Story Drama Structures

Twenty-five years ago, drama innovator Gavin Bolton (1984) recognised the power of embodied narrative when he argued for placing drama at the centre of the curriculum. Rather than seeing literacy practices as discrete competencies unconnected to students’ lives outside school, Bolton, together with Dorothy Heathcote (2003), uses drama to cross disciplines and subject areas. They create learning contexts in which students use their literacy skills in multi-modalities immersed in situations that demand their participation. It is this “apprenticeship into the very specific forms of [social] languages and literacies represented inside and outside the classroom” (Hawkins, 2004, p. 17) that makes drama such a rich pedagogy.