Drama is effective in entry level courses in nursing education to enhance student learning and can be flexible and adjusted to various contexts. Further research using drama to enroll nursing students as fictive patients and relatives and thereby explore different perspectives is suggested, and more research on the application of drama in nursing education at an advanced level is required.

This article reports on a major action research program that experimented with the use of cross-age peer teaching in schools to assist teachers to manage conflict issues in their classrooms, and to re-engage disaffected students in learning. The research, which was conducted in a range of elementary and secondary schools in Australia, was part of a larger international project using conflict resolution concepts and techniques combined with drama strategies to address cultural conflict in schools. The use of formal cross-age peer teaching emerged as a highly effective strategy in teaching students to manage a range of conflicts in schools, and especially in learning to deal with bullying. Operating as peer teachers also enabled a number of students in the study, with serious behaviour problems, to re-engage with their learning. The article therefore evaluates the effectiveness of peer teaching in both conflict management and student re-engagement.

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the outcomes of a project designed to apply the applied theatre techniques developed for the Acting Against Bullying programme to the specific problem of covert or hidden bullying by adolescent girls. Conducted in a large all girls' school, the research reveals some significant new information about the nature of covert bullying. It also provides confirmatory evidence of the efficacy of drama in enhancing identification, empathy and selfesteem in adolescent girls to enable them to deal more effectively with relational aggression. The project is on-going in 2010. The projectThe Hilltop School in Brisbane, Australia is a large, private, all girls' school of over 1000 pupils with classes at all year levels from Year 1 to Year 12. The students are not all from privileged or stable families, and a significant number of them are international students, mainly from Asia, with a range of ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. The Principal and the Dean of Students at the school were aware of recent research that indicates bullying in schools world-wide is escalating rapidly, and some cases of serious bullying had come to light over a period of time within the school. However, there was no clear indication of the full nature or extent of the problem, and like the majority of schools in Australia, Hilltop School had a written policy for dealing with bullying, but no whole-school, proactive, anti-bullying programme in place. Because the Acting Against Bullying programme developed at Griffith University had received extensive exposure in the media and at conferences on bullying and child safety, I was approached to implement the programme throughout the school over a two-year period. *The challenge was an interesting one. The most recent research in Australia suggests that social bullying by girls in single-sex private schools, particularly covert bullying and cyber bullying, is more widespread and more intense than amongst girls at co-educational, state schools (McDougall and Chilcott 2009). Furthermore, the Acting Against Bullying programme had been conducted entirely in state government schools and had not specifically focused on gender-based or particular forms of bullying. The Hilltop project therefore provided an opportunity to research both specific bullying amongst girls and the incidence of covert and cyber bullying in the private school environment as part of identifying and attempting to address the bullying occurring in the school.The name of the school and of all students mentioned in this article have been changed to maintain anonymity. BackgroundThe Acting Against Bullying Applied Theatre programme was the result of 10 years of action research into conflict and bullying in schools. It began in collaboration with the international DRACON research programme into conflict within schools, with partners in Sweden, Malaysia and Australia. The programme, using a combination of improvisation, process drama, forum theatre and peer teaching, evolved into an effective whole-school programme that impacted positively ...

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