Brian Edmiston is an Associate Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning. His primary academic fields of study are dramatic inquiry (also known as drama-as-education or process drama) and dramatic play (also known as socio-dramatic play or children's pretend play). Dr. Edmiston teaches courses in the M.A. and Ph.D. programs and runs the pre-service K-12 M.Ed. licensure program in drama education. He is a core faculty member in two areas of study: Rethinking Early Childhood & Elementary Education; and Multicultural & Equity Studies in Education. He is an affiliate faculty member in three areas of study: Literature for Children & Young Adults; Reading & Literacy in Early & Middle Childhood; and Social Studies & Global Education. He was twice elected chair of Education & Human Ecology College Council. A former co-editor of Drama Matters, chair of the Ohio Drama Education Exchange, and a current co-director of the Martha King Center for Language & Literacies, he has organized two international events at Ohio State: the 2000 International Drama in Education Research Institute, and the Dorothy Heathcote Seminar in 2007. He regularly presents and has been an invited keynote speaker at local, national, and international conferences.
Brian identifies as a British-Irish-American: he was born and grew up in Ireland, was a lawyer and then a teacher in England, and moved to the United States in the mid-1980's. He studied for his master's degree with Dorothy Heathcote, the legendary teacher and scholar of drama-as-education, and for his doctorate with Cecily O'Neill, the leading expert in process drama as an art form. After receiving his Ph.D. he was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for five years before returning to Columbus to join the faculty in the School of Teaching and Learning. He is married with two children, plays the fiddle, likes to bicycle and sing, and is a Quaker.
Dr. Edmiston's scholarship focuses on how adult-mediated dramatic inquiry and dramatic play may create contexts for the learning and teaching of integrated units, literacy, literature interpretation, social studies, and ethics.
He is the author and co-author of two books as well as many articles and chapters. A former elementary and secondary classroom teacher, he regularly researches his teaching in local public school classrooms. His recently published book was based on data gathered during a unique decade-long longitudinal research study of playing with this son. Outside of the United States he has engaged in research in Northern Ireland schools in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Ulster as part of a pilot of Citizenship Education. He recently completed a Creative Partnerships funded six-month research project in England where he has also been a consultant on an Innovation Unit government-funded classroom research project with a group of elementary teachers. He is currently working on a book for teachers and scholars on the theory and practice of using Dorothy Heathcote's mantle-of-the-expert approach to dramatic inquiry.
Dr. Edmiston has developed a theory and practice of play and drama as ethical pedagogy through extensive classroom-based research and via his study of how playing with his son promoted the development of ethical identities. In doing so he has challenged assumptions about children's moral development and has re-conceptualized superhero play as mythic play.
Over two decades he has developed both a theoretical and practical understanding of dramatic inquiry from both curricular and pedagogical perspectives. He has theorized drama-as-education as an inquiry-based adult-mediated pedagogy that extends curricular possibilities through the use of dramatic situations. In particular, he has shown how dramatic inquiry creates the conditions for situated literacy learning. His work on the creation of classroom community in dramatic inquiry focuses on how power shifts can open space for the inclusion of excluded or ignored viewpoints. His analysis of how a playful overlap between everyday and imagined classroom spaces creates dialogic authoring spaces highlights the significance of a dramatic dimension in teaching and learning.
Address:
333 Arps Hall
1945 N High Street
Columbus, OH 43210-1172
Student Advising:
(614) 292-2332
edtl-oas@osu.edu
Director's Office:
Rebecca Kantor
(614) 292-1257
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