Children’s creative understanding of drama education: A Bakhtinian perspective

•Children’s creative understanding in and through drama is mainly grounded in story re-imagination and retelling.•Three categories of creative understanding including characterization, re-conceptualization and transformation are generated.•Draw-and-tell research method works as an offstage activity to stretch children’s drama experience and imagination.•Teacher decrowned herself in a magical and playful way can facilitate creative teaching and learning.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of creative understanding, this paper aims to investigate children’s creative learning of drama education in a group of preschoolers aged 4–5 in a Hong Kong kindergarten. The research was designed originally to offer a case study to identify the emergence of creative learning during and after drama lessons, and investigate its relation to teaching. The field observations, however, noticed the contrary effect brought by a product-oriented and a teacher-centred approach of teaching. These approaches had strongly undermined the stimulus to imaginative and playful participation that drama education is able to generate purportedly. Not only had they restricted dialogic encounters in the lessons but also the feasibility of identifying children’s creative response emerging from within. These observations led to a shift of the study focus to the method and data of draw-and-tell, which was used to enable children to creatively re-imagine and retell their drama experiences as a concluding reflection. The findings were analysed in three categories, namely Characterization, Re-conceptualization and Transformation to illustrate children’s capacity and techniques of restorying drama experiences with their interest, knowledge, language and culture. The research process as well as the results of the study reveal a complex interplay between teaching, learning and researching affirming that a particular type of creative learning of drama education is not only shaped by a particular form of teaching, but also the research method.