186 pages
244 x 170mm
May 2010

Foreword by David Booth and Juliana Saxton

This selection of the seminal texts of Jonothan Neelands is essential reading for everyone involved in drama education. It showcases the classroom participatory democracy through ensemble based theatre education which Neelands developed over 25 years.

Readers will find

• Neelands’ development in the 1980s of the conventions approach which made Dorothy Heathcote’s and Gavin Bolton’s ‘living through drama’ more accessible and which has come to dominate drama curricula across the globe


• his defence - along with Cecily O’Neill - of progressive drama education


• his arguments for drama as both pedagogy and discipline


• his calls for theatre education to be both presentational and representational


• his pleas for drama’s place within the English rather than the arts curriculum


• his response to 9/11: drama is crucial in an age of uncertainty and intolerance and the defining humanising and democratising principles of drama in education are a potent challenge to extremism.

In these inspirational, theoretically grounded and practical writings, Neelands shows how transformation through and on the stage can bring about real change in the world.

Professor Jonothan Neelands is a National Teaching Fellow, the Chair of Drama and Theatre Education, and Director of Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick UK. He has trained teaching artists at the Royal Shakespeare Company and at New York’s New Victory Theater.