drama education. She admitted that when she first arrived in New Zealand she felt she was going back to a previous era and that she was a ―lone voice trying to make drama more relevant‖:

DEBORAH: There‘s always been those who feel that drama‘s primary purpose is performance on a stage in front of an audience. Other people have felt very strongly that drama is not only that but part of a much wider purpose in the whole community and so on. I feel that I can see both perspectives and I‘ve enjoyed teaching drama in different ways; even though what I teach now may lead to performance by developing performance skills and seeing it from that perspective, I haven‘t let go of my awareness of the broader field.

30 _{The most widely known work of Paulo Freire is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) which}

examines the struggle for justice and equity within the educational system. See Steiner, Krank, McLaren & Bahruth (2000) for a detailed analysis of Freirean pedagogy.

Several of the participants in this study had moved into drama while teaching secondary English, for example Hugh, Wanda, Stephen, Sara, Diane, Faith, Brenda, Moira and

Waverly. For some English teachers, prior to the release of

The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum document (Ministry of Education, 2000), drama was seen as a way to counter the restrictions of the English curriculum. For teachers, such as Stephen, the impulse to teach practical drama in their programmes arose from a personal knowledge and interest in the subject:

STEPHEN: I suppose it was quite late in life. I was 40. And I‘d become interested in a local amateur theatre group that I got dragged into more and more and there was no drama in my school so I got brave — I was head of English then — and I got brave and asked the principal if we could have a — what was third form then — drama class. It was just an option for a year and then it sort of went from there. The next year it was Year 9 — third and fourth form — and so it went on. Not all drama teachers, however, emerged from a background in education. Milly, for example, began her professional life as a social worker and was moved to establish a performing arts class for her clients. This led to further training in drama and, eventually, a position in a high school.

For all of the participants, however, regardless of background, the impetus to teach drama was rooted in a personal passion and an intrinsic commitment to the educational possibilities of the subject. The following subsection contains an exploration of teachers‘ observations about their commitment to drama.