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The purpose of this paper is to explore a case study of a group of preservice teachers that took part in a playbuilding process as part of a drama education course at a Canadian University. The paper focusses on ten preservice teachers’ creation in original theatrical production, The Teacher Diaries: a collage of stories based on the preservice teachers’ lived experiences as teacher candidates. Through a discussion of the playbuilding process, the techniques used, and an analysis of three scenes, this paper addresses the question: How can playbuilding and performance help preservice teachers “become pedagogical”?

The paper focusses on ten preservice teachers’ creation in original theatrical production, The Teacher Diaries: a collage of stories based on the preservice teachers’ lived experiences as teacher candidates. Through a discussion of the playbuilding process, the techniques used, and an analysis of three scenes, this paper addresses the question: How can playbuilding and performance help preservice teachers “become pedagogical”?

The primary understanding that emerged from this research was how playbuilding can be used as a holistic participatory research method in which participants conduct research, analyse, thematise, implement and disseminate data throughout the creative process.

As researchers of this playbuilding process, the authors have come to realise that when using playbuilding as a method for research and arts creation there is an overlapping of understanding and analysis of the research findings that is a continual part of the research process. Rather than simply collecting data, analysing it and drawing conclusions from the previously identified data, the whole process becomes a research experience. As seen above, participants were continually coming up with insights throughout the process that informed the creation, growth and change of their scenes so that they could create a final product.

Drawing on a case study of ten preservice teachers, and their original performance piece The Teacher Diaries, this paper set out to determine how the playbuilding process can be used to help preservice teachers develop pedagogically. Several scholars have already noted that creating collaborative theatre is a reflective, inquiry-based process (Belliveau, 2006; Cahill, 2006; Carter et al., 2011; Conrad, 2004; Goldstein, 2008), and that the creation and performance of live theatre allows participants to interact with audiences in ways that written material cannot (Norris, 2000, 2008).

Throughout the playbuilding process, the preservice teachers engaged in storytelling, improvisation, reflection and dialogue. Working collaboratively, the preservice teachers were able to identify similarities in their experiences and develop a supportive community where they could share stories and resources (see Mreiwed et al., 2017 for more discussion of community development through drama).

Because of this, the members of Team Awesome were inspired to create a pamphlet (including tips and links to government and other online resources) to share with their peers following the performance. While this was simply one case study, the results of this study indicate that the playbuilding process has great potential for use in helping educators “become pedagogical” through collaboration, reflection, articulation of needs, community-building and the sharing of resources in preservice teacher education.

This chapter explores ethical issues related to the use of drama-based methods in child and youth-focussed research projects. It begins by outlining some of the reasons for utilising drama-based research methods in projects that examine children’s perspectives and lived experiences. The chapter proceeds to discuss specific methods of drama-based inquiry including ethnodrama, ethnotheatre, reader’s theatre, play-building, devised theatre and collective creation. The sections draw on examples from recent drama-based research projects to highlight some of the key ethical considerations in drama-based research with children and young people, including specific issues surrounding representation, transparency, physical risks, power dynamics, consent, confidentiality, anonymity and reciprocity. The author shares her experiences of navigating some of the tricky ethical challenges involved in a recent participatory play-building project in Canada, providing some suggestions to help researchers in the field become better prepared to use and assess these methods and approaches in research with children and young people.

In order to further advance the research of social bots, based on the latest research trends and in line with international research frontiers, it is necessary to understand the global research situation in social bots.

Choosing Web of Science™ Core Collections as the data sources for searching social bots research literature, this paper visually analyzes the processed items and explores the overall research progress and trends of social bots from multiple perspectives of the characteristics of publication output, major academic communities and active research topics of social bots by the method of bibliometrics.

The findings offer insights into research trends pertaining to social bots and some of the gaps are also identified. It is recommended to further expand the research objects of social bots in the future, not only focus on Twitter platform and strengthen the research of social bot real-time detection methods and the discussion of the legal and ethical issues of social bots.

Most of the existing reviews are all for the detection methods and techniques of social bots. Unlike the above reviews, this study is a systematic literature review, through the method of quantitative analysis, comprehensively sort out the research output in social bots and shows the latest research trends in this area and suggests some research indirections that need to be focused in the future. The findings will provide references for subsequent scholars to research on social bots.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0336.