International Drama and Theatre Education Association

The International Drama and Theatre Education Association - IDEA - represents more than 90 countries around the globe.

IDEA Founding

After the second world war, UNESCO - the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation, recognised the unique role that arts education can play in the creation of a culture of peace, international understanding, social cohesion and sustainable development. It was not until 1992 that the International Drama and Theatre Education Association was founded. IDEA's aim is to promote and advocate drama and theatre as part of a full human education and to provide an international forum for those working as drama and theatre educators throughout the world. IDEA encompasses the integral place of drama and theatre education in pre-schools, primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Congresses

IDEA Congresses have been held in :
* 1992 - Oporto, Portugal
* 1995 - Brisbane, Australia
* 1998 - Kisumu, Kenya
* 2001 - Bergen, Norway
* 2004 - Ottawa, Canada
* 2007 - Hong Kong, SAR, China

The next IDEA World Congress will be in Para, Brazil in 2010.

2007 IDEA Congress

The 2007 IDEA Congress was held in Hong Kong, SAR, China. Its theme was 'Planting Ideas'. Over 400 delegates attended from all over the world. Internationally respected drama and theatre arts practitioners were invited by the organising committee to delivered keynote addresses and conduct seminars, special interest groups and workshops. A host of different performances also took place during the congress highlighting Chinese Opera, Drama in Schools, Dance in Schools and Drama for the Disabled. Part of the congress was also committed to the world of young people. This was called Young IDEA.

At the 6th World IDEA Congress, a world alliance of the three key arts education associations was founded. This brought together IDEA with INSEA (International Society for Education Through Art) and ISME (International Society for Music Education). The aim of the world alliance is to "allow citizens to be enriched through the arts to allow confident, flexible intelligences, creative verbal and non-verbal communication skills, abilities to think critically and imaginatively, intercultural understandings and an empathetic commitment to cultural diversity in our knowledge based post-industrial societies." [ [http://www.idea-org.net/en/articles/World_Alliance_of_IDEA_ISME_and_InSEA IDEA ] ]

To facilitate communication between IDEA members, Dramatool [ [http://www.dramatool.org/en/ Dramatool: ] ] , an IDEA special website, was launched to aid international collaboration between different drama-practitioners.

IDEA President

At the 2007 IDEA World Congress, Dan Baron Cohen was reconfirmed as the President of IDEA.

Dan Baron Cohen is a playwright, community-theatre director, cultural theorist and arts-educator, presently living and working in Brazil. Following undergraduate and post-graduate research into popular educational theatre at the University of Oxford, he was apprenticed to the playwrights Edward Bond (England) and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Kenya) whose life projects inspired a lasting search for methods of community-based cultural action for justice.

In 1998, Dan Baron Cohen worked as a visiting professor at the State University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. His past nine years of collaborations with landless, indigenous, trade-union and university communities in Brazil, Peru, Chile and, more recently, in China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, have advanced his methods into a pedagogy of intercultural literacy and a poetics of 'transformance'.

As the President of the International Drama-Education Association (IDEA), Dan Baron Cohen is also Coordinator of the World Alliance for Arts Education, and a member of the International Committee for the World Social Forum. He has published Theatre of Self-Determination (Derry, 2001), Alfabetização Cultural: a luta íntima por uma nova humanidade (Cultural Literacy: the intimate struggle for a new humanity), São Paulo 2004, and numerous articles.

References

External links

* [http://www.idea-org.net] - IDEA website