Blurring the play–drama boundary: A case study investigating the teaching and learning of a drama-integrated curriculum in a Hong Kong kindergarten

Abstract

This study aims to conceptualise a drama-integrated curriculum devised from process drama as an approach to play-based pedagogy and curriculum to realise the policy initiative of learning through play. By investigating teachers’ perspectives and practices in relation to the curriculum of a local kindergarten, examples of effective drama-integration strategies and the associated children's learning are identified and organised into four themes – namely, drama teaching and learning through, before, in and after play. The teachers understood that although their curriculum is not based on free play, its not-so-free features may reconcile the play–learning binarism, daring them to navigate the maze of complex relationships between play, drama, teaching and learning in implementing a playful curriculum.

Boundary-crossing of play to kindergartens

The binary between play and learning prevails in Hong Kong early childhood education, which has inherited Confucian education traditions such as exam-orientedness and teacher-centredness (Jung and Han, 2018). Far from being absent, play is an integral part of children's everyday life, but it is often refused entry into the classroom due to scepticism regarding its educational values. Nonetheless, the promotion of play, a western construct, in local kindergartens can be dated back to the colonial era. It was first introduced in the mid-1980s but did not receive much attention until the 2006 curriculum guide affirmed the pedagogical significance of play by initiating the policy of ‘learning through play’ and ‘play-based pedagogy’ (Curriculum Development Council, 2006: 41). Since the promotion of play in western early childhood education has its theoretical roots in romanticism and progressive liberalism (Grieshaber, 2016), the boundary-crossing of play into the classroom was expected to dilute teacher-centredness and the strong academic emphasis to accomplish holistic, playful and active learning. As elaborated in the curriculum guides (Curriculum Development Council, 2006, 2017), play is an ideal mode of activity to facilitate the development of children's physical, psychological, intellectual, social, creative and problem-solving abilities. However, considering that the three-decade-long reform had not been very successful (Rao et al., 2010; Wu, 2014), in 2017, the curriculum guide even required that ‘half-day and full-day kindergartens should arrange no less than 30 and 50 minutes every day respectively for children to participate in free play’ (Curriculum Development Council, 2017: 67). This assignment of discrete timeslots to play apparently suggested that not just free play, but play overall had finally taken a distinct position in the curriculum.

Local challenges to the realisation of play initiatives

The brief historical account above suggests that the boundary-crossing of play into Hong Kong kindergarten classrooms is anything but an easy ride. Confronted with the pre-existing play–learning binary and Confucian educational practices, many teachers are still struggling to reconcile the play–learning dichotomy due to a lack of clear policy guidelines (Rao et al., 2010). While free play is being promoted as a type of play that is generally understood as ‘being freely chosen, personally driven, intrinsically motivated, and mostly child-initiated’ (Grieshaber, 2016: 9), teachers are also asked to ‘design a variety of play in line with the curriculum aims and content’ (Curriculum Development Council, 2017: 66). As the local curriculum is widely known for being structured, overpacked and academic-led, how to negotiate the incongruity between freedom and structure, and between the emerging and prescribed learning outcomes in the practice of play, is a great challenge for teachers. Moreover, in the play initiatives, the terms and guidelines concerning learning through play, play-based strategies, and ways of ‘strengthening the element of free exploration in play’ (Curriculum Development Council, 2017: 13) are defined rather ambiguously. All of this perpetuates concerns over the teaching of play. Only teachers’ roles in play have been presented repeatedly (Curriculum Development Council, 2006: 53; 2017: 67); the necessary and concrete instructional and curriculum integration strategies have been hardly mentioned. This absence of guidelines has provoked the criticism that the officially advocated play initiatives are romanticising the benefits of play while leaving the pedagogical issues involved to unsupported teachers. In the next section, I would like to argue that we are unable to fill the pedagogical gap identified in the play initiatives without considering the inherent connection between learning, teaching and play.

The relationships between learning, teaching and the intrinsic nature of play

Studies of children's play (Beigi, 2021; Karpov, 2005) express concerns that children's limited knowledge and experience of particular play activities compromise the quality of play, resulting in disinterest in unfamiliar play, uneven player participation, and incoherent, non-extendable and unsustainable play experiences. This prompts the need for teaching that enhances children's play capacities and play quality. Recently, Pramling and his group of Scandinavian early childhood education scholars developed play-responsive teaching and Didaktik to reconceptualise the pedagogy of play (Pramling et al., 2019). Didaktik is the German word for ‘didactics’ and is used to highlight the German and Swedish education traditions that emphasise teacher–student communication as well as the learning content required and generated in the process of play. Pramling et al. (2019) argue that teaching is a mutually constituted activity in which teachers should participate in and respond to children's play to bring their play and learning to a new level. Teachers’ responses cover not only the game rules and frames of play, such as a story frame, but also subject knowledge and skills that will support children to explore, expand and develop their play experiences emerging in the process. For example, Pramling et al. (2019) reveal from their study that the teaching and learning of mathematical concepts such as size and order emerging in play can provide effective mediation when children negotiate role choice and the ways of mimicry. In other words, in pedagogical play processes, what is first taught as subject content can also serve as a tool to support children's development of crafts relating to particular types of play.

In order to further insight into the teaching and learning content for the pedagogy of play, it is necessary to discuss the rules of play as they constitute the intrinsic nature and basic structure of play. To Sennett (2008), play is an impersonal and make-believe activity which is governed by rules, regardless of whether they are adult-presented or child-generated. Rules aim to engage children with various abilities and experiences to play in the same play frame and in specific ways. To sustain play and its playfulness, children need to endure the tension between their own desires and the external constraints of the rules of play. All this illustrates that play cannot be implemented without helping children grasp the rules of play (Curriculum Development Council, 1993). Nonetheless, rules are not unchangeable, especially in repeated play, where children can modify, enhance or even invent rules to resist boredom, test their own limits, and increase complexity for deeper engagement and more playfulness. For Vygotsky, play is free but not free from rules. He takes dramatic play as an example and explains that ‘whenever there is an imaginary situation in play, there are rules stemming from the imaginary situation’ (Vygotsky, 1967: 10). Rules involve the social context, roles and their actions that shape the profile of play. Vygotsky's view further extends the understanding of the rules of play from game rules to ways of playing, such as how to act out a role in a particular imaginative context. Following this line, I argue that ways of playing are what define the situations, purposes, processes, and related actions and crafts of play, and they should broadly refer to any rules, frames, tools, and teaching and learning content that boost children's skills and knowledge of playing. In view of this, teachers need the pedagogy of play to support children to grasp these ways of playing, which will not only improve their play quality, but also secure their learning through play. In the next section, process drama is introduced and conceptualised not just as a possible pedagogy of play, but also as a play-based pedagogy and curriculum.

Conceptualising process drama as a play-based pedagogy and curriculum

This conceptualisation takes account of arguments on the homology of play and drama and related studies conducted by process-drama scholars (Nicholson, 2011; Winston and Tandy, 2009), and also the latest children's play research on the interwoven and dynamic pedagogical relationship between play and drama. Even though process drama is rules-driven and structured, its play-and-arts-rich, spontaneous and open features characterise it as complex and comprehensive play (Dunn, 2003; Lin, 2017; Winston, 2013). This understanding suggests that process drama is not limited to a creative pedagogy of play; its integration with various kinds of play, games, drama, and teaching and learning activities can also lead to a play-based pedagogy and curriculum.

Dunn (2003, 2011) places story performance and dramatic free play at either end of a spectrum. While both are story-based, the former involves teacher-directed well-structured stories and the latter is open, free and child-led. In between is process drama, a semi-structured but spontaneous approach to drama application. For early childhood education, process drama is always devised from a story and structured with theatre games, as well as various drama conventions (Neelands and Goode, 2015); it is a term that encompasses a wide range of drama strategies such as the Teacher in Role, still images, the Role on the Wall and hot seating. Usually, based on a chosen story, a teacher employs the drama convention of the Teacher in Role (Neelands and Goode, 2015: 54–55) – that is, the teacher takes the role of a story character to purposefully interact with the children and co-construct drama with them. Different drama conventions and strategies along a storyline facilitate the children's engagement in a fictive world to explore the story characters and plot, to work on the problem involved, and to reimagine and retell the story collectively (Brown, 2017; Miller and Saxton, 2011). Process drama is not only a specific arts education discipline or curriculum; its semi-structuredness, versatility and cross-disciplinary features also allow it to integrate with various subject content and different forms of play and drama (Tam and Sun, 2021).

Regarding the homology between play and drama, Winston and Tandy (2009) identify their shared inherent features: suspension of everyday reality, application of symbolic representation, deployment of rules and tensions, and, finally, physical and emotional engagement. These all contribute to the unique playfulness, imaginativeness and pedagogical potentials of play and drama. Based on French sociologist Roger Caillois's four forms of play – agôn (competitive games), alea (games of chance), mimicry (games of illusion and make-believe role play) and ilinx (games with the effects of dizziness and disorientation) – Winston's (2013) study offers a comprehensive framework to conceptualise drama as play-and-arts-rich pedagogy entailing all these play forms. By straddling the boundaries of play, drama and games, teachers apply process-drama strategies not only to enhance children's imaginative play, but also to initiate and structure process drama based on children's play experiences and interests (Lin, 2017; Ødemotland, 2020). As Dunn (2003) argues, the integration of process drama with children's play can provide children with new forms of expression, challenges, tensions, and textual or cultural resources drawn from their everyday life and familiar world.

In early childhood education, Gunilla (2001) also attempts to blur the play–drama boundary. She coins the term ‘playworlds' to ground the aesthetic roots of children's play in literature, drama and music (Švachová, 2016). The term ‘playworlds' highlights the aesthetic aspects of play by using stories, performative components such as movement, improvisation and music, and the teacher's role playing a story character to co-create an imaginative world together with children. Inspired by Gunilla, and probably process drama as well, the studies of Hakkarainen (2010) and Fleer (2015) explore and reveal the effects of the playworlds approach on stretching children's imagination and sustaining their dialogic interaction with teachers, which in turn can enhance the complexity and creativity of children's play. A dynamic and comprehensive bond between process drama and play can also be found in Loizou et al.’s (2019) study, which investigates the benefits of using drama conventions such as the Teacher in Role, thought-tracking and other dramatic interaction techniques in the enhancement of children's role-playing and play scenarios.

In sum, process drama embraces myriad ways of playing, as well as teaching play. With regard to the latter, it includes playing alongside children and supporting their play by introducing them to drama frames, narrative forms, game rules, story themes, the necessary skills and even the subject knowledge involved. Process-drama scholars are fully aware that all these pedagogical practices may limit children's choice and to some extent steer their participation (Neelands, 2010; Winston, 2004). However, as Neelands stresses, process drama emphasises freedom to explore, express and create rather than freedom to play arbitrarily. Whatever the plan, limitation, rule or structure conceived by teachers, it is incomplete and contingent ‘until it meets with and is mediated by the different lived experiences of the students who enter the drama space’ (Neelands, 2010: 109). The meeting of the teacher's drama structure and children's responses will probably transform anything that is pre-planned and prior to the drama. With all this understanding, I argue that process drama and its integration with play can be conceptualised as a play-based pedagogy and curriculum. In the present case study, process drama is applied as a core component of a curriculum where all drama and non-drama teaching and learning, in addition to different sorts of play and games, are integrated in the same drama frame and learning theme developed from a storyline. The purpose of the investigation is to examine how it can realise the learning-through-play initiative in the curriculum guides.

Research methodology

As revealed by a project evaluation questionnaire for my recent project of promoting process drama in 83 kindergartens in Hong Kong, both the principals and teachers strongly agreed or agreed that process drama could help them implement the latest initiative of learning through play (Curriculum Development Council, 2017). To identify in-depth and local perspectives and practices, and to investigate why and how process drama can help teachers achieve the mandated boundary-crossing of play and learning through play, Happyland kindergarten was purposively chosen as an emblematic sample (Gobo, 2008). ¹ It is regarded as what Patton (2015: 46) calls ‘information-rich and illuminative’ due to its sustainable and comprehensive practice of process drama as a drama-integrated curriculum. Hence, Happyland allowed me to examine how its curriculum would benefit children's learning by investigating the multifaceted, intricate and complex relationships between drama/play, teaching and learning.

The case of Happyland

Happyland is a government-subsidised kindergarten located in a public-housing area in Hong Kong. Before launching the drama-integrated curriculum, a theme-based curriculum had been adopted. In 2018, Happyland participated in a year-long drama partnership programme which was offered by a theatre company aiming to promote the use of process drama in local kindergartens. In the partnership, Happyland posited process drama as a specific play-and-arts-rich curriculum to innovate its school-based curriculum . Initially, the curriculum only ran for a few days and mainly catered for classes of children from four to five years old (K2) and five to six years old (K3). Following the one-year trial, as most of the teachers found the semi-structured and versatile features of process drama conducive to bridging play and learning, curriculum integration and their professional development, they gradually developed a four-to-six-week drama-integrated curriculum.

The teaching team at Happyland includes the principal (Candy), the teachers and coordinators of the drama partnership (Joyce and Lily), K2 teachers (Heidi, Sandy and Nick) and K3 teachers (Wendy and Grace). The principal's and teachers’ consent to participate was sought and granted prior to the commencement of the study, which involved three rounds of fieldwork implemented from the first quarter of 2019 to April 2021. The first round lasted about six months and included 40-minute participant observations in the K2 and K3 classes and a one-hour in-depth interview with each member of the teaching team. Additionally, all the related curriculum documents were collected to assist the data analysis. Apart from investigating how they integrated process drama in their curriculum, I solicited their views on its relationships with play, how it would benefit children's learning and what sorts of children's learning it would promote. The second and third rounds were conducted in November 2020 and April 2021, respectively. The whole process spanned three years, with all of the teachers forming a strong team with shared professional aspirations, beliefs and skills in developing a drama-integrated curriculum (Candy).

Data analysis

Two initial observations were made during the first round of the fieldwork. First, all of the teachers completed professional training in play and process drama, and consistently affirmed their equivalent functions to children's learning . Second, the teachers shared the aforementioned scholars’ views on the significance of teaching ways of playing (drama) in mediating children's participation and enhancing the quality and complexity of play. These observations suggested that, for Happyland, the decision to adopt a drama-integrated curriculum to achieve learning through play was not because it needed an expedient measure to address the government policy. Rather, it was made as a result of its teaching praxis and the benefits of drama education that the teachers experienced through the aforementioned drama partnership. In light of this, I was interested in investigating these observations further by unearthing (1) the local perspectives and practices of a drama-integrated curriculum and (2) the pedagogical relationships between drama teaching and children's learning. For these purposes, I decided to employ thematic analysis, which would allow me to construct a subjective interpretation of the studied phenomenon or topic through systematic coding and identification of meaningful emerging themes or categories (Guest et al., 2012).

The interview data was analysed by iterative coding to sieve through the teachers’ and principal's views and identify the most cited benefits of the drama-integrated curriculum for children's learning and the associated pedagogies of drama/play. As the teachers’ views offered comprehensive, first-hand, systematic information for investigating the case as a whole, the data analysis and reporting mainly focused on their views, while the data collected from the principal served as a supplement. Considering that the benefits of the drama-integrated curriculum for children's learning were expressed through the teachers’ self-reported and subjective claims, I verified the preliminary findings with the field notes and video data taken from the classroom observations. All sorts of data were analysed against the pedagogies and ways of play/drama discussed earlier, and were also openly coded to identify the related learning outcomes. The results were further triangulated by comparing the codes that were consistently and recurrently found in the two data sets (Patton, 1999). Based on the results, the axial coding strategy (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) was applied to construct four themes, organising the discussion around learning through, before, in and after drama. The findings reveal that although the teachers claimed that dominant and salient children's learning emerged naturally, further analysis suggests that it was attributable to carefully conceived, but also spontaneously devised, planning and practice throughout the curriculum process. Regarding the language of the data, the fieldwork was conducted in Cantonese and the excerpted interview transcripts are the author's translations. In addition to triangulation, member-checking was applied to evaluate the validity of the findings.

Findings: interplays between teaching of drama/play and learning through, before, during and after the drama process

Learning through drama: learning emerges naturally

The interviewed teachers argued that using drama leads to inherent learning benefits, which occur naturally and do not conform to a linear or input-output logic of teaching and learning. These include mainly social development and the cognitive learning of a story and related subject content. Instead of identifying attributes, the teachers believed that many pedagogical features and strategies of process drama, such as role enactment, playfulness, experientiality and story-based activities, can account for these learning benefits, despite the absence of explicit teaching.

The teachers saw an evident improvement in their students’ social skills, particularly in terms of cooperation and empathy – two areas that are widely recognised as highly learnable via process drama (Winston and Tandy, 2009). They also inferred that the children's raised abilities to care for others, as well as avoid conflict and mutual accusation, are associated with the use of theatre games, collaborative participation and mimicry in the curriculum. Among these activities, various forms of role play provide the children with ample learning opportunities to take other people's perspectives. As Lily observed, the children's social skills seem to have improved following the implementation of the drama-integrated curriculum:

Usually, when the children give a shout of encouragement to their team, they only go ‘Add oil’ [i.e. ‘Go team’]. Today, I asked casually, ‘We’ve heard “Go team” too often. Is there any other way to cheer for the character?’ Sunny, who always appears quiet and uncreative, raised his hand and suggested, ‘There stands a tree of courage. The apples make you brave. Go and eat them!’ It was totally his creation, unheard of in the class story. He then walked out, pretending to pick the apples and saying, ‘Let me pick them for you. Be brave after you have them!’ I was totally taken aback by the change in this boy.

Other data also reveals that the children's behavioural changes were probably induced by the moral and ethical messages and learning of the drama. As Winston and Tandy (2009) argue, a story can illustrate very abstract moral concepts and ethical values, and, through drama engagement and exploration, children can relate to them. One of the examples cited by Wendy was the obvious improvement of children's punctuality in going to school after the ‘King of clock’ drama, which helped the children to explore the importance of keeping regular hours in daily life: ‘As the parents admitted, their children would hurry them up by pointing to the clock when it is almost eight. We see them come on time; it is something we cannot deny’.

All of the teachers commented that the children also demonstrate a lasting memory of a story or drama, and the subject content explored and experienced in the process. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogies of playing drama, they also agreed that process drama can engage children in revisiting, experiencing and exploring a story through a playful and multifaceted approach, which effectively supports children's learning at the levels of 入心 and 入腦 (two colloquial terms to describe how something is engraved in one's mind and heart). There is strong evidence that every child – be they weak, strong or average learners – can benefit. As Sandy reported her observations:

Some students in class are seemingly looking right at you but, deep down, you know behind the gaze is the wandering mind of a daydreamer. But in drama class, many of them are committed. Does it count as learning? They need to express what they learn, for example, with physical movements. You can tell whether they are truly engaged in it. Their body won't lie.

As Winston and Tandy (2009) argue, the teaching of social and moral understanding is not conducted by rote learning but by induction. Through observing children's behavioural change, emotional engagement, verbal responses and bodily enactment in and out of drama, the teachers identified evidence that their belief and practice in process drama could nurture children's social, moral and cognitive learning.

Pre-drama teaching: precursor to complex drama learning

According to the interviewed teachers, before engaging the children in a drama with increasing complexity, they provide two types of pre-drama teaching and learning. The first involves the basic ways of play or playing drama, story frames, game rules, and any skills and knowledge, which serve as the necessary tools and crafts for enabling the children to work through the drama world. The second focuses on subject knowledge, such as literacy and numeracy skills, which, like the former, is also taught as an integral part of the drama world. Both are pre-planned and taught directly and explicitly.

The teaching of game rules and related subject knowledge deserves further explanation. As stated in an earlier curriculum guide (Curriculum Development Council, 1993), rules instruction lays down the essential groundwork for children's participation. Apart from explaining, demonstrating and testing the game rules, play involves the instruction of knowledge and skills. The game ‘What Time Is It, Miss Clock?’, cited by Wendy, illustrates how teaching rules and knowledge of reading a clock before the drama facilitated learning in drama. In this game, she played Miss Clock by standing with a clock in her hands on one side of the classroom while the children, standing on the other side, asked in unison: ‘What is the time, Miss Clock?’. On her answer, the children had to walk the number of steps accordingly. Whenever the answer was 12 o’clock, they had to run back to the start or they would be caught by the teacher. The child who avoided being caught by Wendy won the game. As observed, in the beginning, she shouted out the time loudly, but after several rounds, with all the children becoming familiar with the rules, she adjusted the clock's little hand to show the time instead of giving verbal answers. The increasing complexity and unexpected change in the way of playing provoked the children's excitement in the game (classroom observation).

Theatre games like this can enhance children's development of various generic skills – namely, concentration, understanding and responding to instructions, reaction, and the sense of space (Barker, 1989). According to the teachers, while the children could acquire these skills naturally by playing, there would have been no playing whatsoever had the children not been pre-taught skills such as telling the time and making correct moves on cue. This shows that pre-drama teaching of the ways of playing – such as declarative and decontextualised knowledge, concepts and academic skills – must be added to prepare children for advancing the complexity, playfulness and aesthetics of the game and the drama as a whole.

While drama facilitates the contextualisation of language and literacy learning, pre-drama teaching can be turned into an opportunity to dramatise, motivate and enhance such learning. As Heidi explained, the teaching of nursery rhymes, songs, vocabulary and sentence-building can be dramatised as magic spells and clues to solving problems or riddles in drama – for example, to save a character who is being captured by the villain of the drama. She elaborated:

The children loved the idea of using magic spells in the drama and always responded eagerly: ‘I wanna do it. Let's learn it now!’ When we started, they read more loudly with their own twist. A touch of drama elements can make a huge difference in children's engagement.

Another way of conducting pre-drama teaching and learning shown in the findings is engaging children by setting up a free-play environment or whole-class pretend play developed from an important scene in a drama – for example, a restaurant inspired by Pumpkin Soup or an open market by One Pizza, One Penny. This process involves many literacy and arts and craft activities, such as preparing props, designing posters, drafting regulations, making environmental prints and signs, reading notices and filling in forms.

All of these examples show that children's learning of rules and ways of playing is a prerequisite for their participation in games and drama activities. The dramatisation of the decontextualised subject contents also works to offer fun-filled and aesthetic elements to promote children's learning. If learning the ways of playing (drama) is comparable to the act of redeeming entrance tickets to a playground, the subsequent drama is the playground, where children are admitted to explore the potentiality of the newly taught ways to play drama.

In-drama teaching and learning: imaginative problem-solving and elaborate drama-building

There is rich data on how children learn in an immediate, open and imaginative context in drama. Among the drama strategies, the teachers found the Teacher in Role to be especially effective in immersing children in the drama world, and also enhancing their capacities and play quality. First, despite the teachers’ disguised power, their portrayal as one of the playmates in co-constructing a drama (Dunn, 2003; Miller and Saxton, 2011) achieves an illusive reversal of power between the children and teachers (Tam, 2018). Second, this drama convention is always applied to induce a drama tension or problem-solving task with fun challenges to elicit children's active and imaginative thinking, emotional engagement and creative problem-solving. The data below shows how the Teacher in Role strategy accommodates a discreetly embedded, structured problem-solving task – a subcategory of problem-solving learning.

Grace explained that in many pre-planned, teacher-initiated Teacher in Role activities, children are able to create their solutions spontaneously by freely exploring the drama context. In one lesson for Pumpkin Soup, she played the little duck who was trapped on a riverbank in need of help. A bridge-building task was introduced to get the children to solve the problem of crossing the river. She witnessed the children racking their brains to crack the problem:

For example, one of the animals, Peter, having tried to jump over the bridge but failed, broke up the bridge in order to rebuild it into a new one. To do that, he had to go back and forth many times. Waiting patiently, I allowed him to explore all he liked. There I saw a child full of creative thoughts, puzzling over his self-initiated task.

On another occasion, creative problem-solving was able to emerge either ubiquitously or serendipitously when the Teacher in Role interacted with the children with wit and nimbleness to prompt their immediate reactions and hence unfold the fictive world collectively and spontaneously. An example is identified in the drama of ‘The Three Little Pigs’:

The children were working in groups to help the eldest pig design and decorate his home in a drama activity called ‘Still Image’, where they would pretend to be the furniture, appliances and other motionless things in different rooms of the house. When each group was ready to show their image, Heidi played the pigs’ mother and, first, went to the kitchen to check the functions of the washing machine and the tap played by the children. These children reacted immediately by spinning around to imitate the machine's drum and uttering sounds of running water. When Heidi said to herself that she needed to save water, they lowered their voices accordingly. (Classroom observation)

As shown here, Heidi did not prescribe answers to the problem. Rather, her prompt worked like a ball machine, where the children had to think on their feet and hit the ball thrown at them. Heidi's credit as the Teacher in Role lay in her portrayal of a fun-loving and capable playmate, who covertly worked like a sports coach to push her team to better respond to the task by honing their crafts.

In addition to the Teacher in Role, drama-prompted free play, which is usually structured by teachers based on children's experiences and responses derived from drama, is used as a vehicle of in-drama learning (Dunn, 2011; Lin, 2017). As Bolton (1992) argues, it can be used when children have learnt enough to be trusted with more freedom to play in meaningful, elaborate and collaborative ways. This is also a defining moment where children demonstrate problem-solving learning and also evolving crafts of play such as better role-playing. This is illustrated in the open-market play inspired by One Pizza, One Penny. The children were allowed to bring in or create any goods and price them for sale in the market; they were also given tokens for exchanging gifts the teachers had prepared:

The open-market play had been going on for days. Andy, realising that his goods were never going to sell if he kept selling them at $80, decided to give a discount. On the last day, after he had slashed the price to $10, he finally had customers. Meanwhile, some of the shops had sold out their goods due to their extremely low prices and so the owners started to sell old toys they had found at home. (Classroom observation)

Nick highlighted that the children's capacity to handle the emerging problems shown in this extract could not have happened without the prior drama experiences and related concepts of buying and selling because they prepared them for the free exploration and knowledge application the play demanded. This suggests that the occurrence of child-led problem-solving and deep-play capacities should not be taken for granted; rather, it seems to be the fruit of teachers’ careful pedagogical consideration.

Post-drama learning and teaching: savouring, enhancement and extension of drama experiences

One finding that is not mentioned in the literature on play pedagogy relates to teaching and learning after play. In the case of Happyland, I categorised it into post-drama child-initiated learning or teacher-led teaching activities. The former manifests itself in children's informal chat and free play, where they further explore their prior play experiences. These moments are often fortuitously and sporadically seen at mealtimes, playtimes and toilet sessions. The teachers regarded them generally as an afterthought and aftermath of the drama, revealing the sustainable evolution of children's playful, imaginative and emotional engagement in the drama. As Joyce explained, in all these child-initiated activities, the teachers usually allow the children to take full advantage of talking and playing freely. However, they would rather seize the opportunity to initiate post-drama teaching and learning by organising extended activities to reflect on and evaluate the children's ways of playing that need rectifying or improving, and to stretch the children's drama experiences when strong interest and curiosity are detected. An evident example of this category is a discrete debriefing session.

Debriefing after drama

Regardless of their length, debriefing sessions are always arranged after a drama, where the teachers step out of their role in order to facilitate the children's reflection on their prior drama experiences. Such sessions cannot be precisely prearranged because they depend on the issues that emerge in the course of the drama. Some are organised to rectify children's misbehaviour and misconceptions observed in the playing process. The following extract is an observation from Nick’s whole-class debriefing session in the last lesson on One Pizza, One Penny, showing how the debriefing assisted his class to summarise, reflect on and consolidate their in-drama learning:

In the debriefing, Nick firstly led the children to reflect on their learning, especially in the open-market play. The children were able to recall, explain and evaluate how they had established the rules of play, created goods for selling, decorated the booth and played different roles with others. Lastly, Nick asked how many tokens the children had spent and told them to count and record their tokens on a worksheet. (Classroom observation)

Nick also reported in his interview that he had found some children mixing up the values of the tokens. The worksheet was thus a necessary error-rectifying activity to build the children's calculation skills. By drawing on children's in-drama experiences, which provide experimental, experiential and contextualised learning that ends loosely, an after-drama debriefing session such as this can tie up the loose ends by identifying and closing learning gaps.

Serendipitous extension of drama learning

Another example of teacher-initiated post-drama learning is what teachers call ‘serendipitous learning’. Heidi explained that, in drama lessons, children are always motivated to raise questions, exchange ideas and solve problems. Heidi has used this thirst for learning to lead inquiry-based activities:

K2 is now doing ‘The Enormous Turnip’ play. Some were very curious as to ‘Why were turnips grown so big?’ Because soil was used in the story, they started to grow mung beans with it. Then some of them asked if water only would work. Rather than answering directly, I organised a project based on their interests and questions about the drama.

As shown, the serendipitous encounters with teaching and learning opportunities were prompted and drived by children's curiosity and eargerness to know more about planting. We may interpret the interplay between drama teaching and learning in regard to Winston's (2004: 111) observation: ‘conscientious teachers of arts are used to grappling with questions related to teaching children ways of giving shape to their imaginative ideas’. Clearly, Heidi's conscientiousness as an art teacher makes her a good provider of extended drama learning. Apart from drama's generative power in relation to children's imagination, underlined by the burst of curiosity, the fact that this curiosity was channelled into learnable and teachable subject areas and inspired exploratory activities suggests that a drama/play-based curriculum is a semi-malleable process.

Concluding remarks

This study has aimed to conceptualise a drama-integrated curriculum devised from process drama as an approach to a play-based pedagogy and curriculum to realise the policy initiative of learning through play. By investigating teachers’ perspectives and practices in a drama-integrated curriculum at a Hong Kong kindergarten, it is found that teaching and learning in the curriculum work explicitly and implicitly, deliberately and serendipitously, declaratively and experientially, and also inside and outside the fictive world. I have constructed four themes – through, before, in and after drama – to illustrate the benefits of a drama-integrated curriculum and the associated play/drama pedagogies for children's learning, and highlight the intrinsic, interwoven and complex interplays between teaching and learning throughout the whole curriculum. Based on these findings, I further assert the significance of the active and responsive teaching of drama/play, particularly the teaching of the ways of playing (drama) which entail game rules, stories, role work, problem-solving, literacy and numeracy skills, and subject content knowledge. As shown, they are both the end product of teaching as well as the tools and crafts to support children's learning. Their functions include promoting children’s engagement; guiding children to co-construct an increasingly elaborate, playful and challenging drama world; and extending, rectifying and reflecting on their drama experiences and understanding.

The complex and dynamic interplays between drama teaching and learning shown in this study raise questions about the binary perspective of free play and no play, and also concretise how learning occurs through play. In addition to exemplifying the co-construction of play and drama by teachers and children (Miller and Saxton, 2011; Pramling et al., 2019), this case study reveals that seemingly spontaneous pedagogical inventions in the middle of playful learning are actually pre-embedded in the curriculum plan (Neelands, 2010). In the words of the teachers interviewed, it is a 燒腦 (literally, ‘brain-burning’) job. As the co-creators of the drama and the children’s playmates, they must think carefully about how to draft a roadmap for the drama/play which facilitates rather than controls how children's spontaneous experiences will evolve as the drama unfolds. Meanwhile, they must be able to anticipate what subject content and skills should be explicitly taught as ways of playing that are conducive to drama-building without infringing the playfulness and spontaneity of the drama/play. As Neelands (2010: 108–109) succinctly puts it: ‘the true art of teaching lies in the complex tempering of the planned and the lived’. When applied to a drama/play curriculum, the ultimate goal of teachers is not a simple match between the perceived and actual needs and desires of their students, but a happy marriage between drama/play teaching and learning.

It is expected that this case study will shed light on the pedagogical practices of play in kindergartens, particularly those in Chinese communities. The limitations of this study, owing to its reliance on a single case and small sampling size, warrant further research on the conditions affecting the effectiveness of a drama-integrated curriculum.