Using drama to enrich a genre-based pedagogy for teaching academic writing across content areas

Abstract Drama has the potential to enrich and enliven established approaches to literacy learning, engaging students and expanding their possibilities for meaning-making. Drama-rich pedagogy is well-established as an effective tool in supporting language and literacy development. However, research to date has not explored the possibilities of using drama to enrich established genre-based approaches to teaching writing. This article reports on findings from an interventionist case study in an Australian primary school examining how a Year Three/Four teacher used drama-rich pedagogy to support students’ academic writing of a scientific explanation text. The findings indicate three key pedagogical benefits of employing drama to build conceptual understandings of the field of study and relevant academic language as part of a genre-based pedagogy for teaching writing. Firstly, drama experiences can make visible students’ prior knowledge of a topic, allowing teachers to identify, interrogate and transform students’ misconceptions through reflective dialogue on embodied experience. These embodied and interactive experiences also support the development of shared understandings of key concepts and language. Finally, drama experiences provide embodied and interactive contexts in which students can move from common sense to more abstract/technical understandings of the topic of study which they can apply in writing their own texts. In sharing these findings, this article aims to illustrate how drama can be used to develop the conceptual and linguistic understandings required by genre pedagogy in engaging, embodied ways that draw productively on the diverse resources that students bring to their learning.