Ways into Drama: Preparing for Engagement

This section’s introductory chapter provides an overview of the shared challenges for citizenship and drama educators in promoting student engagement at different levels of education. A variety of influential voices have illuminated the relationship between drama and civic engagement – we remind readers here of seminal perspectives offered by Aristotle, Vaclav Havel, Augusto Boal, Shakespeare and Peter Brook, among other influential scholars and practitioners. Engagement and transformation are central to the purposes of both citizenship and drama educators. There is much for citizenship educators to learn from the capacity of drama to foster deep engagement by both participants and audiences with fundamentally important civic issues and narratives. The second half of the chapter explores two specific intersections between citizenship education and drama – firstly drama as a microcosm of the world at large: a model world in which ‘citizens’ must engage and work with each other in order to achieve the balance and harmony required of all healthy societies. On the other hand, specifically within the realms of education, we discuss drama as pedagogical tool in preparing for political and community engagement, problem-posing and problem-solving.