ABSTRACT
As a creative and collaborative form of imaginative inquiry, drama can activate unique learning connections across the curriculum. This chapter explores Heathcote’s rolling role system of teaching (1993) and how it can be used as a ‘pedagogy of connection’ (Dillon, 2008) in the contemporary classroom. Critical to this discussion is an exploration of how rolling role processes might activate students’ ethical imaginations to engage with complex entanglements between people, times, places and species. It references an innovative Australian rolling role project conducted with a Year 5 cohort and their teachers, entitled the Sanctuary Project, where drama linked the subjects of English, science, history and geography in a rich role-based inquiry. Rolling role techniques, combined with digital technologies and puppetry, provided powerful transdisciplinary learning opportunities for students and teachers to create an imagined community and step inside its challenges as experts and locals grappling with wetland rehabilitation and the survival of the endangered migratory shorebird, the bar-tailed godwit. This chapter argues that now, more than ever, we need to champion drama as a ‘pedagogy of connection’ to revitalise twenty-first-century education to prepare learners to become ‘response-able’ as they chart complex and uncertain futures on a damaged planet.
