ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the complex, chaotic and contradictory institutions of education and schooling. To do this, we draw on Appadurai's (1995) global flows and consider the disjunctures between financescapes and ideoscapes and how these have instigated and maintained a recent Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2016). Critics of the GERM argue that the standardisation of schooling and assessment does not allow for complex understandings of success, which leads to specific, power-laden forms of engagement in work and society which are now synonymous with what has come to be known as ‘successful’ participation in our knowledge economy. The hegemony that allows certain forms of success to become normalised also shapes the discourses of how institutions such as schools and practices such as arts and artmaking ‘help’ neoliberal agendas. But within such a challenging vista, wherein lies drama? In this chapter, we explore the relationship between drama and schooling in these times, focussing on three different but intersecting locations and practices: creativity, drama curriculum and drama pedagogy.
