Drama in Education(DE) is a unique performance and pedagogical discipline focused on process-oriented theatrical techniques, which is designed to engage a broad spectrum of learners. It is an engaging, theoretically significant, and historically rooted field of inquiry and genre of transdisciplinary practice. The practice of DE occurs not only in schools and classrooms but also increasingly in community spaces and in professional theaters, and with populations of all ages (McAvoy and O’Connor, 2022). 

DE encompasses aesthetic methods and theories, theatrical practices, ethical engagements, and pedagogical pursuits, often all at once. When contextualized within the larger applied drama field, DE takes up the explicit goal of learning and teaching through drama, although its pedagogical dimension may take a variety of forms. Moreover, DE now appears not only in various explicitly pedagogical settings like schools, but also in community and arts institutions. Further, as creativity and creative learning modalities increasingly influence discourses and policy initiatives associated with the best practices in twenty-first-century learning and creative economies on global scale for good and ill, DE’s relevance as a worthwhile mode of learner engagement grows increasingly salient (McAvoy and O’Connor, 2022). 

In the 1990s, the drama approaches invented by a significant practitioner of the field, Dorothy Heathcote, were organized and published in Dorothy Heathcote: drama as a learning medium (1999). Heathcote suggests four approaches to drama pedagogy, namely Process Drama, Rolling Role, Mantle of the Expert, and the Commission Model (Wagner, 1999).

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戲劇教育是一門獨特的表演及教學學科，專注於以過程為導向的戲劇技巧，旨在吸引廣泛的學習者。它是一個引人入勝、具有理論意義，而且歷史悠久的探究性和跨學科實踐科目。戲劇教育不僅能在學校和課室中展開，在社區空間和專業劇院中也越來越常見，並且適合不同年齡段的受眾(McAvoy and O’Connor，2022)。

戲劇教育內容廣泛，通常同時涵蓋美學方法與理論、戲劇實踐、道德參與及教學追求等多方面內容。當放在更大的應用戲劇領域時，戲劇教育能夠借用多樣的教學模式，實現透過戲劇來進行學與教的明確目標。目前，戲劇教育不僅應用在校園中，也應用於不同的場域，如社區和藝術機構等。與此同時，在21世紀學習與創意經濟領域中，隨著創意和創造性思維學習在環球層面的話語權和政策影響力越來越大，戲劇教育作為一種效益顯著的學習模式，也變得愈來愈重要(McAvoy and O’Connor，2022)。

1990年代，Wagner, B. J.在《Dorothy Heathcote: drama as a learning medium》一書中，對著名戲劇實踐者Dorothy Heathcote所提出的戲劇方法作出整理。Heathcote認為，戲劇教育可以有四種方法，即過程戲劇、滾動角色、專家任務及委託模型(Wagner，1999)。