Drama New Zealand

Matariki hunga nui

As we were finally collating this first issue of New Zealand Journal of Research in Performing Arts and Education: Ngā Mahi ā Rēhia for e-launch, we celebrated the season of Matariki, or new year in the Maori calendar.

The star constellation of Matariki, or the Pleiades, rises when winter is at its deepest and the days begin to lengthen.

Those who have contributed to this journal will perhaps feel that the seeds they offered have lain fallow in the ground over the many winter months of the journal’s preparation. But, of course, beneath the cover of the soil things have been happening, and it is timely to thank all the reviewers, copy editors, administrators and technical advisors for the work they have done. A lot happens to seeds before the first shoots break the ground!

The proverb above might be translated as ‘Matariki has a lot of people’, relating to the drawing together of many people for the work of the planting season. So, too, we hope, this journal will draw together many teachers, researchers and students in the fields of the performing arts. In her editorial essay my co-editor, Susan, expresses her hopes for the dialogues that will follow our on-line publication.

Matariki might also serve as a symbol for the new joint venture that this journal represents. Our collaboration with Drama New Zealand allows us to frame scholarship and research in the performing arts as something that serves the needs of both practitioners and academics. Many of the articles in this issue report research that is directly relevant to the classroom, and some play a little with the kinds of research approaches that are useful within our fields. We hope that in coming issues we will continue to explore the parameters of research and scholarliness that are appropriate to our work.

The role of this journal is twofold. Firstly, it provides a platform for the publication, and therefore for the development, of research within New Zealand in the fields of drama, music, and dance, as they relate to education in it widest sense. Secondly, it allows us in New Zealand to contribute to international dialogues in these fields. It therefore bodes well for the future of our journal that, as well as local contributions, we have two contributions from people who been early, and continuing, pioneers in the development of the scholarship of the arts in education. We hope in future issues to have many more.

In the editorial essay that follows, Susan Battye, writing from her history of engagement with the development of drama in New Zealand and constantly vigilant perspective, asks a number of provocative questions about the current resourcing, physical and academic, of drama within the curriculum and provokes us to be both critical and proactive in the development of the field. She advocates this journal and the Drama New Zealand website as tools in that process.

Five of the articles in the journal grow out of recent postgraduate research. Patrick Shepherd recently attained the relatively rare title of Doctor of Music. In Shades of Blankness in a Pale Palette he explores how the landscape of Antarctica impacted on him as a creative artist and how the experience of living in this wide landscape found expression not only in his musical compositions but also in poetry and paint. His article highlights the importance of the creative process itself as a site for investigation.

In his recent doctoral thesis, Trevor Thwaites explores the possibilities of literacy in broader contexts, including those of music education. In Music Education in a New Key: The Dissonance of Competence, Connectedness, Culture and Curriculum he presents the dilemmas facing the music teachers and, to use his own words, “the educational space available to music education as confused, troubled and diminishing”. He exhorts us not to squander the musical opportunities offered by New Zealand heritages through the limitations of the new curriculum framework.

Birgit Abels also presents findings from her doctoral thesis. Performing Palauan identity: Popular music in the Western Carolines provides an ethnographic report on the role Palauan popular music plays in Palauan society. Her work invites us to further explore the boundaries, or lack of them, between popular and traditional.

Stuart Wise is at the beginning of his doctoral journey. In Using ICT in the Music Room: Possible Implications for Secondary Music Teacher Training he outlines the challenges the new music technologies may have for the classroom and reviews the literature that initially informs his investigation.

Annette Searle reports findings from her Masters research project. Her article, Kiwi Kids Can Fly: Making Connections with Devised Drama, the Key Competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum and Classroom Practice, describes her own experiences in devising with primary school students and provides guidelines for other teachers learning how to give flesh to the new curriculum.

Juliana Saxton and Carole Miller are drama educators who are well known internationally. They offered Acts of Hospitality as a welcome to this new journal. As they say, their thoughts are “still percolating”, but their short paper provides an illustration of the use of imagery as a method of investigation and invites us to look further at the relationship between knowledge and the images through which it is shaped.

Dorothy Heathcote, a founding contributor to the development of the scholarship of arts in education, offers a current distillation of her understandings of learning and the possibilities of drama, and, in particular, the raft of strategies she calls “mantle of the expert”, offers to make learning empowering and meaningful. Her report of her lifetime’s growth of understandings in Mantle of the Expert: A Further Paradigm for Education? is a timely reminder of the importance within considerations of research paradigms of accumulated practitioner knowledge.

Viv Aitken plays with the persona of Borat to springboard a discussion of the use of unsignalled role and misframing in classrooms. In Pedagogical Learnings of Borat for Make Benefit Glorious Community of Drama Teachers: What Teachers Can Learn from Borat about Frame, Position and Power When Working in Role her fine-scrupled analysis offers a further and different example of the use of imagery as a research tool.

Maran Sutherlin and Janinka Greenwood collaborated on an article that grew out of interweaving but discrete projects. Break the Cycle reports the projects and invites questions about the way power operates in our classrooms.

The final and important role of this e-journal will be provided by you, the readers, as you send responses, comments, further provocations. We look forward to receiving them.

Janinka Greenwood
Co-editor

Biography

Janinka Greenwood is a teacher, writer, researcher and drama worker. She is Associate Dean of Postgraduate Studies in Education. Her research is based in a group of interconnected areas: education, theatre and the intercultural space where these take place. While some of her projects are in one or other of these separate areas, she is keenly interested in where they overlap and extend our conceptualisations of aesthetics, semiotics, scholarship and knowledge. Associate Professor Greenwood has published widely and is an editor for a number of journals. Work includes: Te Mauri Pakeaka: A Journey in to the Third Space (with Arnold Wilson, 2006,Auckland University Press) and The bridge, the trolls, and a number of crossings: a foray into the third space (with Laura MCCammon, 2008) in NJ (Drama Australia Journal.