What is the relationship between theatre and education? How do forms of theatre with children and teenagers reflect aesthetic approaches of contemporary theatre-makers? And how do these approaches move beyond the concept of education as instruction? These are the leading questions posed by the editors Patrick Primavesi and Jan Deck, as well as by various additional authors in the recently published volume Stop Teaching! New Theatre Forms with Children and Teenagers. Initiated after an eponymous conference, held in 2008, this essay collection combines academic studies on aesthetic and pedagogical approaches with artistic reflections on working methods in theatre in the field of education. Therefore Stop Teaching! not only contributes to current debates in applied drama, but also enables a productive dialogue between academics and theatre practitioners, mostly from Belgium and German-speaking countries.

The volume opens with a broad overview of general assumptions of theatre in education and its historical contextualization. Primavesi introduces his general thesis, that contemporary practices of devised theatre, based on collective research and work with non-professional performers, reflect crucial transformations in theatre in education towards an anti-pedagogical approach. Jan Deck and other authors, for example Kirstin Westphal and Florian Vaßen, additionally formulate challenges and aims in theatre with children and young adults. Taken together, these essays could be read as a plea for an alternative consideration of theatre in education, which does not contribute to a neo-liberal understanding of ‘education as self-optimization’, but – in reference to, for instance, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller and Jacques Rancière – rather functions as a critical practice, as a platform to experiment with different social behaviours.

In addition to these (mostly theoretical) reflections, the second and third sections provide an insight into different artistic methods, projects as well as cultural institutions. Various productions are discussed, for example Tim Etchell's That Night Follows Day (2007), Josse de Pauw's üBUNG (2001), Gob Squad's Before Your Very Eyes (2011), or Bauen nach Katastrophen (2009) by Eva Meyer-Keller and Sybille Müller, and Samir Akika's Young&Furious (2013). Furthermore, the last part focuses on institutions dealing with new approaches in theatre pedagogy, such as the winter academy at the Theater an der Parkaue in Berlin or long-established German festivals such as the Schultheater der Länder.

Stop Teaching! not only offers an important contribution to discourses in theatre in education, it is also to be read as a sharp observation of contemporary European theatre practices. The geographical focus may provoke questions of an international perspective on this topic, which remain consequently unanswered. Without any claim of comprehensiveness, the editors characterize the collection as a broad picture of new aesthetic tendencies. Even though the aim to balance between theatre studies, pedagogy and artistic reflection deals with a patchy mixture of texts, the collection is an important study of contemporary theatre practices with children and young adults and, due to its openness towards different contributions, is approachable for various interested readers.