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FOREWORD ———<~o»—___ BY PROF DAVID Davis I am very pleased to be able to introduce this extremely useful account of Ädäm Bethlenfalvy’s research. It breaks new ground in the field of drama in education. To the best of my knowledge it is only the second example of research to investigate a relationship between school drama and the theatre forms of the playwright Edward Bond. Both this and the earlier research focus on the emphasis Bond places on the way the audience’s imagination needs to be evoked by the content of the drama and the way the drama is performed and the resulting impetus to new ways of seeing resulting from this. The first research was by Kostas Amoiropoulos' who looked at how the UK theatre in education company, Big Brum, used Bond’s theatre form in Theatre in Education and how what they were discovering might be used in classroom drama. Both this research and Ädäm Bethlenfalvy’s focus on the role and uses of imagination by the pupils in drama education but his is the first to look specifically at how the drama teacher might structure the drama lesson to enable the imagination to work in the way explored in Bond’s plays. In his research Ädäm Bethlenfalvy works through several examples of drama lessons which try different approaches with different age ranges of pupils and in the final examples he is reaching out to break entirely new ground in the field of drama teaching. My intention here is not to pre-empt what is to come in the thesis but simply to indicate some of the areas that Ädäm Bethlenfalvy covers. My aim will be to ‘whet the appetite’ of the reader as it were. LIVING THROUGH DRAMA AND LIVING THROUGH DRAMA WITH HEATHCOTE AND BOLTON From its early days in the 1950s and 1960s much of the drama in education in UK schools was improvised drama rather than simply studying classic play ' Konstantinos Amoiropoulos: BALANCING GAPS: An Investigation of Edward Bond’s Theory and Practice for Drama (Unpublished PhD Thesis), Birmingham, Birmingham City University, 2013.