Promoting Creativity in Teaching Drama

The use of drama in education can be seen as an alternative to traditional teacher-led, scripted schooling and an answer to the challenges of our current postmodern knowledge culture, which aims at deeper conceptual understanding by preparing students to be more creative and create multimodal knowledge. At the same time the research project “Challenge of the empty space”, at Helsinki University's Teacher Education Department, has established that the potential complexity and diversity of creative processes in drama education is a challenge for teachers and as well for Finnish teacher education. In this article we bring together three doctoral studies of teaching drama (Kaasinen, Karjalainen-Väkevä and Lehtonen). They present three different approaches for how a teacher could support students’ creativity in a drama class. We suggest, that it might be beneficial for teachers teaching drama to have training in improvisation, to pay attention to the holistic presence and to focus on students’ perspectives, agency and ownership in teaching.