Educational drama in Norway: From cultural expression to curriculum element

Abstract

The article is conceived as a survey exploration of significant historic developmental stages of the Norwegian educational drama field. The article first engages in an historical consideration of educational dramatics from traces of performed education in old Norse culture, via school drama organized by the church in the Middle Ages, to a decline of drama and theatre after Pietism in the eighteenth century, with a succeeding narrower view of knowledge and teaching in the following century and scarce information about drama as education. The focus then turns to deliberation of educational reforms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offering new possibilities for drama pedagogy through the Progressive Education movement, followed by identifying the position of drama in the six national curriculum reforms from 1939 to 2020 and the changing role of the subject area resulting from policy accentuations underlying curriculum revisions.