The use of drama as a RIT strategy

This project used drama to challenge restricted notions of research and practice in teacher education. We were concerned that classroom and behaviour management are perhaps the most problematic aspects of learning to be a teacher. We adopted Augusto Boal’s ideas about forum theatre in order to open up the teaching/research nexus and to escape the supposed theory/practice binary. We wanted to explore how a play could provide a safe space for teaching professionals to talk honestly about the difficulties of managing behaviour in secondary schools. We both had a long-standing concern that literary texts represent important ways of knowing about the world and that such ways of knowing tend to be marginalized in many forms of education research, where social scientific texts and methodologies tend to dominate. Similarly we wanted to bring the valuable insights from the long-standing tradition of drama in education into a higher education context.