Making daisychains : playing to learn to research into playing to learn ...

Abstract

Classical science and drama share an important starting point - both create hypotheses to explain natural phenomena, and devise controlled fictional models to test out those hypotheses. Drama's territory is the world of human relationships, with its conflicts and interests and power structures, and drama's models are living, breathing fictions of human behaviour that can be lived through, watched, modified, replayed, jumping backwards and forwards in time to find possibilities of cause and effect. In the drama of children's play and of role-play - the drama of process - the scientific investigators explore the behaviours as active participants, not as audience. In his lecture, Professor O'Toole invites the audience to join in the dramatic dialogue.