Drama at Key Stages 1 and 2

Looking at Learning in Drama

Focusing on the imagination

In drama, children are involved in working imaginatively to improvise and sustain different roles, offering ideas to develop and shape the drama and contributing to the problem solving agenda. In working creatively in this way, they construct and inhabit familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and develop alternative worlds in which they encounter the unknown.

Children and adults must be prepared to take risks as they move forward together on this journey of discovery. Drama thus relies heavily upon the imagination and offers real opportunities for its development through the creation of a questioning stance and the exploration of different possibilities and perspectives.

Whilst there are many areas of learning in drama (including for example language and literacy, the content of the drama, learning about drama processes, social and emotional learning and learning through reflection) many researchers argue that the imagination is pre-eminent area of learning.

Consider with the student teachers what they understand by the concept, how they develop their own imaginations, how this might relate to creativity and what evidence they have that might support or challenge the claim that drama can develop children's imaginations.

Consider the following statements from Grainger and Cremin (2001) about the imagination. Do they offer a possible progression?

• Recognizing that drama is an activity using the imagination.
• Entering imaginary situations.
• Contributing ideas to develop the fictional situation, firstly as themselves and then in role.
• Offering ideas originating from personal feelings, values, experience or knowledge.
• Developing increasingly effective, original, clear and vivid ideas.
• Consciously generating ideas to develop the drama.
• Controlling and manipulating both spontaneous and considered ideas to fit the fictional situation.
• Developing and showing empathy in the construction and portrayal of the drama.
• Developing the ability to maintain different roles during an extended sequence of drama.
• Consciously shaping the dramatic space and deliberately placing objects and roles within it.