Rate My Professor Trish Wells

Dr Trish Wells is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Education at the University of Otago, Dunedin Campus. She holds a BA and PhD from the University of Otago, an MDE Honours from Griffith University, and a Diploma in Teaching from Dunedin College of Education. With over 20 years of experience in initial teacher education, she draws on her primary teaching background and professional theatre training. Wells teaches drama education across primary and secondary programmes and coordinates courses such as EDCR235 Dance and Drama.

Her research specializations include drama education, process drama as a pedagogy and embodied pedagogy, process drama with multiliteracies, and applied theatre approaches across the curriculum. She has collaborated on projects embedding process drama in primary literacy programmes. In 2024, Wells completed her PhD at the University of Otago titled Process drama: Authentic embodied learning about the planet, its people, and issues that matter. Key publications are: “I’m on a journey I never thought I’d be on”: using process drama pedagogy for the literacy programme (Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2017, with S. Sandretto); Learning “what it’s like to be someone else apart from yourself”: developing holistic empathy with process drama (Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2023, with S. Sandretto and J. Tilson); Bridging the theory-practice divide in teacher education through process drama pedagogy: “You fully experience what you're learning” (Teaching and Teacher Education, 2023, with S. Sandretto and J. Tilson); Metaxis moments prompted by authentic questions in primary classroom contexts (Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2023, with S. Sandretto, J. Tilson, and P.M. Wells); and Insights into approaching sexual health education through applied theatre methodology (Applied Theatre Research, 2014). Recent conference contributions include Riding the wave of COVID-19: The afterMATH (MERGA, 2024, with N. Ingram) and a keynote at the Whakamana, Mana Reo Conference (2025). Her work advances innovative pedagogies in teacher education.