Brisbane—Cooling Conflicts and Acting Against Bullying

Abstract

This chapter describes the longest and most complex of the DRACON projects, spanning nine year-long cycles of drama and peer teaching. It opens by describing the origins of the Brisbane project in an originally independent investigation into drama and intercultural conflicts and gives an overview of the research. The cycles are then outlined in turn. The first three took place in a Brisbane high school, comprising preliminary experimentation with a range of drama methods, the team’s discovery of the benefits of whole-class peer teaching, and a theatre-in-education project devised by the students for their parents and school community. The next three moved to New South Wales, where the project operated in a number of culturally and economically diverse schools, the drama techniques were consolidated into the enhanced forum theatre (EFT) strategy, and the peer teaching was expanded to incorporate neighbourhood primary schools, eventually encompassing Year 12 (17-year-olds) to Year 3 (8-year-olds) in some cases. The final three cycles returned to Brisbane, where what had been discovered was applied specifically to countering bullying in a range of secondary and primary schools.