Old, new, review

The year 2020 has been a year when our field and our work have been tested beyond measure, when most of us were pushed to extend and adapt our teaching practices in ways unexpected. As a global pandemic shut down schools and face to face teaching, drama educators embraced opportunities to share their experiences, offer advice and ideas. This collegiality and sharing of practice is what draws many of us to engage with our drama professional associations, attend ‘swapshops’, professional development programs and conferences. At these events, we often learn new strategies to take back to the classroom, discover new resources and ways of working. Certain forms of drama have been regulars on drama education conference programs across the decades, such as process drama, commedia dell-arte, and working with masks and puppets. We recall some of our first ever workshops attended at drama education workshops some decades ago and learning from other drama practitioners in some of these very forms, working with masks and commedia dell’arte. Given this, it is interesting to find that these type of foundational drama forms are the ones that practitioner/researchers have investigated for this issue of NJ Drama Australia Journal. The work conducted has also emerged from practitioners and teachers who have taken up the challenge of embracing a more formal research framework.