Music & Drama Education Expo 2023: Push your practice

Over 2,500 Music and Drama teachers from around the UK flooded to the Business Design Centre in Islington in February for a packed couple of days of talks, performances, CPD sessions and practical workshops from a raft of top educators and theatre companies.

Learning opportunities

Education expert and Drama & Theatre writer Patrice Baldwin led one of the expo's first sessions, teaching delegates how to explore a picture book through drama. This is one of the key elements Baldwin has explored in Drama & Theatre through her Primary Drama Curriculum series (p24), which guides readers through the various ways teachers can introduce Drama within the rest of the core Primary curriculum. In her Expo session, Baldwin proposed various Drama strategies to investigate and extend text and images within a picture book for younger learners.

Later in the day, Annie Smol from Face Front Inclusive Theatre ran an insightful workshop on how to work inclusively in Drama education, suggesting and trying out various creative techniques to involve and include disabled students and those with special educational needs. We were asked to consider what inclusion and exclusion look like in the classroom, and what we need to do as practitioners to add processes to increase the sense of belonging for those in our classes. Smol worked through various drama games, asking us how we could adapt them to suit those with differing abilities. The games looked entirely different for wheelchair users, autistic and blind or visually impaired students, but never diminished the impact of the practice. If anything, the workshop simply challenged us to experiment with our practice and try out new techniques to engage students in more dynamic, inclusive ways.

While some sessions were more discussion-based, others – like Geoff Smith's Pretext into Practice through Process Drama – had participants making animal sounds, moving about the space to explore conflict and resolution through the picture book Where the Wild Things Are. Helen Battelley from Music and Movement had delegates doing a conga line into the exhibition space, using lights and music to motivate learning in early childhood.

Delegates take part in a movement workshop at this year's Expo

On the floor

Running alongside these CPD sessions were a wide range of over 150 exhibitors from the creative fields. These included publishers and distributors such as Bloomsbury, Concord Theatricals, Broadway Licensing, Nick Hern Books and Theatrical Rights Worldwide, as well as exam boards – AQA, OCR and LAMDA Exams – and associations including National Drama. Theatre company Frantic Assembly also joined the exhibitors, along with resource providers We Teach Drama and Wicked Active Learning, trip organisers The School Trip and Theatre Workout and training and further education providers including BIMM University and Fourth Monkey Actor Training.

All in all, another great year of the Music and Drama Education Expo, with plenty of inspiring speakers, innovative products and interactive experiences on offer for the delegates. We hope you enjoyed the experience, met likeminded teachers and educators, and learned new skills and teaching ideas.

The Music & Drama Education Expo will be taking place again from 22-23 February 2024 at the Business Design Centre in London. Register your interest as a delegate or exhibitor at musicanddramaeducationexpo.co.uk