Chapter 6 - Dramatic Methods of Teaching

Summary

In many ways, the entire Cadbury’s enterprise was rooted in a commitment to the ongoing education and development of all staff. Education programmes created and sponsored by the firm sought to do more than secure accrual of knowledge, and that recreational activities that foregrounded learning new skills were understood to be as important as the content of more formal educational curricula. Both were viewed as self-development opportunities. As 1926’s Work and Play asserted, ‘the worker acquires in himself sharpened faculty and fuller capacities derived from his experience [in participating] in those activities, and a larger knowledge of men and affairs’. Chapter 6 details the range of educational opportunities on offer to employees, alongside those that the firm supported that were not exclusively for their own staff – including the Day Continuation Schools and Fircroft and Woodbrooke Colleges, and considers the use of drama as an innovative pedagogic tool at Bournville and performances staged for, and as, learning.