Abstract

This study illuminates the lived experiences of A Level Drama students and teachers within the Further Education sector in England and reasserts the necessity of a creative education. Working with the research conversations of twenty-two students and teachers, the findings indicate a discord between the participants’ experiences of teaching and learning in A Level Drama, which are tacit, collaborative, dialogic, and embodied (Polanyi, 1967; Osmond, 2007; Conroy, 2010; Franks, 2015) and the required methods of assessment. The narrative accounts of the research participants suggest that efforts to ensure the “academic rigour” of drama as a subject strengthens enduring divisions of theory and practice (Bohm, 1996; McCullough, 1998; Hyland, 2017; Fleming, 2012; Nichols, 2021), and questions the use of written examination as a viable means of expressing and measuring practical, embodied knowledge.
Synchronously, this thesis explores how lived experience can be (re)interpreted and (re)presented on the stage and the findings support Harris and Sinclair’s claim that ‘the writing of a play is an act of inquiry’ (2014:5). Drawing on a/r/tographic practices (Springgay, Irwin and Kind, 2005), the study argues that ‘creative and artistic processes parallel the analysis that any qualitative researcher applies to their work’ (Sallis, 2018:55) and situates drama as a method through which ‘to interrogate data in different and often revealing ways’ (Butler-Kisber, 2010:135). Subsequently, the study affirms playwriting as a robust research practice with the capability to ‘facilitate engagement, more nuanced representation, reflexivity, and even action from the researcher, participant, and audience’ (Cannon, 2012:583).