Webinar #59 | Lynsey McCulloch and Matthew Collins - Rehearsal Room Pedagogy at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Time to Act: Rehearsal-Room Approaches and Creative Writing

Coming from two Senior Research Fellows of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Dr Lynsey McCulloch and Dr Matthew Collins, this webinar will take us through Time to Act, the expansive RSC research project that activates rehearsal room practices in a classroom space.

Over the past few decades, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has worked with hundreds of schools using its rehearsal-room pedagogy. This approach uses the ways in which directors and actors work with text to inform the work of teachers with pupils in their classroom. Last year, the RSC undertook a major research project, Time to Act, which provided qualitative and quantitative evidence for the value of these pedagogical approaches.

This is a chance to hear about the impact that rehearsal-room approaches have on pupils’ language development within their creative writing. Matt and Lynsey will discuss the tools that informed their analysis – tools that captured how pupils wrote at greater length, and with greater variety, complexity, and sophistication, and also explore how this quantitative evidence formed the basis for literary analysis, and how the writing of those exposed to rehearsal-room pedagogy shows greater empathy, broader inferencing skills, depth of characterisation, and richer imaginative worlds.

Photograph by Sam Allard ©RSC