On these pages you can read in their own words what motivated PGCE Drama Students to become Drama Teachers and what they make of the world of Drama so far.

Harnessing Students’ Cultural Capital in Lesson Design

It is no secret that KS4 and KS5 entries for Drama have been falling steadily over the past decade and continue to decline. This decline can be attributed to many factors, including the introduction of the EBacc and changes in funding. However, as part of the fight to boost KS4 and KS5 enrollment numbers, I would also like drama teachers to consider how careful design of the KS3 curricula can help increase students’ intrinsic interest in drama. After all, it is not enough for us teachers to know the value that drama skills can bring to all aspects of our lives; we must actively make the case to students that drama continues to be relevant in the 21^st century.

And for many students, it can be difficult to see how drama could be relevant in their lives. Drama institutions with high cultural capital are traditionally (and some continue to be) exclusionary to students from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds. And in a society where people are increasingly communicating and consuming entertainment through screens, the study of an in-person performing art form might be quite removed from students’ daily lives. If KS3 curricula are not designed with students’ cultural capital in mind, and are taught with approaches or texts that do not harness students’ lived experiences, then drama teachers might have an even more difficult time making the case that drama is relevant in our students’ lives.

Over the course of my two PGCE placements, I was able to observe just how big of an impact cultural capital—when harnessed well—can have on interest and learning outcomes in the classroom. At both schools, one of the KS3 schemes-of-work being taught was the work of Bertolt Brecht. The first school’s scheme-of-work was designed without actively incorporating students’ cultural capital and lived experiences into the curriculum. Brecht’s overarching ideas were introduced in their original cultural context (Weimar Germany), while Brechtian techniques were explored without any sort of context at all, using only drama games.

In the second school, however, it was clear that the scheme-of-work had been explicitly designed with the students’ lived experiences and cultural capital in mind: students were introduced to and experimented with Brechtian techniques using Abi Morgan’s Fugee as a stimulus. This contemporary text, which centers on a young refugee arriving in England from Sierra Leone, actively incorporates Brechtian techniques and allowed the students to see clearly how one man’s ideas from 1930s Berlin might be relevant to their own lives in 2020s Southeast London. Harnessing the students’ cultural capital not only made it easier for the students to understand the effects that Brechtian techniques could create; the students were also more intrinsically motivated to experiment with the techniques, and use the text as a stimulus from which they could craft a message they saw as important and relevant.

I am not saying that the KS3 drama curriculum should consist only of texts, stimuli and characters that are familiar to students—students should have the opportunity to exercise their imagination and learn about situations and people they might not encounter in their daily lives. But, as teachers of one of the few school subjects without a National Curriculum, we drama teachers have the unique added responsibility, power and freedom of deciding what curriculum our KS3 students experience, and how they experience it. Harnessing our students’ cultural capital when making these decisions can only help in the mission to present drama as relevant and necessary amidst this enrollment decline.

Kendra Cui (July 2024)