1st Edition

Ethics, Identity, and the Dramatherapy-informed Classroom Processes of Identity Negotiation and Performance

By Jeanne Roberts Copyright 2025
164 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

164 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

164 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Using the drama classroom to shape an active, student-centred space and foster a new perspective for understanding the dramatherapeutic change-process, this book explores the processes that underpin the ways young people negotiate and perform their identities as ethical people. Arguing for the retention of process-based exploratory drama on the curriculum, chapters critique the impact of... Read more

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Resisting the Neoliberal Binary

Chapter 3: The Situated Mindbody: Embodied Psychosocial Relationality

Chapter 4: Bridging the Theory/Practice Divide: What Is Actually Going On Inside the Classroom and How Do We Know?

Chapter 5: Group Drama: Trust the Process

Chapter 6: Functional-, Fictional-, and Relational-Roles

Chapter 7: The Choices I Make as Teacher

Chapter 8: Conclusions: Negotiating Change in the Overlaps and the Spaces In-between

Biography

Jeanne Roberts worked as head of drama in secondary schools for over 30 years in the UK and the Crown Dependencies. She received her doctorate from Leeds Beckett University, UK, and is a full member of the British Association of Dramatherapists (BADth).

‘Drama classrooms can offer students critical opportunities to re-think and re-enact themselves as social beings and citizens. Dramatherapy, integrated into mainstream classes, offers long-term exploration of values and identities rather than short-term cultivation of marketable skills. Jeanne Roberts helps us think our way out of the overly-managed classroom and into a space of potential transformation. This splendid adventure in creative, student-centered, drama-based classroom education will appeal to teachers at all levels of education who long for more active and enjoyable ways to engage students and open up their worlds’.

Dr Kathy E. Ferguson, University of Hawai’i, Mānoa

‘This is a book for all those educators, policy makers, and students of education who are interested in educating for children’s self-actualisation and critical agency. It powerfully highlights the role of dramatherapeutically informed drama for promoting the embodied, psychosocial, and relational identity-work which is fundamental to enabling children in this. Rooted in Roberts’ empirical research and over thirty years’ practice experience, the book offers searing critique of neoliberalised narrowing of learning, and evidences new possibilities enacted in current dramatherapeutically informed classrooms. The book makes a passionate, rigorously articulated case for the importance of relationality and embodiment in learning and the development of a dramatherapeutic sensibility in drama-teaching practice’.

Dr Shona Hunter, Leeds Beckett University, Author of Power, Politics and the Emotions