Review: Hotseating – The Drama Education Podcast

There is certainly space in the podcast market for drama education. Open Drama's Half Hour Call is a monthly podcast that offers conversations with theatre companies such as ‘Trestle’ and ‘Gecko’ as well as covering live events such as the ESU Public Speaking competition. Alongside this, there isn't a huge amount on offer, but ADEI (The Association for Drama in Education in Ireland) launched their own podcast, ‘Hotseating’ in November 2021.

The podcast covers interviews with various contributors to drama in education, some based in Ireland, some in the UK and others working internationally. Many of the interviewees work in university settings, with Carmel O'sullivan, a professor in education from Trinity College Dublin opening up series 2, for example. The episodes I listened to (Carmel O'sullivan, John O'toole and Cecily O'Neill) all mentioned the importance and influence of Dorothy Heathcote on their work, and all covered many years of experience of working in a range of settings. There were certainly crossovers with the content of the episodes, though perhaps the episodes I listened to were a little too similar in terms of the context and the backgrounds of the practitioners.

The podcast is a gentle listen, with the instruction at the beginning of each telling the listener to ‘pour yourself a cup of tea, sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation’ which I felt summed up the style of the podcast perfectly. Each episode follows a similar structure (almost akin to a lesson plan) with guests being asked for their ‘still image’ (how they got involved in drama), their ‘teacher in role’ (a memorable moment that stands out from their own their practice) and a ‘role on the wall’ (an influential person in the interviewee's life).

The issue with this podcast is really the amount of episodes and content on offer for listeners. What is here is interesting and all of the practitioners have great stories to share and are positive and passionate about drama in education. However, there are only nine episodes to listen to and the gaps between each episode are also quite large, with the last episode dropped on the 26 September 2023 and the one before that in July 2022. Perhaps with more variety in guests interviewed and more regularity in the publication of actual podcasts might be useful for this show to really fill the gap in the drama education podcast market.