Overview
This unique collection promotes and develops 'drama-in-English’, a hybrid pedagogy combining reader response theory with literacy research and educational drama. Drawing on experienced practitioners' classroom insights, the authors show how embedded drama approaches can be used to revitalise the English/Language Arts curriculum and motivate young people to make personal and critical connections with their learning. Readers will find eight reader-friendly accounts exploring how drama-inflected approaches support diverse learners across all aspects of English teaching. Contributors discuss engaging with literary texts through spoken, written and multimodal responses; digital storytelling; embodied approaches to creative and informative writing; developing language competency; and preparation for formal examinations. The research-informed content, rooted in real classroom practice, demonstrates sustainable and fully integrated creative approaches applicable to UK and international contexts. This essential resource benefits all those working in English/Language Arts education: secondary teachers, teacher educators, trainee teachers, and teachers of English as an additional language.
Full Product Details
Author: Jane Coles ,
Maggie Pitfield (Goldsmiths University, London)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
ISBN: 9781041105404
ISBN 10: 1041105401
Pages: 164
Publication Date: 30 April 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
In Transforming English Through Drama, Jane Coles and Maggie Pitfield have presented an overwhelmingly forceful argument for the enactment of the ‘drama-in-English’ pedagogy formulated in their earlier work, Drama at the Heart of English. This collection of international classroom-based case studies offers powerfully persuasive accounts of the ways in which ‘drama-in-English’ approaches can foster enjoyment and motivation, stimulate creativity and create rich and meaningful learning for students. Coles and Pitfield rightly argue that English is in need of transformation; for all those involved in the subject who share this view, [and who believe in the centrality of effective learning and teaching of English for young people’s development] Transforming English Through Drama should be essential reading. SIMON GIBBONS: Reader in English Education, King’s College London. Maggie Pitfield and Jane Coles are to be warmly congratulated on their new edited book, Transforming English Through Drama: Case Studies in Classroom Practice. This wide-ranging collection promises to be an invaluable handbook for English, Language Arts, English as Additional Language teachers and the broader drama-in-education community. Each chapter makes a strong case for embedding drama-rich strategies and experiences in fostering deep and critical literacy learning. An experienced group of researchers and practitioners demonstrate how these inherently inquiry-based approaches motivate and engage learners, nurturing their creativity and imagination while drawing on their own identities and cultural understandings. A very welcome and very timely addition to the field. ROBYN EWING AM: Professor Emerita, Co-Director, The CREATE Centre, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney. The push to bring in the 'knowledge-rich curriculum' has swept aside much of the arts curriculum in schools and one victim of this has been drama. Maggie Pitfield and Jane Coles have done a superb job here of building on their previous work by drawing in other practitioners to the cause. Transforming English Through Drama: Case Studies in Classroom Practice is a timely and much-needed book which lays out both the 'what' and the 'why' of collaborative drama work in schools, specifically in subject English. MICHAEL ROSEN: Professor of Children’s Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London; poet and children’s author.
Author Information
Maggie Pitfield is an experienced English and Drama teacher, is currently a Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. Jane Coles, a former Head of English and Deputy Headteacher, is also an experienced teacher educator and educational researcher, most recently at UCL’s Institute of Education.
