ABSTRACT
The papers presented so far in this collection have debated the nature, practices and evaluation of drama in schools. In this paper, John Norman focusses the debate on the initial training of teachers. He presents a bleak picture of the past, present and future of drama in education courses and, while he cites the negative influences of the dead hand of conventional academic practice, the demarcation of academic, educational and professional studies and the control exercised by universities and the CNAA, more significantly, he places moral responsibility on the tutors of these courses. He contends that there has been little, if any, change in the nature, style and orientation of teacher training for drama during the period of growth and decline of initial training courses, principally because tutors who in the main are not experienced classroom practitioners have not been interested in change. He criticizes both traditional theatre bound courses, with their emphasis on aesthetic, academic and personal development, and those which seem rooted in sociological theory for their lack of explicit commitment to preparing teachers to use drama effectively in schools; and, by inference, he links this with the failure to establish drama in education firmly on the school curriculum. For the future he proposes specialist and non-specialist courses which focus on enactive teaching and learning techniques across the curriculum, and which do not perpetuate the ‘absurd’ separation of subject and method work, and of theory from practice.
