ABSTRACT

I want TIE to be radical.1 I see a need for practitioners to think of TIE as a radical performance methodology of teaching and learning and to devise programmes with a radical intentionality. With roots in Bertolt Brecht’s lehrstücke and Workers’ Theatre as well as progressive education movements such as John Dewey’s ideas of participatory, democratic and arts-based education, one could argue that TIE is already radical simply because of its history and traditions. Yet I am not convinced this is always the case. The various origin narratives for TIE often state that TIE is simply

participatory theatre in the service of education or in support of a specific curriculum. For example, in Gordon Vallins’s report from 23 June 1965, the first report documenting the emergence of TIE, Vallins describes TIE as ‘an animated visual aid to both teachers and children acting as a stimulus to the creative work in the school’ (Vallins 1965: 1). That does not seem radical. Of course Vallins’s thinking here is very early in the process of imagining what TIE might be, but such statements begin a historical trajectory of descriptions and definitions of TIE that mark it as a project which supports the needs of the (state-mandated) curriculum.2