Standalone
DISCOVER DRAMA
EDUCATION
A Three-Day Introduction to Drama and Creative Teaching.
Discover drama as a way to teach, question, investigate, imagine, collaborate and learn.
"What if drama in education was not about putting up a play?"
For many of us, our first experience of drama in school meant scripts, rehearsals, costumes, annual days and performances. Discovering Drama begins there—and opens the door to something much larger.
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Vaishali Chakravarty - Program Director
What Will I LEARN?
Build Your Drama Toolkit
A collection of practical drama strategies and conventions that you can take straight into your classroom.
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A Drama-Based Lesson Design Framework
A simple way to turn curriculum content into an active drama-based learning experience.
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New Ways into Familiar Curriculum
Discover how a story, poem, historical event, concept or question can become the starting point for inquiry, conversation and creative learning.
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A New Lens on Teaching
Experiment with role, questioning, tension and fiction to move from simply delivering content towards creating situations in which students think, respond, make choices and take greater ownership of their learning.
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WOrkSHOP DETAILS
Location
Joy of Drama Studio
Building 29, Saket Community Centre
New Delhi -110017
Eligibility
Age: 21 years plus
No drama teaching or theatre experience needed
Schedule
1 to 3 Dec 2026 | 4pm to 7 pm
Fee
INR 10,000/-
Application Open
Early Registration- INR 7500/- By 01 Nov 2026
Please share your CV and write to sharejoy@joyofdrama.com stating how this workshop will help you to teach better. We will shortlist 10 applicants to participate in the workshop.
Learn with the mentors who practice and develop these processes with children every day.
Vaishali Chakravarty
Workshop Director
Vaishali Chakravarty is a drama-in-education practitioner and researcher, and the founder of Joy Of Drama, an organisation with programmes in India and the UK. A Licentiate of Trinity College London (LTCL), she works in the process drama tradition of Dorothy Heathcote, Cecily O'Neill and Gavin Bolton, bringing it into dialogue with Indian performance forms. Her work appears in ArtsPraxis (NYU Steinhardt), Education in the North (University of Aberdeen) and The Journal for Drama in Education (NATD, UK). She speaks internationally on drama and education and convenes OpenOut, a drama-in-education conference that brings together educators, artists and researchers from around the world.
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Selected Publications
Chakravarty, V. (2026). Assessing Drama: Beyond Performance. ArtsPraxis, 13(1). NYU Steinhardt. https://doi.org/10.33682/ax56-rpxu
Chakravarty, V. & Chakravarty, V. (2024). Making process drama effective online for children and young people. Education in the North, 31(2). University of Aberdeen. https://doi.org/10.26203/tja2-7v72
Chakravarty, V. (2022/23). [Title]. The Journal for Drama in Education, [vol/issue]. National Association for the Teaching of Drama (NATD), UK.
Day-BY-DAY
Workshop Plan
Day-1
1. What Do We Mean by Drama?
Move beyond scripts, stages and performances and discover drama as an active learning experience.
2. The Drama Toolkit
Experience practical strategies and conventions including tableaux, thought tracking, hot seating, collective role, soundscape and writing in role—and discover what they can unlock in a classroom.
3. When the Teacher Steps In
Meet the work of Dorothy Heathcote through Teacher-in-Role and explore what changes when the teacher becomes part of the dramatic world.
Day-2
4. Drama in Education
Explore how role, fiction, tension and inquiry can transform curriculum into lived experience.
5. Process Drama
Experience the work of Cecily O’Neill through an unfolding drama where there is no script to rehearse and no final performance to prepare.
6. Mantle of the Expert
Discover Heathcote’s remarkable approach to placing learners inside an imagined enterprise—as people with expertise, responsibility and a problem that matters.
Day-3
7. Drama in Education
Discover the actor-teacher tradition and how theatre, participation and learning can meet.
8. The Creative Teacher
Explore questioning, framing, listening, tension, facilitation and participant agency—and the teacher’s changing role in a creative classroom.
9. Create Your Own
Bring it all together by transforming familiar curriculum material into a short drama-based learning experience of your own.