ABSTRACT
Drama is a valuable tool for developing children’s oral and written voices. Educational classroom drama is not concerned with stories retold in action, but with the exploration and investigation of texts and the creation of alternative perspectives through the co-authorship of new and living fictions. Classroom drama, as distinct from theatre and free-flow play, occupies a central place on the drama continuum and involves the use of a range of drama conventions and teacher intervention and involvement in role. In classroom drama, also known as process drama (O’Neill 1995), children create and inhabit an imaginary world and learn from living inside this open-ended world. The National Curriculum (NC) (DfEE 1999) includes the statutory requirement to develop such drama and focuses upon discovering and shaping the unknown, rather than acting out what is already decided. Although elements of theatre will inevitably stray into the realms of classroom drama, in such drama children are not invited to act or perform, but to believe, engage and learn creatively (Craft et al. 2001).
