ABSTRACT
The “conventions approach”, introduced and developed over three editions of Structuring Drama Work by Jonothan Neelands and Tony Goode, has had a significant influence on drama education in the home countries of the authors, Norway, Hungary, and China, despite the fact that the drama environments of these countries are remarkably different. In the first half of this article, following a brief presentation of the different contexts of educational drama in these three countries, we focus on the different academic receptions of the conventions approach. We conducted a survey of international drama educators to learn more about the reasons behind, the means for, and the consequences of, the significant spread of the conventions approach, and, in the second half of this article, we summarise the responses we received to the open-ended questions in this survey. We assume that analysing three different drama traditions against the same criteria represents the state of the conventions approach internationally.
