WHAT IS DRAMA?
Drama is an art form, a practical activity and an intellectual discipline highly accessible to young people.
In education, it is a mode of learning that challenges students to make meaning of their world.
A drama education which begins with play may eventually include all the elements of theatre.
- Drama is the enactment of real and imagined events through roles and situations.
- Drama enables both individuals and groups to explore, shape and symbolically represent ideas and feelings and their consequences.
- Drama has the capacity to move and challenge values, cultures and identities
- Drama includes a wide range of experiences, such as dramatic play, improvisation, theatrical performance, film and television drama, and includes both the processes and presentation of drama.
- Drama draws on many different contexts, from past and present societies and cultures.
Drama is one of the four art forms to make up the Arts, an essential learning area as identified in the New Zealand Curriculum Framework.
AN EDUCATION IN DRAMA
Drama in the school curriculum can develop students’ artistic and creative skills.
It can also provide knowledge and skills that are transferable to a variety of artistic, social and work-related contexts.
An education in drama can:
- humanise learning by provide lifelike learning contexts in a classroom setting that values active participation in a non-threatening, supportive environment.
- empower students to understand and influence their world through exploring roles and situations.
- develop students’ non-verbal, individual and group communication skills.
- develop students’ intellectual, social, physical, emotional and moral domains through learning that engages their thoughts, feelings, bodies and actions.
- enable students to become critically reflective members of the New Zealand community through their engagements in dramatic contexts relating to identity, societies, cultures, ideologies, gender, time and change.
- give students knowledge and understanding of drama and skills in drama to participate throughout life in one of the oldest yet most dynamic art forms.
- give students experience in and understanding of the other Arts.
The Arts are important to the growth of self-knowledge and self worth. They encourage students’ to investigate their own values and those of others, and to recognise the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of their lives.
