Freeing the imagination (Image: Mel Lawes/melodramaphotography.blogspot.co.uk)

Could drama workshops help children with autism-spectrum disorders? Results from a pilot study called Imagining Autism suggests this might be the case.

The research involved 22 children aged between 7 and 12 and consisted of one 45-minute session every week for 10 weeks. During this time, groups of four children entered an enclosed themed environment, such as a forest or outer space. These environments were designed to engage all senses simultaneously, using lights, sounds, puppetry and interactive digital elements.

Trained performers used improvisation techniques to encourage the children to engage creatively with the environment and each other, both physically and verbally. The hope was that the sessions would help develop the children’s communication, social interaction, and imagination skills – the “triad of impairments” seen in autism.


Children were assessed before the intervention, and again between two and six weeks after the sessions ended. As well as looking at whether behaviours used to diagnose autism changed after the drama sessions, the researchers also assessed emotion recognition, imitation, IQ and theory of mind – the ability to infer what others are thinking and feeling. Subjective ratings were also gathered from parents and teachers and follow-up assessments were conducted up to a year later.

Their own story

At the early assessments, all children showed some improvement. The most significant change was in the number of facial expressions recognised, a key communication skill. Nine children improved on this. Six children improved on their level of social interaction. The majority of these changes were also seen at the follow-up assessments.

“If you look at other studies of this nature, that’s quite a significant effect,” says David Wilkinson at the University of Kent, the lead psychologist on the project.

Project leader Nicola Shaughnessy, a professor of performance at the University of Kent who presented the Imaging Autism results at the AISB50 conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, earlier this month, credits the approach’s effectiveness to engaging all the children’s senses at once. “Children are moving and thinking and interacting at the same time,” she says.

“It’s an opportunity for children to create their own narratives in an unconstrained, unfamiliar environment,” says Wilkinson. “They find this empowering, and we know from the psychology literature that individuals who are empowered enjoy increased attention skills and an improved sense of well-being.”

Iambic calming

“I think it quite plausible that drama experience will aid at least some autistic children in learning about social interactions,” says Uta Frith of University College London. But she stresses that the small size of the pilot study and the lack of a control group means the study is not sufficient to draw conclusions from.

For the researchers, the results are encouraging enough to warrant further study. They plan to collaborate with psychologists at the Centre for Embodied Cognition at Stony Brook University in New York later this year on a larger, more rigorous study. “What we have demonstrated is that this is something that is well received and could work,” says Wilkinson.

Other groups are thinking along similar lines. A project at Ohio State University in Columbus, called Shakespeare and Autism, claims the similarity between the heartbeat and the rhythm of iambic pentameter can help children to feel safer when communicating. The SENSE (Social, Emotional Neuroscience and Endocrinology) Theatre project at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has also carried out a two-week pilot study at a summer camp for children with autism.

“The studies indicate we are all on to something,” says Shaughnessy.