Taking Stock and Looking Ahead: Drama Pedagogy as a Gateway to a Performative Teaching and Learning Culture

This overview article initially focuses on early connections between dramatic art, teaching, learning, and living, followed by a brief account of how Great Britain took on a pioneering role with regard to the establishment of drama as a school subject, method and educational subdiscipline.It then focuses on how drama pedagogy in foreign language teaching and learning has developed as a specific field of research and practice since the 1970s, acknowledging the important contributions to the field made by scholars and practitioners from outside Great Britain.An overview of current practice in the field is given by presenting different (small-scale and large-scale) forms of staging language, literature and culture.The article concludes by proposing a model for a "Performative Fremdsprachendidaktik" (Performative Foreign Languages Didactics) and by arguing that in the future "performative" be used as an umbrella term to describe forms of foreign language teaching and learning that derive from the performing arts.