There are strong elements of make-believe in all children’s play. This make-believe helps the child to test out his/her hypotheses about what the world is like and how it might feel to have certain experiences. It is fuelled by inquisitiveness and a desire to think about possibilities and concepts through the medium of action. The process by which this is done is the same process as that by which drama is made for all levels and ages. The primary task of the teacher of drama, therefore, is to preserve and encourage this desire to make-believe while at the same time extending it to other areas of life and knowledge. In this way drama can assist in the fulfilment of the child’s current cognitive and affective needs and in providing for his/her future personal, social, emotional and intellectual development.

We meet drama most frequently in the theatre, on television or in the cinema, and we associate it with performance, costumes, setting and stages. Similarly, in school we often associate drama with script, rehearsal, voice production and the display of acting talent. This type of drama has certain benefits in that it increases children’s self-confidence, gives them the opportunity to express themselves in public and allows them the opportunity of appearing on stage. However, it represents only a part of the rich learning and developmental experience that drama has to offer.

This curriculum will not dwell on the display element of drama but will, rather, emphasise the benefits to be gained from the process of exploring life through the creation of plot, theme, fiction and make-believe. Drama used in this way is called classroom drama or process drama.

The field that drama can explore is as wide as life itself, and the areas of the exploration can be derived from the content of other curricula or from any other aspect of life that interests and concerns the children or the teacher. Examining these topics through drama will involve children in such activities as

the spontaneous making of drama scenes (sometimes called improvisation)
entering into other lives and situations
engaging with life issues, knowledge and themes through drama
honing and shaping drama scenes for the purpose of communicating them to others
living through a story, making it up as they go along, solving problems in the real and fictional worlds, co-operating with others, and pooling ideas
thinking about and discussing the patterns in life so that the outcome of encounters and plots will reflect their perception of how life is or might be.

All of this can take place at a level suitable to the age of the child. However complex the material may seem, the child, at any level, will find his/her own understanding and ways of dealing with it.

Because drama is a holistic activity it is difficult to separate the form from the content, the affective from the cognitive, the social development from the personal. Nevertheless, it can be said that its educational outcomes derive from two sources:

the knowledge and insights gained from bringing the child’s experience to bear on the examination of a particular aspect of life through drama
the personal skills, social skills and drama skills that must be encouraged if the class is to enter effectively into and create the world of the drama.

These skills are as natural to the younger child as playing and need only careful support and nurturing to extend them into continuing to serve the child’s education. It requires primarily that the teacher adopts the role of facilitator and acts like a good guide in the forest, pointing out the possibilities of certain directions and delights but leaving much of the responsibility for the exploration, and its enjoyment, to the child.

An Ghaeilge agus an curaclam drámaíochta

This curriculum will be followed in English in schools where English is the normal medium of instruction and in Irish in scoileanna lán-Ghaeilge and scoileanna Gaeltachta. However, at every level some Irish-language exemplars are included, so as to remind the teacher that in schools where English is the medium of instruction Irish-language teaching can be woven into the drama and that, through drama, facility with Irish can achieve the fluency and registers of life. In this way the drama curriculum complements the communicative approach to language learning inherent in the Gaeilge curriculum.

The subject matter of drama

The learning objectives in the curriculum are all drama-related. Drama, however, cannot exist without exploring some content, whether simple or sophisticated. The exemplars given in the three strand units indicate the kind of content to be examined through the fictional lens of the drama. The subject matter, whether taken from other curriculum areas or from life in general, will reflect the needs, concerns and interests appropriate to the ages and abilities of the individual children in any particular class.

The drama curriculum and teacher guidelines

The learning benefits of drama in the classroom spring from the processof children making drama. The product of the drama lesson is, indeed, the learning that accrues to the child through that process, as well as the actual drama that results from it. This gives a special impor tance to teacher guidelines for drama. They should be seen as complementary to the curriculum and the means through which the teacher can maximise its educational potential. Teachers, therefore, are urged to use the curriculum and the guidelines side by side as interdependent teaching resources.

Aims

The aims of the drama curriculum are

to enable the child to become drama literate
to enable the child to create a permanent bridge between make-believe play and the art form of theatre
to develop the child’s ability to enter physically, emotionally and intellectually into the drama world in order to promote questing, empowering and empathetic skills
to enable the child to develop the social skills necessary to engage openly, honestly and playfully with others
to enable the child to co-operate and communicate with others in solving problems in the drama and through the drama
to enable the child to understand the structures and modes of drama and how they create links between play, thought and life
to enable the child to acquire this knowledge of drama through the active exploration of themes drawn from life (past and present), whether they have their source in other curriculum areas or in general areas relevant to the child’s life
to enable the child to begin the process of translating a knowledge of drama into the active exploration of life themes from drama literature, leading to the appreciation of world drama culture
to form the criteria with which to evaluate the drama texts, written or performed, to which he/she is continually exposed.

Broad objectives

When due account is taken of intrinsic abilities and varying circumstances, the drama curriculum should enable the child to

develop the ability to enter physically, mentally and emotionally into the fictional drama context and discover its possibilities through cooperation with others
develop empathy with and understanding of others and the confidence needed to assume a role or character
experience and create an atmosphere where ideas, feelings and experiences can be expressed, where conflict can be handled positively, and life situations explored openly and honestly
develop personal adaptability, spontaneity, the ability to co-operate, verbal and non-verbal skills, and imagination and creativity, in order to ensure that the drama text reflects real life in a fresh and valid way
develop the ability to decide what course is likely to lead to significant drama action
develop the ability to steer the drama towards areas that are likely to lead, through whatever genre, to insights into the subject matter to be explored
develop the ability to co-operate with others in solving, out of role, the problems that are presented in making the drama
develop the ability to co-operate with others, in role, in keeping the drama alive, in creating context, and in exploring the problems that are presented in making the drama
develop the ability to use drama to promote or express a view on a subject on which he/she may have strong views or feelings
develop the ability to use drama to examine and explore unfamiliar material so as to reach an understanding of the patterns, meanings and concepts contained in it
develop concern, curiosity and understanding of the increasingly sophisticated patterns that comprise drama content and of the increasingly refined insights that can flow from it
use drama to explore actively the human aspect of all learning as a means of curricular integration
become aware of subtexts, which manifest themselves involuntarily, in drama and in life
begin to develop, through active story-making in drama, an appreciation of plot and theme so that these can form the basis of an understanding of drama literature and how it relates to text-making in a specific time and place
begin to be able to discern the covert or overt messages in drama texts, ranging from advertising to Shakespeare, through becoming aware of how values and attitudes are woven into drama
begin to develop the ability to assess critically the validity of the meanings hidden in drama texts and what can be learned from them.

Explanatory notes

The exemplars given in the curriculum are merely suggestions that may help to clarify the content objectives. These have a number of contexts. Some have already been used in actual drama activities and the teacher may have to infer a context for them. In others the context is obvious. Some others are illustrated more extensively in the descriptions of successful drama activities in the teacher guidelines.

The exemplars are chosen to demonstrate that drama draws its content from the full range of human experience. Many of them are in fact drawn from lessons already taught which had been so framed that issues of morality, violence, life and death were being explored in an active and reflective way. The inclusion of exemplars such as these reminds us that drama often enters the realm of the mythic and the archetypal in order to achieve distance from social or personal issues and to provide a lively focus for pupils’ exploration. Furthermore, it affords children a valuable perspective that will be a counterbalance to the trivialisation of such content in so many films and television programmes to which they are exposed.

The word drama is used in three contexts in the drama curriculum and teacher guidelines, as follows:

drama refers to the widest generally accepted meaning of the word
a drama refers to a specific drama activity in any form or genre
the drama refers to a drama activity on the classroom floor.

A number of terms are used and a number of concepts are referred to in both the curriculum and the guidelines that may be unfamiliar to teachers. These are explained in the glossaries in the documents.