ABSTRACT
In 2008, Jonothan Neelands published a briefi ng paper for student teachers of English in England designed to introduce them to the main issues informing drama pedagogy in contemporary classrooms (Neelands, 2008). What is striking about Neelands’ tour d’horizon is just how many of the issues from the past that have already been explored in this book – even in its earliest chapters – still demand attention in his paper. Shakespeare’s looming presence, for example, features prominently in the work of Caldwell Cook and Finlay-Johnson; but a century later, Neelands still has to explain to the prospective teachers why this particular playwright dominates, uniquely, the ‘English model’ of drama (p. 1). Forty years on from Dixon’s (1967) Growth Through English and a decade after the appearance of Hornbrook’s (1998) On the Subject of Drama, the noun/verb, process/product issue is still regarded by Neelands as something about which student teachers need to know and that they can expect to encounter during careers that might last well into the twenty-fi rst century. To give a third example: in 1967, Her Majesty’s Inspectors for Schools concluded from their monitoring visits that ‘there is no agreement’ about the ‘real identity’ of drama (DES, 1967, p. 2). Forty years later, Neelands feels the need to repeat the observation, noting in contemporary classrooms ‘a degree of professional insecurity amongst teachers employed as drama specialists’ and ‘a long and sometimes fi erce contest to defi ne what is legitimate drama in schools’ (Neelands, 2008, p. 2). Thinking back even to the very fi rst chapters of this book, it is not too fanciful to detect a faint echo of transcendent statements about childhood in Neelands’ assertion that, even within a system of compulsory education, ‘students cannot be coerced into drama or made to do it. It has to be by choice’ (p. 3).
