Methodical Development

As the biggest theatre in education company in Hungary and one of the biggest and most experienced ones in the region, we are committed to help the establishment of new groups, to foster the spreading of the method, and to facilitate the strengthening and the joining of the already existing groups. We find it equally important to fortify our relationships with schools, as it is our experience that schools sending a class to a theatre in education programme will often become committed to the method.
We also put special emphasis on cultivating our relationships with theatres and theatrical organisations. In the last few years, the most important achievement of Káva’s operation was that theatre professionals have become acquainted with the method and we’ve won numerous supporters from overlapping fields of art and pedagogy.

The main elements of our operation:

Participation in international projects
Our international network of connections is the most extended in the Central-Eastern European region: we maintain contacts with dramateachers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, but we also have professional partners in England, Austria, Norway, Germany and Finland. We are the leaders of a Comenius project in 2009/2010 (www.dramanetwork.eu) and we are partners in a Culture programme.  

Applying the system of quality assurance (EFQM)
The Hungarian Association for Excellence is a professional non-profit organisation of public utility, the Hungarian partner organisation of the European Quality Assurance Foundation. (EFQM Brussels). Last year with our work we earned the Commitment to Excellence award for the successful achievement of the European level of recognition 

This year we aim to achieve improvement or change in the following four areas:
• developing the indicator system of feedback from our “clients”,
• building closer relationship with the “clients”, taking their feedback into consideration
• developing and consciously applying professional indicators,
• developing and consciously applying financial indicators

Partner School Programme
We’ve been running our Partner School Programme since the previous season. Our aim is to build real collaboration with those schools and teachers who, due to their regular visits, we are closely connected to. One element of this project is to organise meetings with them at least twice a year, thus giving them the opportunity to formulate feedback and opinions, also to talk about teacher packages (related to our theatre in education programmes), developments, tenders and new elements of our working together.
We continually extend the circle of participants in this project. It is one of our medium-term aims to sign partnership agreements with the schools committed to our work. 

Coordination of tracking and research

From the autumn of 2008 we have been leading a research programme with the participation of prominent drama organisations from twelve countries (Hungary, England, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Norway, Palestine, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden) with the financial support of the EU.
In addition to other educational aims, this two-year project is a cross-cultural research undertaking the investigation of the effects of dramatic activities in education on five of the eight Lisbon Key Competences:
Communication in the mother tongue
Learning to learn
Interpersonal, intercultural and social competences, civic competence
Entrepreneurship
Cultural expression
The findings of the research will be published in twelve languages and we will organise guide conferences in every partner countries.

The objectives of the project are:
 
• To demonstrate with cross-cultural quantitative and qualitative research that dramatic activities in education are powerful tools to improve the Lisbon Key Competences. To publish a Green Paper based on the research, and disseminate it among educational and cultural stakeholders on the European, national, and local levels in 12 languages.
• To create a “European Education Pack for Drama in Education” - a tool-kit for schools on how to use dramatic activities to improve the Lisbon Key Competences. To disseminate this pack widely in schools in 12 languages.
• To compare dramatic activities in education in different countries and help the transfer of know-how through facilitating the mobility of experts.

• Besides the above mentioned research we are also running four pieces of qualitative research. The professionals (most of them are the experts of the AnBlokk Association of Cultural and Social Sciences) apply the methods of participatory action research to carry on research connected to the following programmes:

• Puppets  - TIE-programme (Anna Végh)
• DramaDrom programme (Zsuzsa Nagy)
• Obstacles (Kata Horváth, Veronika Szabó)
• New Spectator programme (Kata Horváth, Cecília Kovai)

The findings of the different research will be published this year or in the first half of the next season in our publications, and in articles, essays written by the researchers. 

 

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