My research and creative activity generate new pedagogical possibilities for how to improve education through the arts. As a practice-based researcher, I build bridges between the arts and education, schools and communities, and students and teachers. Specifically, I explore how drama-based pedagogy (DBP)—an arts-integrated teaching method—can be used by teachers and students to improve education and to thrive across political, cultural, and disciplinary divides. 

As a teaching artist and researcher, I employ drama-based pedagogy (DBP) to increase moments of humanizing dialogue and self-expression in teaching and learning. I do this because the arts meet an educational need to differentiate learning. DBP provides multiple pathways for understanding and sharing thinking about the self, others, and educational content.  My conceptualization of DBP also brings further attention to the arts’ capacities to spark and mediate sociocultural dialogue to reflect, envision, and create a more just world.  I use DBP to engage students’ experience, imagination, and bodies as key sources of knowledge production and meaning-making. For example, students can use DBP to embody the relationship between atoms in a water molecule, to visually map a character’s inner conflicts, and to rehearse language for problem-solving through role play.

Educators and artists around the world use my approach to DBP to design and teach for more effective learning in their classrooms. I design and implement long-term, research-practice partnerships with organizations, universities, and governments interested in adapting DBP to their local educational contexts. Together, we use ethnographic, case study, and participatory action research methods—a systematic inquiry into one’s own practice and environment—to address local educational issues through the arts. The partnerships result in multi-year, arts-integrated professional learning initiatives in schools and communities. I then disseminate our discoveries (often with teacher and student partners) in articles, chapters, books, white papers, keynotes, and through open-access websites.

Since receiving tenure in 2019, I have written a new book, co-edited a special journal issue, published nine articles and book chapters, one book review, one conference proceeding, given multiple high-profile keynotes, produced public scholarship websites and a podcast, and, been awarded over $600,000 to lead practice-based research on four continents. My research since 2019:

(1) theorizes and codifies a transformative approach to arts integration in education;

(2) amplifies teachers and students’ arts-integrated research and curriculum redesign; and,

(3) solves educational issues in complex socio-political environments, through a scalable applied drama institute.

Across my collective publications, my work has 958 unique citations on Google Scholar as of July 21, 2025 and an h-index of 12. These numbers indicate that my interdisciplinary research has garnered interest from a range of disciplinary scholars. They also demonstrate the value of arts-based research and practice that builds educational bridges in novel ways.

A Transformative Approach to Arts Integration in Education

My new book, Drama for Schools and Beyond: Transformative Learning Through the Arts (2025), tells the twenty-year story of my research and practice as director of The University of Texas at Austin’s Drama for Schools (DFS) professional learning program. Drama for Schools and Beyond is my third book with Intellect/University of Chicago Press. It advances the theoretical codification of DBP introduced in my second book, Drama-Based Pedagogy (2018), and explores my use and adaptation of DBP in education over time. I co-authored Drama for Schools and Beyond with DFS’s director of research, a former graduate student teaching artist, and our professional learning coordinator. I am the lead or sole author on nine of the twelve book chapters.

Drama for Schools and Beyond is an evidence-based blueprint for arts-integrated education that turns schools into laboratories of transformation and collective growth. Through theorized programmatic frameworks, critical reflection, and global case studies, the book details how DFS leadership and our projects have evolved over time. Drama for Schools and Beyond argues for a transformative approach to arts integration that centers teacher and student knowledge, inquiry, and discovery as a key driver for school improvement. Specifically, the book investigates arts integration’s productive capacity to prompt and mediate moments of dilemma and discovery in learning. Dilemmas often arise from a rupture between personal belief and the requirements of a system or from the dissonance of encountering people with different worldviews. The rupture—or dilemma—seeds a desire for something new, something better.

Drama for Schools and Beyond shares stories of teachers and students whose experience with transformative approaches to arts integration often led to an increase in engagement, self-efficacy, and belonging in education, and in some cases, improved academic success. Importantly, this book also reveals that a transformative approach to arts integration is not a panacea for all educational improvement. Instead, the book argues that the value of a transformative approach to arts integration might be found in its expansive variation. DFS has created a network of educators, artists, and students who share a common vocabulary and commitment to the arts in education. Each understands that to transform education, we must transform ourselves. The book received enthusiastic peer reviews; e-book publication will be available in August and print copies will be distributed by The University of Chicago Press in September 2025.

I spent eight months as a visiting academic at The University of South Australia in 2016. This led to my fractional appointment in pedagogical innovation with South Australia’s Department for Education between 2018-2020. These appointments resulted in five book chapters and journal articles with Australian colleagues published between 2018-2024; their impact is described here. Together, we wrote about new theories of transformative learning and arts integration with an emphasis on dance, visual art, and Aboriginal ways of knowing in education. For example, my experience in Australia shaped the transformative learning approach I employ in my 2023 book chapter, “Nailing Jell-O to the Wall: Digital Displacement and a Pivot Towards Healing-Centered Engagement.” This book chapter is part of Digital Displacement: Re-inventing Embodied Practice Online During the Covid-19 Pandemic, published by Palgrave. Digital Displacement was edited by leading global applied drama and theatre scholars: Erika Piazzoli, Rachael Jacobs, and Garret Scally.  

In “Nailing Jell-O to the Wall,” I offer a reflexive practitioner analysis of pedagogical dilemmas that arose during my online, graduate-level course in drama-based pedagogy during the spring of 2021. I engage Sally Mackey’s 2020 conceptualization of productive “anatopic” precarity to describe my online teaching as a bounded performance shaped by the socio-political climate of a global pandemic and a devastating winter storm. I critically consider my pedagogical missteps and dilemmas. Then, I reconceptualize my jiggly Jell-O assemblage of memory through a healing-centered framework. I employ critical educator Shawn Ginwright’s four pivots to demonstrate how educators can move towards more awareness, connection, vision, and presence in their pedagogical practice. The research in this chapter was foundational for the transformational arts integration approach articulated in the Drama for Schools and Beyond text that followed.  This chapter also marked a moment of transformative shift in my own teaching. I learned that I had to turn with others towards care and possibility in difficult times, rather than struggle for others on my own.

Amplifying the Voices of Teachers and Students

In much of my educational work, I employ participatory action research (PAR) as an epistemological intervention into who is typically engaged in school improvement, with a specific focus on the voices of teaching artists, teachers, and students. My recent research uses youth participatory action research (YPAR) so that students’ curiosities, inquiries, and theorizing about their learning environment can guide curriculum intervention. Put another way, YPAR offers an opportunity to rethink educational systems from the inside out, in collaboration with the students the system is built to serve. This innovative work reveals that the arts are a highly productive, capacious, and ontologically productive way to engage young people in PAR. Specifically, my research demonstrates that the aesthetic and embodied vocabulary of the arts provides a novel, accessible language and method to intervene in school-based hierarchies, so that teachers and students can see and value each other in new ways.

Several of my recent publications use variations of PAR to increase the visibility of teacher and student voices in academic and public scholarship. For example,  “Telling Our Own Story: Using Digital Storytelling to Transform Education with Texan and Alaskan Youth,”  a book chapter in Lisa S. Brenner, Chris Ceraso, and Evelyn Diaz Cruz’s edited book, Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism, uses content analysis and YPAR to consider outputs from a digital storytelling exchange project between elementary school students in Alaska and Texas. Here, I describe my pedagogy within a digital storytelling project to illuminate how to support young children to use their imaginations, bodies, and funds of knowledge to intervene in stereotypical narratives about indigenous people. My findings include students’ productive revision of social studies and literacy units in their respective school. I also saw small conceptual shifts in students’ understanding about what shapes their views of others. Applied Theatre with Youth is part of a widely used book series by Routledge, Applied Theatre in Context, and is unique in its focus on the value and efficacy of applied theatre with young people in a wide range of settings. 

My work also aims to address issues related to special education educators and students’ exclusion from many innovative school programs in the arts. My co-authored chapter, “Accessible for All: Drama-Based Pedagogy in an Inclusive Primary School,” works to fill a gap in the under-theorized area of inclusive drama-based learning design and practice. Disability scholar and educational psychologist Stephanie Cawthon and I supported administrators and teachers at an inclusive school in South Australia to adopt a whole-school Creative Body-based Learning (CBL) teaching method—a multi-arts expansion of drama-based pedagogy. Funded by South Australia’s Department for Education, our year-long research project developed a series of measures for teachers to track shifts in their understanding of CBL as an inclusive, pedagogical practice in the school’s disability unit (with students with one or more verified disabilities), and with their local students from complex backgrounds. Our findings suggest that CBL supports students with disabilities to be viewed as capable and competent learners, and that CBL increased the quality and quantity of student engagement for all students at this inclusive school site.

Scaling Applied Drama Institutes to Solve Global Issues

Since receiving tenure, I have led multi-year, research-practice partnerships in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland, and Taiwan. The centerpiece of each initiative is a scalable, applied drama institute model—a single or multi-day training model in DBP. The Applied Drama Institute brings together local artists, educators (K-12 and university), organizations, and government partners to co-design new curriculum and build networks for future educational change using the DBP method. My global institute model was developed through long term partnerships, grants, and research. Each institute is designed to create a professional learning community that (1) responds to the challenges and affordances in the complex socio-political environment; (2) builds new relationships between educators through an ethic of care; and (3) grows and supports local educators’ vision, plans, and partnerships to use the arts to innovate education.

Thirty plus years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a complex post-conflict reconstruction has resulted in regionally separate education systems, and ethnically segregated schools in some regions. Amidst limited resources and a lack of training opportunities, educators in BiH struggle to move beyond rigid, ethnically divided curricula and schooling structures. Based on the success of my prior U.S. State Department work in Croatia, I was awarded a 2018 State Dept./U.S. Embassy grant to train inter-ethnic English teachers how to use DBP to increase perspective taking and critical/creative thinking in their classrooms. I began with a series of five, one-day applied drama institutes across the three political entities in BiH to assess local interest in DBP. The favorable response led to a second Embassy grant in 2019, to design a four-day applied drama institute for fifty inter-ethnic educators. I used this model to train BiH co-facilitators, alongside my graduate students, so that local leaders could scale their own DBP training to other regions in their country. My ongoing research-practice partnership with the U.S. in BiH, eventually included six U.S. State Department grant funded projects (2018-2023) and one UT Austin Global Classroom Exchange (2020) project with BiH academics.

At its core, I used the arts in the BiH Applied Drama Institute project to create a safe and brave space for inter-ethnic educators to spark and mediate sociocultural dialogue about shared educational purposes, and to build new lessons and action plans to create educational change across real and imagined divides. I speak to the results of my third BiH applied drama institute in a 2021 white paper, “Interdisciplinary Applied Drama Institute Research Summary,” prepared with UT Austin graduate students and a U.S. academic colleague for the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

During the global pandemic, I was also awarded U.S. State Department funding to design and lead web-based, public scholarship and curriculum projects for BiH educators to expand and sustain training in DBP for English as foreign language teachers. I used these funds to partner with BiH educators to investigate how to use DBP to explore issues of identity, using the U.S. young adult novels Dear Martin (2020-21) and The House on Mango Street in 2022-23. Our public websites were hosted by UT Austin and became central dissemination points for the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo’s country-wide book-read initiative during this time. Each book-read project was curated with a team of previously trained BiH inter-ethnic educators and UT Austin graduate students and alumni. I also curated a six-month, online Arts Integrated Teaching Community featuring leading U.S. arts integration facilitators in 2021-2022. I am currently analyzing data from each of these projects for a forthcoming manuscript in collaboration with BiH academics to better understand the impact of our collaboration.

Future Directions

My research on innovative models for transformative arts integration learning in education continues to thrive. In the next two years, I want to establish a DFS Research Lab for UT Austin. My focus will be on scalable, arts-integrated student and teacher learning communities for K-12 education. The lab will house a series of new book projects, research efforts, and programming structures. This includes my second edition of Drama-Based Pedagogy: Activating Learning Through the Arts (University of Chicago Press/Intellect, 2018) scheduled to begin in 2026, and a new global book series written with leading drama scholars in Taiwan, China, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Poland.

Also forthcoming are articles and a website that document my three-year research appointment with UT Austin’s Planet Texas 2050 (PT2050) transdisciplinary research initiative. With PT2050, I support artists and scientists to research together to build resilience in those who are most impacted by climate and population stressors in Texas. I also co-design, facilitate, and research new arts-integrated curriculum with Austin-area students and teachers focused on climate literacy. We then share our findings with colleagues and community stakeholders. I submitted a NEA Research Lab grant in spring of 2025 to expand this research across Texas public schools.

In closing, feminist educational scholar bell hooks states that the arts do more than “tell it like it is”; they help us “to imagine what is possible.” My global research demonstrates that the arts can create bridges to imagine and enact new educational possibilities. It is my sincere hope that we can build an educational system that supports all students and teachers to imagine a future where they thrive.