ABSTRACT
Since Gavin Bolton wrote ‘Drama in Education and TIE: A comparison’ for the first edition of Learning through Theatre in 1980 (and indeed the revised 1993 edition), there have of course been enormously significant changes in the field of arts education, changes that make a comparison today very difficult if not impossible. These changes relate to social, economic and political developments as well as to form and content, which are of course inextricably linked. The above could be the subject of a substantial book in itself, but revisiting Bolton’s chapter serves as a useful starting point for anyone wishing to understand the historical ‘kinship’ between Drama in Education (DIE) and TIE and the current state of both today. What, however, does Bolton mean by ‘kinship’? In some of his later writings he makes this absolutely explicit:
I want to suggest that what we have all been doing is indeed theatre and that it is about timewe acknowledged it more fully.… [T]he work from Newcastle and Durham Universities … became known as ‘Drama in Education’, a term that in fact first appeared in print in 1921 but in the ‘60s & ‘70s became associated with the use of teacher-in-role and whole class ‘living through’ dramatic activity. Dorothy Heathcote always claimed that she was working in ‘theatre’, a view I used to find very difficult to swallow, but she never got round to changing the
name of her courses to ‘teaching teachers to use theatre’, because it would certainly have been misunderstood.
