Miracles are happening: beyond the rhetoric of transformation in the Western traditions of drama education

This paper seeks out the gaps between localised accounts of drama's efficacy in terms of producing transformations in students’ behaviours and sense of identities and the theoretical accounts of such transformations offered in the textual discourses of the field of Drama in Education. Drawing on a range of post-colonial and emancipatory discourses the paper tentatively suggests certain pre-conditions in the pedagogic and artistic intentions of drama practitioners that might indicate that personal and social transformations in drama could be the rule rather than exceptional ‘miracles’. These pre-conditions include a rejection of ‘domesticated’ and intra-aesthetic pedagogies of drama in favour of a socially committed pedagogy that regards students and the realities in which they dwell as ‘unfinished’ and ‘waiting to be created’.