Transmitting Transactive Pedagogy: A Dilemma of Pre-Service Teacher Education in Drama (Report‪)‬

Introduction to the Problem Before becoming a pre-service teacher educator, I taught high-school drama for over a decade, often using process drama techniques to encourage student explorations of universal themes and human problems (Bolton, "It's all Theatre"; Bowell and Heap; O'Neill). I anchored class investigations with theatrical structures that supplied form to the expression of student ideas. I provided models from both classical and modern plays, and regularly assigned diverse working groups to encourage the practice of collaborative creation (McLauchlan, "Collaborative"). My aim was for students not only to learn to do drama, but also to learn about drama and through drama (Hundert 4-5) in order to embrace Bolton's claim that drama helps students "to face facts and to interpret them without prejudice; so that they develop a range and degree of identification with other people; so that they develop a set of principles [...] by which they are going to live" ("Drama and Theatre" 8). For each grade, I was assigned 90 classes of 75 minutes in which to accomplish this task.