As part of the first Drama Australia Symposium in 2016 three of Australia’s best loved ‘vintage’ drama educators, who had been instrumental in the establishment of the association, were asked to contribute a keynote. Kate Donelan, Val Johnson and John O’Toole drew on their shared memories of the 40 years since the foundation of Drama Australia to highlight key moments in the association’s history. Here is the script they presented to delegates, 1st October, 2016, Adelaide.

This report is made up of notes contributed by the speakers on the Presidents’ panel at Looking Forward, Looking Back, the inaugural Drama Australia Symposium held 29 September–2 October 2016, at the University of Adelaide McGill Campus. Each state/territory president, or their representative, was asked to talk about the particular issues that encompass contributing enablers or challenges in individual state contexts. This material helps us gain a point-in-time understanding of the national agenda with a state-by-state focus.

This article focuses on the Sydney case study within the 2013 international Water Reckoning Project (www.water-reckoning.net) – a project which repurposed Dorothy Heathcote’s rolling role curriculum model with digital technologies to connect students and teachers around the world in a common drama, considering the ‘what if’ context of a fictional community, called ‘Ardus Unda’, which was on the brink of an imagined environmental disaster. The article proposes a new geodramatic inquiry framework that draws upon place pedagogy and social ecology to examine the positioning of learners as the drama opened up new ways for them to consider their collective and personal responses to local and global environmental issues. In this project experiences were curated by teacher/researchers and student’s dramatic content was uploaded online for a range of audiences. In analysing the role-based exchanges between students and teachers, as well as focus group data, the writers offer a new framework for researching drama. This geodramatic analysis examines the dynamic interplay of place, time and relationships within a digital rolling role project. Researchers of the Sydney case study also consider the tensions and possibilities of situatedness in a global drama and the implications for applying this digital pedagogical model.

The aim of this article is to provide primary teachers with effective ways of engaging in drama processes to affirm diversity and to promote inclusive education in regard to cultural and linguistic diversity. It is informed by, and a response to, the ‘cultural and linguistic’ section within the recently revised version of the Drama Australia Equity and Diversity Guidelines to which both authors contributed. It examines some ways in which recommendations and advice provided within the document can be enacted in primary schools through the use of drama education methods, in particular dramatic storytelling and process drama. Through their work the authors have found that drama techniques and processes can be highly effective in developing understandings of cultural and linguistic diversity within primary schools. By way of illustration this paper also focuses on the findings of a recent PhD project conducted by one of the authors, which focused on the education of pre-service primary teachers in the use of drama techniques to explore cultural identities and linguistic diversity. Specifically, it examined the roles culturally specific oral arts forms, including participatory storytelling (in this instance stories from South African cultures) can play in supporting drama pedagogy and intercultural understanding of pre-service primary teacher candidates and how they can transfer this knowledge to their teaching.

In his introduction to Michael Anderson and Colleen Roche’s, ‘The State of the Art’ Robin Pascoe depicts this collection as a ‘powerful frame through which to make sense of the unfolding turbulent ...

This article reports on a research project which investigated boys' engagement in drama at a coeducational government school in Melbourne, Australia and the factors which influenced their participation. There was found to be a direct relationship between the teaching approaches operating in the drama program and the positive and productive participation of boys in the drama classes.

This paper reports on longitudinal research into a partnership between a youth arts organisation and an inner city secondary school, using case study and reflective practitioner methodological approaches. Earlier projects in this same field of study explored a mimetic model of theatre practice, based on young people's dramatised stories that culturally diverse teenage participants described both as ‘real’ and delivering moral messages to their peers and wider community. In 2009 a play-building process, combining text from Shakespeare's King Lear with original material inspired by Beckett's Waiting For Godot and a devised contemporary narrative, was used to generate a new play called Searching For Lear. This work wove tragic and absurdist perspectives into a contemporary young person's street story. In this article, the project is analysed using literary theory and an analysis of mimetic processes. The play utilised a model of mimesis that complicated the relationship between the audience and the dramatic narrative, interrogating the basis on which dramaturgical meaning was constructed. These theoretical perspectives are considered in relation to research data, revealing participant and community audience perceptions of this work and its significance in its local cultural context.