“The Drama for Learning and Creativity project (D4LC) is a specific example of enabling young people to use their imagination and creativity as a stepping-stone to reality.”
Jude Kelly, Head of Culture for London 2012 (LOCOG) Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, London
What is D4LC?
Drama for Learning and Creativity (D4LC) started in Norfolk in 2005 and has gradually spread to other parts of the UK and internationally. It is a sustainable, cross phase school improvement initiative created by National Drama and piloted initially with Norfolk County Council Children’s Services. It systematically enables classroom teachers and external drama specialists, (local and national together), to work in true partnership, with a focus on improving and developing creative, whole class drama to support the achievement of school improvement priorities.
Whole class drama can provide an holistic, multi- sensory, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic experience that enables children to engage in role with a make believe situation and react spontaneously and creatively to it. It is rooted in the first learning style of imitation and mimicry. Most young children (if developing normally) readily engage with ‘pretend’. Real emotional engagement and learning takes place, even though the ‘pretend’ or drama is an imagined experience. Drama strategies and conventions can be used by teachers selectively as highly effective, thinking frames that can scaffold different types of thinking and inter-thinking. Whole class drama is also a social form of learning experience, relying on whole class co-operation and collaboration for the drama to be sustained and succeed.
In D4LC the teachers themselves are challenged and supported to work creatively in role with the class. This is highly engaging for children and enables interesting and positive shifts often in the pupil/teacher relationship. Drama can be about anything, anywhere, in any place and at any time in history or the future. This makes it an ideal medium for teaching creatively both in and across the curriculum. There are a plethora of drama/in role related approaches to learning these days that do not always make explicitly clear that they are in fact drama. D4LC sets out to build a clear, rounded and unambiguous understanding of drama in education, which then becomes a strong seedbed within which other drama related initiatives might better flourish.