| dc.description.abstract | Over the last forty years, education policy in the UK and elsewhere has ‘decoupled’ creativity from the arts, redefining it as an economic commodity, while simultaneously adopting a standards and competencies approach that measures children’s attainments and the ‘value’ added by teaching that has prioritised ‘knowledge’ over experiencing. Concurrently in the UK, all aspects of drama and other creative arts in schools have been systematically marginalised, where primary schools are especially vulnerable partly because teaching is not organised in discrete subjects. In the same time frame, there has been a rapid expansion of elective classes for children outside education using various models of practice and structure.
Children aged between eight and eleven engage in embodied, imaginative performance in two fundamental ways: universally in socio-dramatic imaginary play and selectively in structured drama. This research project uses qualitative methods, including semi-structured one-to-one interviews and drama practice research, to explore the phenomenological insights of children into the tension between creative agency and collective creativity and how the fluidity between play and structured drama offers children the potential to mitigate it. The thesis examines how children’s creative habits forged in play, such as the heavily agentic elements of liminality, roleplay and transformation together with a playful, prosaic capacity for productive flow that marginalises ‘failure’, can form a productive congruence with structured drama.
This thesis argues that, despite some notable exceptions, many children with an interest in drama can face a situation in which drama activity in primary school is sporadic and does not fully engage with their motivations or address their creative aspirations, of which performance is fundamental in all its aspects. Children’s creative needs and desires are complex, intuitively experienced and relate, among other things, to expression, communication, agency, control, and growth through challenge. However, although elective classes are conspicuously about performance and can offer the most profound experience of it, to meet these needs the practice has to accommodate the children’s individual and collective creative habitus and offer meaningful creative development that negotiates with children’s creative state of being. The research suggests this requires the co-construction of collaborative drama practices with children that enable the formation of new creative habits in areas like theatrical performance to an audience, where play has no precursor, in order to optimise children’s collective creativity within drama practice and theatre performance. | en_GB |
