Theatre in the Elementary Classroom: Pedagogy, Practice, and Measurement — Ghana's Perspective

This conceptual paper proposes a framework, Enact, Understand, Reflect and Measure (EURM), for organising theatre based pedagogy in the elementary classroom and for addressing the persistent difficulty of measuring what such pedagogy actually develops in learners. Drawing on more than twelve years of practice in theatre education and community learning in Ghana, the paper argues that arts integrated learning is routinely under measured because the assessment instruments applied to it are built for a different kind of learning, one that assumes a written response and a single correct answer rather than an embodied, collectively negotiated one. The EURM framework is presented as the paper's central contribution, positioning enactment, rather than verbal explanation, as the starting point of learning, and treating measurement as the final stage of a single pedagogical cycle rather than as an administrative task performed afterwards. The framework is grounded in Ghana's community centred educational tradition and in the participatory pedagogy associated with Freire and Boal, and is shown responding directly to conditions that shape many Ghanaian elementary classrooms, including large class sizes, examination oriented syllabi, multilingual learners and limited material resources. The paper illustrates the framework through classroom vignettes and a small set of practical measurement tools, and closes by considering which elements of the framework are context specific to Ghana and which are transferable to elementary classrooms elsewhere.