DiE Days report Zug 2019

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About 60 Drama in Education (DiE) enthusiasts from 15 countries and 4 continents (Asia, Australia, Europe and North America) and all kinds of teaching backgrounds met at Zug University of Education for professional development on drama and theatre in language teaching and learning. 30 talks and workshops in German and English (including Keynotes by Patrice Baldwin and Jonothan Neelands) took place over 2.5 days, due to the international setup of participants English was a bit more dominant as working language. Ranging from workshops about Physical Theatre and Process Drama over training pronuncation with drama methods to talks on for example improvisation training for interpreters or theatre projects for future language teachers the programme reflected the great variety of contributors.

The keynote delivered by Patrice Baldwin (past president of International Drama and Theatre Education Association, past chair of National Drama, UK) focused on the potential of “Drama for Learning”. Her workshop on the children’s book “The Saddest King” showed the power of process drama to make the already quite though-provoking topics of the book, such as happiness, repression and questioning norms, even more memorable to the participants.

  • “happy” inhabitants
  • The saddest King
  • Who’s listening?
  • A parking ticket – oh happiness!

Jonothan Neelands, Professor of Creative Education at Warwick Business School, UK in his talk „Popular Theatre in Populist Times“ addressed topics like values, theatre and democracy and offered the audience some food for thought. Also his process drama workshop focused on values, more specifically traditional Chinese values and how these are mediated but also subtly questioned in the story of Mulan.

  • Mulan and her father
  • “Run Mulan…”
  • “She was educated like a son…”

As for 2018 also for this conference the publication of selected conference proceedings (workshop reports and articles on current research) is planned.

The bilingual conference was organised by Zug University of Education in cooperation with HTWG Konstanz organisiert was sponsored this year by the Amt für Kultur des Kantons Zug and by Korporation Zug.