Theatre for Teacher Education to Prepare Teachers in an Inclusive Classroom: A Historical Perspective of India and Southeast Asia

Education should be about transformation, whether for teachers or learners: transformation in conceptual understanding and the methods of completion of tasks. It is true that enormous and widely dispersed influences from regions outside of Southeast Asia—from China, India, the West, and Islamic nations—have left their marks on the region's theatre. It's also true that theatre from one nation in Southeast Asia has frequently influenced theatre from nearby nations. But it is also true that throughout the various countries of Southeast Asia, theatre has grown in different directions in response to local conditions and influences. In this evolutionary process, several diverse theatre styles have come into being. In Indonesia and Thailand, two nations with highly established theatre industries, there are over a dozen different theatre genres. With the passage of time, there have been major changes in the field of second language teaching; among the more recent promising and productive ones is task-based language teaching. In ESL classrooms, funds and resources are always an issue and often, the stakeholders are concerned about the paucity of resources in ESL contexts. Theatre is an absolutely cost-effective resource useful for task-based pedagogy. This paper focuses on probing how theatre can be a useful tool for teacher education to prepare teachers in an inclusive classroom from the perspective of India and Southeast Asia. This paper aims to link how Indian Theatre arts can influence the teaching and learning of the English language in Southeast Asian nations. This paper further identifies conceptual and theoretical frameworks from the fields of theatre and teacher education for an inclusive classroom. Additionally, it tries to find the links between teacher education and theatre, which might benefit ESL/EFL learning in the classroom by using theatrical techniques. Therefore, the paper aims to propose how teacher training can be enriched with theatre as a resource.