Drama Boreale - Åbo Akademi

9. Researching Drama and Theatre Education – are we
telling believers tales?
Hannu M. Heikkinen
Abstract
In this article Hannu Heikkinen reflects upon what kind of culture drama education
creates and reflects. Throughout the text he is examining central questions regarding the
value of drama and the themes of drama educational research. The text is in dialogue
with excerpts from Finnish drama students’ learning diary entries and with Finnish
drama and theatre educational research.
Introduction
Research in drama education has seen fast developments since the 1990s. In Finland,
drama is now considered a valid research topic in the instructional science of Finnish
along with reading, writing, speaking, listening, literature and media. Indeed, drama fits
well into this frame of reference. According to some opinions, in the new curriculum
drama should be turned into a subject called ‘theatre art’. I am concerned that this would
mean reverting to the method-subject (drama-theatre) dilemma, which does not serve the
purposes of drama in the school. This is an issue that raises feelings and passions for and
against, and hence in this article I ask are we able to look at drama and theatre as
objective researchers or do we look at the subject through rose-tinted glasses?
I have asked myself this question in my work teaching drama education students at the
University of Jyväskylä during 2000–2005 and 2008–2009. During this work I collected
learning diaries from my students. I used this material in my doctoral dissertation and
have since continued. The examples used here are students’ comments gathered from this
material, not comments made by an individual student. Comments made in learning
diaries often contain strong feelings, while a more analytical approach is still finding its
place, sneaking in here and there. Of course it should be kept in mind that the writers are
students, whose ideas still need time to mature. The following comments exemplify
students’ comments on what they have learned e.g. from courses on process drama and
theatre.
• I learned a lot of technical stuff, how to put lights up, how to do things like
that.
• I learned about how it feels to be somebody else.
• A lot, but I can’t really say exactly what I’ve learned, there was so much
going on …
Learning is seen as something very concrete, or perhaps it takes time for students to
recognise what they have learned. For the main part, drama work is considered positive,
as indicated in the doctoral dissertations of Tapio Toivanen, Soile Rusanen and Erkki
Laakso. According to Toivanen (2002), the main content of teaching theatre work is
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