Relational pedagogy and the drama curriculum

Abstract

Trawling through the back issues of RIDE it is evident that articles which explicitly address the notion of curriculum are very thin on the ground. Early volumes contain one or two but in later years, there have only been those that formed part of the Special Issue on ‘Drama for School Education: Global Perspectives’. While research into the reasons for this relative neglect lie beyond the scope of this editorial essay, it is tempting to speculate that the space for contemplating questions relating to drama and the curriculum was usurped by the turn towards pedagogy (cf. Bernstein) evident in educational discourse from the 1990s onwards. The work in this volume draws on a diverse curriculum heritage, encompassing the curriculum orientations proposed by Heathcote, Bolton, Courtney, Spolin, Neelands, Nicholson and Boal. Unlike most considerations of curriculum, these authors considered emotions, aesthetics, values, culture and embodied knowing as central to learning and pivotal underpinnings to curriculum, in contrast to the focus on purely cognitive ways of knowing evident in many other curriculum theorists. What is evident from the articles that follow is the power and influence of local contexts, of government commitment (or lack of) to access to an education in drama, of financial investment by governments or groups, and of the passion and commitment of individuals, alone and collectively, for access to quality drama education. This volume provides a baseline, a mark in the sand, a platform from which discussions of drama curriculum in the twenty-first century can be based.