Foreword

Dear SCENARIO Readers,

We are pleased to announce that this third edition of SCENARIO includes contributions from a Canadian, German, Italian, Irish and US-American perspective.

It starts off with Peter Jankowsky’s Defeat and After under the rubric “Texts around Theatre.” In this narrative, he portrays a formative experience from his school days that triggered a life-long, enthusiastic involvement with literature and theatre.

Defeat and After is followed by five drama pedagogical models which promote students’ creative endeavours, especially in terms of dramatic writing.

Michael J. Sosulski (Kalamazoo College, Indiana, USA) outlines a university course in which students of German analyse dramatic texts, stage selected scenes, and advance their literary appreciation. It is of particular interest that Sosulski’s model familiarizes students with the acting conventions of different eras, which they subsequently put into practice.

Mark Lauer (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.) and Steffi Retzlaff (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada) describe in their articles how techniques from drama pedagogy can unlock narrative texts. Mark Lauer’s contribution revolves around the manifold learning processes theatre brought to bear on the adaptation of Hans Peter Friedrich‘s novel Damals war es Friedrich (1961). Steffi Retzlaff introduces a course based on Thomas Brussig's novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (1999). The students make lasting learning experiences with the innovative teaching technique “Neuromuscular Integrative Action“ (Nia).

Frank Fischäss (Volkshochschule Ravensburg) was guest lecturer at the Department of German, University College Cork, in 2006. There he taught a semester-long module entitled “Understanding and Staging Literature“¹, during which students put together a play which was performed in the University’s Granary Theatre. His contribution describes the step-by-step drafting of this play, in which a photo composition, later used as a dramatic backdrop for the public performance, served as the initial impulse for dramatic creation.

Marina Bertino (Secondary School, Catania) adds some perspective from an Italian school. She describes how even in a beginners’ course, pupils experience the telling and acting out of fairy tales, legends, and their own stories as inherently motivating and conducive to learning. She highlights the specific potential of narrative theatre (teatro di narrazione) and reports on the different stages of a theatre project which in 2007 won first prize in the competition Mit Deutsch auf die Bühne (With German on Stage), hosted by the Goethe Institute Turin.

Towards the end of this edition, Birgit Oelschläger (Goethe Institute Berlin) focuses on the ongoing academic discussion around theatre pedagogy in Germany. Conferences with the titles „Theaterpädagogische Methoden und Spracherwerb“ (Methods in theatre pedagogy and language acquisition), „Spielen Sprechen Lernen – Theaterpädagogik und Sprachförderung“ (Playing Talking Learning – Theatre Pedagogy and the Promotion of Language Learning) as well as „Theaterspiel und Sprachlust“ (Theatre and the Delight in Language) are definite indicators for an increased interest in Foreign and Second Language Teaching and Learning. Birgit Oelschläger comments on this development by investigating possible productive interchanges between theatre pedagogy and language acquisition / advancement.

A few comments from the editors:

We regret that the publication of Daniel Feldhendler’s article that was planned for this issue has to be postponed to a later edition.

We are experiencing minor problems with the transfer of files to the printer-friendly pdf-format. However, we are hot on the trail of these technical issues and expect to solve them soon.

The Editors

Susanne Even / Manfred Schewe

May 10th, 2008