“How to approach speaking and
listening through drama”
Why use
teacher in role?
One of the best ways to do that
in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of
the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique
that is used, namely teacher in role. Many times we have watched
trainee teachers with a class of children struggling to get attention when
giving instructions in traditional teacher mode. Yet, as soon as they
move into role, they obtain that attention more effectively. For example, a
trainee was talking out of role to a class to explain that they were about to
meet a girl who was having trouble with her father and needed their help. She
picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as the
role signifier. The trainee was not doing anything different apart from
using role and committing to it very strongly. The trainee was using the
simplest form of TIR, hot-seating the role, where the class meets the
role sitting in front of them and can ask questions.
You are not effective as a teacher if you do not at some point
engage fully with the drama yourself by using TIR. Remaining as teacher, intervening
as teacher, side-coaching, structuring the drama from the outside, and/or
sending the class off in groups to create their own drama must at best restrict
and at worst negate any opportunity for the teacher to teach effectively. It
is far more effective for the teacher to engage with the drama form as artist
and be part of the creative act. It is very useful in a Literacy lesson
for the teacher to use roles from the text. The very fact
that you take on a key role can provide important ways of defining and
exploring the text. Let us look more closely at the Hermia role.
What
did you learn about her and why she’s angry?
Here is another way that the role
could be introduced. Sit on the seat with a piece of paper in your hand
reading it silently to yourself. He writes me a letter and thinks I like
him and I will like him even more just because he likes me. In the first
it is the note from her father, Egeus, outlining her situation .
This extreme social
expectation and law makes the fiction like their reality but also different
from it, something that helps drama create a useful distance, which
helps the class reflect on their own beliefs and look at the drama world in a
more balanced and thoughtful way. All of this introduces an interesting
set of issues which children at this age are beginning to experience and
understand about their relationship with parents and about their relationship
with the opposite sex. Even if the main aim of the work is not a study of
the Shakespeare play, the role can be used to open up very important areas
for personal and social education that the children can identify with.
Teacher
as storyteller
The teacher as a
storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. The
pupil’s role will be dominated by listening and this will be interlaced with
questioning, responding and interpreting the meaning and sense of the
fiction. The teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively
and interesting manner, holding their attention and engaging their
imagination. In making judgements about the quality of this method of
teaching, the critical questions will be around whether the content of the
story interests the class and holds their attention, whether the delivery
of the teacher, i.
The connection between the
teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, lies in the fact that
they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach. The
relationship between story and drama in education is a complex and dynamic one. A
class can take part in a drama where all of them know the story, where
none of them knows the story, or a mixture of both. As long as some
fundamental planning strategies are observed, knowledge of the story is
not a barrier to participation.
The use of drama
strategies to explore events and their consequences, to look at
alternatives and test them. 3 If narrative consists of roles, fictional
contexts, the use of symbols and events then the teacher needs to hold
some of those elements true and consistent with the story so far.
1. How
to Begin with Teacher in Role
Let us illustrate these
ideas with an example from ‘The Pied Piper’ drama . You put the
pupils in role as the townspeople making their way up the mountain when they
meet TiR as a child coming in the opposite direction.
Preparation
for the role
In preparing to be
this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particular decisions about
this child. Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask
the child and the order of those questions. This not only provides the
teacher with some security in knowing what is going to be asked, at least
initially, but also allows some minutes to refine the planning, so
that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions. The
questions will, to a certain extent, be predictable because they are
largely generated by the circumstances of the drama so far and the role the
class has taken, which will be that of anxious parents. Before the drama session, decide what attitude you
are going to take when questioned by the class.
It’s
just not fair!
They are questioning from
within the story, as if they were there. Next we consider this key
skill of moving in and out of role.
Moving
in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it
We are describing using
role as ‘teaching from within’ because the teacher enters the drama
world, but it is very important to step out of the fiction often and not
let it run away with itself. When using TiR, the teacher is operating
as a manager as well as participant and must spend as much time stopping the
drama and moving out of role to reflect on what is happening and give the
pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want to
do. This OoR working is as important as the role itself. Let us look
at an example to see how you as the teacher have the opportunity to negotiate
how the role behaves with the class. This
also shows a step from hot-seating to role-playing as a demonstration with a
small group. As with all of this section of the book, we are using an
example from drama based upon ‘The Pied Piper’ . You set up going
into role with one of the groups that you know will handle the situation
well. The whole class is involved in defining the role and can use their
imaginations, their ‘drama eyes’, to help create the appropriate
appearance/behaviour and their own understanding.
This is in contrast to an
actor who has to use acting skills to create the role in its entirety for an
audience. We are making a distinction between role behaviour and
acting. Both depend on appropriate signing, but whereas the actor
must give the non-participant audience the bulk of the signing, a teacher
using role can get away with a committed minimum. When you have discussed
enough you can move back into role and take their stories about the problems
the rats are causing. You can do this with all of the class or each family
in turn. Give the groups time to prepare their evidence before you go into
role to receive the input. The Rat-catcher ‘writes down’ the points and
then asks the class/family if they could come to the Mayor to help put the
case.
For
another example of using OoR to help establish a role see ‘The
The person playing the role can
then simply walk forward adopting a serious tone, holding the
blanket, without having to pretend any of those outward signs an actor
would have to portray if it were a play being performed to an
audience. When the drama is stopped they can
describe, recap, interpret, think through, consider next
moves and understand what is the significance of their work. It is very
important to get the participants to look at and interpret what is going
on, frequently by stepping out of the drama. Depth in drama depends
on the very clear and regular use of OoR negotiation so that the awareness of
the co-existence of two worlds is effective at all times.
Children commit to the
fictional world of the drama but need always to be aware that it is fiction and
to step outside it often to look at what they are doing. Contrary to some
opinions, depth is not dependent upon maintaining the fiction all of the
time, nor does it depend upon the children losing themselves in the
drama. In fact, if the latter takes over, children will get an
experience but not understanding. In effective drama, children can
actually feel the ‘as if’ world as real at certain points.
The teacher must make sure that
if the drama does engage in that way, the pupils know it is a fiction at
all times, especially by stopping and coming out of role
frequently. The relationship developed by the teacher with the class is
dependent on the movement between these two worlds. The result is to make
the creative community.
The
requirements of working in role
It can be used judiciously to
focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the
children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to
support the work and develop it. In order to make the TiR most
effective, we need to look at educational drama from the point of view of
the ‘audience’, an audience who in this instance are participants at the
same time. This will help us shape up the TiR elements particularly
according to how the audience is seeing things. Here are two responses to
considering the ‘audience’ position. In drama the pupils are making
sense actively, knowing their meaning can be acted upon. You’re
asking a very complex thing of the group of children. They have to switch
from operating as audience to participant and back again often and
suddenly. An example of responding to the critical incident occurred in a
session on the drama based on Macbeth.
When considering the way of
showing the overthrow of Macbeth, one of the class of 10-year-olds
said, I want to sit on the throne and stop him sitting on it. The
teacher took this up and put two of the servants on the thrones of Macbeth and
Lady Macbeth, with the rest of the servants gathered behind the thrones. He
then set up the entry of Macbeth to the throne room. TiR as Macbeth
entered slowly and stopped as though taking in the situation. The class
cheered as Macbeth bowed his head and the two pupils stood
up, triumphant. When they are given opportunities to influence the
outcomes, to make decisions, the drama becomes partly theirs.
Disturbing
the class productively
The drama is developed through a set
of activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate
role. We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and
then disturb that comfort productively.
In
setting up the drama we are doing what Heathcote calls ‘trapping
Within a life
situation’ . The result of constructing the situation thus is that
they can then discover what it all means. The key is how children are
given information. If pupils acquire knowledge and understanding by
working for it, stumbling upon it or having it sprung upon them such that
their expectations are challenged, their learning experiences will be more
dynamic than simply being told. The class are in role as a village community
helping a woman with a baby, who, unbeknownst to them, has fled
a revolution.
The art
of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responses
This community is made most effective
by the teacher participating in role. If a teacher runs drama without
using TiR there tends to be a lack of dialectic because the teacher produces
the structure that the children engage with, but the teacher can only
manipulate it from outside that structure. The teacher can fully manipulate the
structure from within and the resulting activity can be shown diagrammatically
as in Figure 1.2. The teacher gives the impression of handing over the
power and does so in a way that allows him or her to teach properly and yet
empower the participants significantly. We are making the distinction here
between the aesthetic actor and the social actor. The aesthetic actor will
have learned skills related to voice, gesture and physicality that are not
required by the teacher using TiR.
The teacher in role will already
have the skills of the social actor that are used in everyday life. The
class will use their creativity to see the role in a particular way that has
been indicated as long as it has been properly signed to them. Whereas the
actor defines for the audience the message of the play within the circumstances
of the plot, the teacher uses signing as an indication to the audience to
join in the encounter, effecting and affecting the enterprise. As a
result of this difference, an actor, using lines written as a script, behaves
in a very different way from a teacher improvising within a planned structure, who
has to take account of what the class will say in response to the moves he or
she makes. The audience in the theatre waits for something to happen, but
the participants in a drama session make it happen.
As the class feed back their
responses and make possible development of the role’s importance the teacher
must respond appropriately and therein lies the skill of the ‘subtle tongue’
and the possibility for authentic dialogue. The teacher must respond to
these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the
role. The TiR as the Steward must honour the truth of both possibilities
and, in the first case, be the weak and fearing servant who cannot
see how this can be done or, in the second, begin to challenge
whether doing nothing in such a situation is going to work in keeping them
safe. The class must be made to work to achieve the aim they have been
given in the drama.
Let us look at handling an extended
example from the ‘Pied Piper’ drama when the class as the villagers finally
arrive at the mountain. At this point in the drama they have accepted the
main aim as the villagers of getting their children back from the
Piper. Mark the space in front of the class, where the children have
been said to have entered the mountain, with two chairs. OoR ask them
to describe the mountain in front of them and whether there are any clues as to
whether the children have, in fact, gone into the mountain as they
have been told. When they are not aware of you, slip behind them and
when they are carrying out their task ‘appear’ behind them as the
Piper. This simple, theatrical surprise engages the children even
more. The dialogue that transpires here is critical to the outcome of the
drama. The burden placed on the class at this point is to offer some way
of showing their thankfulness, their sincerity and their trustworthiness
to the Piper so that he will accept the apology and return the children.
Accept any imaginative offer as long
as it is not materialistic but is related more to establishing a human
relationship of trust and honour with the Piper. A different learning area
would be to have a Piper who is too full of himself, someone who needs to
be taught a lesson about justice and fairness. The drama is set up as a
framework and is not finished in the same way as a play written by a
playwright. In fact, the secret of educational drama is to have the
framework, even a tight framework, such that the class feel they have
some ownership because of the parts that they are developing.
The pupils can thought-track
TiR. A drama technique can be used to help them define possible
reasons. The TiR is not exclusively the teacher’s creation. The
‘play’ we are creating is a joint enterprise and, when the beginnings of a
role are in place and we have established the givens, the class will know
what we are creating and why and can develop that role by the way they respond
and the way they see it. In all teaching situations there exists a power
relationship between the learners and the teacher. Of course, it does
not look like this when the class are responding and contracting into the tasks
set by the teacher but should some or all decide not to, the cohesion can
be broken. In drama this power relationship is made overt. We must
start from the point of view that if the class do not want the drama to work
then it will not.
We must
begin with the interest level of the class: the plight of Goldilocks will
interest the class of 4- or 5-year-olds and a mission to rescue Kai from the
Snow Queen, children of 7
and 8. The nature of drama makes the interest level a dynamic and flexible
dimension. The pupils will, to a certain extent, define a level
of interest in a drama by focusing upon the issues that interest
them. There is not a hard and fast rule on age groups because we have used
Kai with younger children and dramas from our Early Years book have been used
with 12-year-olds. In the classroom, the pupils enter into an agreement
with you the teacher that you are in charge. This may be a tacit
agreement, it may depend upon many factors but in it the teacher is in
charge and there are certain rights and privileges attached to your
role. The power relationship is asymmetric. Of course, in drama
we have the possibility of shifting the power when we are inside the fiction
because we may choose a role that has low status and has little
power. This shift in status and power is very engaging for pupils. It
can result in a different kind of dialogue from the usual teacher/pupil one and
this can be very attractive to pupils. There are five basic types of role
and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama. The authority
role This is a role like the Duke in the ‘The Dream’ drama, who is
presented with Egeus’s problem and has to rule on it.This figure is usually in
charge of an organisation and has the class in a role subordinate to him/her. The
role is fair, applies rules and governs properly, but often does not
know the full facts and issues and needs the class to investigate and enlighten
him/her. It is very close to being teacher and can be reassuring for a
class, but also has the negativity of not changing the teacher–taught
relationship enough to allow more ownership for the class. The opposer
role This is a role that is often in authority but dangerous to and/or creating
a problem for another role and, by extension, the class.
Egeus is an opposer role who is
against Hermia and therefore in opposition to the class role, as they take
her side against his dictatorial treatment of her. This is a stimulating
position for many pupils as the opposition of parents is something they have
all experienced. The opposer role has to be used carefully because the
response to it can be difficult to handle if it becomes too strong. We
have to know what response to expect and be able to channel it productively.
The intermediate role This is often
a messenger or go-between, as the servant role used in the ‘The Dream’
drama. This role is then caught between opposing sides and can appeal to
the empathy in the class to help them out of the predicament. The needing
help role This is a role like Hermia, who is in need of help to fight the
injustice of her father’s decision. This role, like the servant
described above, is the best way to get empathy from a class and most
raises the status of the class, putting them in a position of responsibility
and thus generating interest and learning possibility because the teacher is
the one who does not know what to do for once.
The ordinary person This role is in
the same position as the role given to the class. Steward in the ‘Macbeth’
drama is like this. The three low status roles present more possibilities
for the pupils’ learning because the teacher–pupil power relationship is
shifted and they have a semblance of power. We say ‘semblance’ because the
pupil power only lies within the fiction and, as always, the teacher is
running the class and can come out of role at any time to assume
control. Related to issues of power and role is the issue of power and
control in the classroom. Pied Piper’ and analyse how it is handled and
chaos avoided. The class have been told they must confront the
Mayor. Before we can confront the Mayor we must set out how his office
looks. First you must tell me how big the doors into his parlour are. The
distance between the chairs indicates how big the class want the door to
be. This is the desk and chair in which the Mayor sits. Use your
‘drama eyes’ and tell me what you see.
The townspeople are marching down to
the Mayor’s parlour. So, we have a parlour, we have an angry
crowd and a chant. We need someone to give a signal to stop the chant
otherwise we won’t hear the knock on the door and the conversation with the
Mayor. Finally we need one person to be spokesperson to say to the Mayor
what you all think. I am going to take the role of the Mayor and I am
going wear my chain of office. When I take it off I will be your teacher
again and we can talk about what has happened.
You
break out of role
OK, let’s stop the drama there
and look at what has happened. The key issue in this example is the way in
which a potentially chaotic event in the drama is managed by careful
structuring and rehearsing before it takes place.
2. How
to Begin Planning Drama
In this chapter we are
going to describe and analyse the main components of planning in drama. There
is even an intermediate stage in planning and that is to take parts of
different dramas and remake them as new ones. Clearly the
teaching/learning objective will drive the shape of the drama, but the
engine that drives the drama needs fuel and that fuel is a piece of strong
material, a creative idea, and that is more inspirational than an
objectives-led design. This material – a book, a piece of literature, a
picture or some other subject matter, fiction or non-fiction – will give
us one or more of the elements of a good drama, a role or roles, an
interesting context or a dilemma.
The
frame of a drama
We are using the idea of a
frame as a way of seeing key decisions in planning. Translated into terms
of process drama as a genre of theatre, we could say that Goffman’s frame
constitutes a means of laying in the dramatic tension by situating the
participants in relation to the unfolding action. In planning a drama we
have to write the main frame, the scenario, in a way that indicates
the relationship of the component parts and how the interactions provide
tension and potential. Looking at Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild
Things Are led to ideas about possible roles and situations to explore with the
pupils. There is a direct link to PSHE objectives. Mother
sends Max to bed without supper because he has been naughty. Mother finds
him gone and seeks help to find him. The next stage was to develop some
sense of his mother, her handling of Max and her attitude to him. We
considered the mother’s possible ambiguous signals, embodying ideas of
softness and indulgence towards Max at the same time as being irritated by
Max’s wildness and wanting to control him. Thus
we are exploring ideas of why Max is like he is, an exploration that the
class will experience through the drama.
You can see that we have begun to
create ideas of what Max’s room would look like, as it is the central
setting. So the teacher directs the picture of Max the class forms. In
the Sendak book there is a picture on the wall in the second illustration of a
wild creature’s face with ‘Max’ written underneath, clearly a drawing by
Max himself. This suggested including a line drawing of Max chasing his
mother with a knife. In addition we added little notes written by Max for the
pupils to discover and read. Of course, we could have then developed
a drama about finding Max, but it would be difficult to run that without
descending into potentially silly non-activities for the pupils searching
non-existent places. They do go to the shed his mother talks of, but
there draw a blank, apart from the arrival of a figure they take to be
him , hide to surprise him, only to find it is his sister. Instead
they have the responsibility to confront Max and make him aware of his problem, his
behaviour and the mother’s attitudes. It needs to be handled dynamically to
raise tension, so it is now planned in that the class are considering what
they know of Max and thinking where they could look next, the shed having
proved fruitless. They need to be gathered round the role sheet and be
looking at it. The aim of the drama is now clearly focused, to have
the children explore and consider a boy’s unacceptable behaviour and look at a
parent–child relationship, to give advice and solve problems. The
resolution of the issues is the final stage of the drama.
Usually we use forum theatre to set
up the class taking over the wronged role, against the role who most needs
to learn to change, to see and understand something important about
themselves. The pupils have to show him the error of his ways and how other
people, his mother, his sister, really feel about him.
The
ingredients of planning
Let us take the elements
of a drama we have been referring to above and look at them separately with
other examples. Creating a drama is very much like cooking.
The
learning can be in any of five areas
●
Language Development – the medium of drama and hence the key impetus to
Speaking and Listening .
●
Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal – there is
usually this capability in any drama. The very reflective nature of the
work, going out of role to examine the meaning of situations and events in
the drama, promotes metacognition.
●
Comparing the drama version of the story and the original myth.
If we can refine an objective
tightly it will help us make decisions about the structure and what it should
do.
Strong
material
This my be a piece of writing with
key learning points, that are usually unresolved by the writer of the
original material. These often lie in the PSHE curriculum area. Let
us again look at our drama ‘The Wild Thing’ from Where the Wild Things
Are. Sendak shows us Max, a boy who is very imaginative, but
whose behaviour is very wild. In addition, no other family members appear
in the story. This is a gift for drama because we have a number of PSHE
issues implied through the story but not dealt with and we can add key roles to
look at these issues and embody in them their attitudes to Max.
Roles
for the pupils
They can be an expert community, the
‘Mantle of the Expert’ role. The ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role gives the
pupils status and an objective viewpoint to consider situations often fraught
with emotions and opposing attitudes. We use this sort of communal role as
they also invest the pupils with the skills and attributes that we would want
them to exhibit – they have to be
analytical, compassionate, communicative, thoughtful, creative, listeners.
‘Macbeth’
and ‘Daedalus and Icarus’, mountain villagers in ‘The Governor’s
Child’, park volunteers in
‘Charlie’. In all cases belief in the role is built and the learning
focused through the problem they encounter. The pupils also have
opportunities to take central roles, particularly from TiR at key stages
in the dramas. ‘The Wild Thing’, Charles in ‘Charlie’, Hermia in
‘The Dream’, and many others. They take it over at a crucial moment where
the chance to change things, to challenge injustice or correct a wrong is
paramount. The learning objective must be the focus of planning.
Tension
points – risks – theatre moments
Tension provides the momentum that
pushes the class, demands a response, engages them. All the
times we have done the drama they have never failed to do this. There is a
bit of a risk on our part because we cannot ensure they will do it, but
should they not do so we plan to go out of role and discuss how they see what
is happening and what they think needs to be done. Tension can be planned
in, but needs to be seized on according to how the class react. With a
class of 10-year-olds the tension was created on the spur of the moment by the
teacher’s use of the potential of the planned situation itself. The
tension at that point was palpable with all eyes on the class member whose job
it was to handle the situation. The teacher playing the Soldier built the
situation admirably, with never any intention of finding Maria, but
the class could see the possibility. The tension rose even though, or
maybe because of the theatricality of the moment.
This provides the fictional belief
in her invisibility aided by the Soldier never looking at her. But then
the Soldier is the teacher so unless the class accept the fiction nothing will
work. Tension here is produced by the collective imagination, what
the consequence of discovery would be.
Building
context
Usually having one main location
helps the drama to be properly focused. The tomb could focus all the
activity of the drama. That planning decision reinforced the importance of
the depictions on the walls so that they can also then be used more at other
stages of the drama. That consolidation of the context strengthened the
integrity of the drama and helped structure it, as you will see from the
full plan.
Building
belief
It is the need to get the class to
trust in the teacher and what the teacher is creating. Only if you create
the belief that there is something in it for them. Use of TiR can interest
and build belief.
All of
the ingredients contribute to building belief
Taking the cloth that becomes the
baby in ‘The Governor’s Child’ and deliberately rolling it up into the shape in
front of them and asking what it is representing.
In
delivering the drama we have to
We have to remove ideas that may get
in the way of the drama working , but doing it in such a way that the
pupil offering the idea genuinely does not feel rejected in the process and is
willing to continue to make suggestions. There are teacher decisions and
pupil decisions and we have to be clear about the timing and nature of
both, why one should be the teacher’s and why another should be the
pupils’. Many teacher decisions are built into the plan as
givens, otherwise there will be no clear direction for the
learning. As with many art forms, the constraints of the piece are
critical to the quality of the product. What we embed as non-negotiable in
the planning of a drama tightens the focus and ensures a concentration on the
particularity of the main event. As
successful dramas move from the particular to the universal this makes certain
the contexts and dilemmas are not nebulous or indistinct. The opportunity
for the pupils to input and take initiative parallels the idea of Dialogic
Teaching as outlined by Robin Alexander and related to drama in Chapter 3 ‘How
to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening’.
The success of the lesson will be
how closely the pupils follow my plan and deliver what I have planned. It
has to be recognised that in drama lessons the dynamic of teacher planning and
pupil response must have fluidity. The teacher may plan for little space
for pupils’ decisions in some parts of the lesson and more in other parts. Highly
constrained planning is often a feature of the early phases of the drama lesson
where common agreements are necessary in order to build the context. In these
early phases of the drama lesson the pupils do not have enough information to
make key decisions. Later in the drama there can be more space and more
possibilities for pupil contribution. It may be better to use a drama
where tight planning is the norm throughout because the class are inexperienced
and not ready to take on the responsibility of key decisions. Here are
examples of the difference between a closed access and open access approach to
drama. ‘The Governor’s Child’ drama. This is because at this point we are
building context, a context where Maria will be hidden by the villagers
and that will provide the major challenge and decisions later.
The
drama conventions, strategies and techniques
There are many techniques for
structuring the stages of a drama.
Planning
as a collaborative activity
This functions as a means to bounce
ideas, to see flaws and to provide insights into the potential for
learning. The complexity of drama means a multiplicity of possible
learning outcomes. For example, when planning developments to the
original ‘Macbeth’ drama, we wanted to add the ‘Witch’ section. One
of us, A, had ideas about the Witch arriving at the castle
door, a vagrant, carrying something.
Road
testing the first version
Participants in dramas offer us as
the teachers insights into ways of using an established structure. Once we
have the beginnings of a drama we need to try ideas out. When a class are
responding to strong moments in a drama they not only provide ideas for future
use, but also show us the sections which are weak and need replanning. Their
positive responses reveal new possibilities and can often become incorporated
as ‘givens’ when the drama is used in future.
He had to manage the situation
carefully to avoid the drama deteriorating. It was clear that whilst that
attitude in Max might recreate ideas from the book, the entry needed to be
more subtle and the context of Max’s adventure built more in order to work.
Another
example of the class offering new ideas as to what to do and the form to use
when you run the drama occurred in a run of ‘Daedalus and
This was a gift, so the teacher
set up a forum, asking for two pupils who had strong arguments on each
side to take the chairs, gathering the others around and having them offer
to take over the seats as they wanted to add different points. This method
of moving forward can then be taken as the planned possibility for exploring
the issue in future use of the drama. The group even took the drama
further themselves. The quality of the drama develops in these ways.
You can
choose to incorporate them in future versions of the drama.
There
are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved
‘living through drama’, where
the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and
‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by
the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or
strategies and where chronology is more broken. Of course, most
dramas have a mixture of the styles, but the younger or more inexperienced
a class, the more ‘living through’ will dominate to create the tensions
and challenges more directly.
In one outing of ‘The Governor’s
Child’ the class could in fact see a greater dramatic satisfaction in partial
success. The three teachers who were observing one of us teach this drama
had discussed between the sessions what they thought the class would choose to
do in the second session. Two thought they would resolve in a happy
ending, the third saw them choosing complete disaster as the outcome for
that sense of destruction children can seek at times.
What is
speaking and listening ?
When a pupil is speaking
and listening properly, he or she is able to see how each contribution
arises from what has already been said. Reading and writing come later in
language learning and should not come until the child’s head is full of the
words that reading and writing will demand.
Dialogic
teaching
English pupils, in this
characterisation at least, are individuals struggling to survive in the
crowd. The context within which mistakes are admissible, as in the
Russian classrooms, greatly reduces this element of
gamesmanship. This explains the apparent paradox of why, although the
climate of Russian classrooms tends to be viewed by Western observers as
authoritarian, even oppressive, Russian pupils are eager to answer
questions while in the supposedly more democratic climate of English classrooms
they may be reluctant to do so.
From
his own and others’ research, he summarises the picture of classrooms’
In schools too often speaking and
listening is seen as question and answer, usually the teacher questioning
and the pupils answering. What we see in classrooms is very often the IRF
approach, where the teacher initiates, a child responds and a teacher
gives feedback. This approach limits the pupil’s speaking and listening
engagement with the teacher, as well as preventing engaging with, and
listening to, other pupils. We need to see pupils initiating the talk
much more with pupils asking questions rather than the teacher.
Too often talk is this ‘recitation’
where teacher speaks most and pupils listen or only answer questions.
This
lack of proper talk is all the more serious as it is clear that the primary
school years are critical in the development of the brain
Talk, being central to the
development of the brain, must be a priority for teachers. Alexander
promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom.
Drama
shares the elements listed above, and it promotes pupils’ thinking because
of the quality, dynamics and content of talk that can develop. It is
about pupils having the desire to speak rather than being required to speak.
3. How
to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening
In one run of the drama pupils used
their role to point out the error of Max’s ways, asserting, You are
only 7 and must listen more to your mother, at the same time making clear
that they saw their role as adults and the teacher’s role as only a little
boy. This gives pupils confidence in speaking and they see that their
contributions matter a great deal. In this way we structure into a drama
the very possibility of pupils’ talk mattering. The drama itself provides
a form which ensures that the pupils are part of a context with roles that
always have direction, often a problem to solve, a person to
help, and with strategies and structure that ensure a framework for the
language. As the drama develops the pupils develop as a community on the basis
of the shared experience. That in itself provides a cumulative language
world which is very rich and where the pupils, if the drama engages
properly, care in a way that promotes collective, reciprocal and
supportive talk. We would maintain that drama is more effective in
developing pupils’ ways of thinking, ways of understanding, than
ordinary classroom discussion because the language of drama, as the
language of all artistic creation, is a heightened version of the language
of everyday talk. Its usefulness to speaking and listening, and thus
language development, is that we create together a shared experience which
frames the language and makes us, the pupils and the
teacher, communicate more effectively than mere discussion ever can.
This is particularly true for older
primary pupils, ages 7–11, who can bring more separate experiences
than younger pupils and are often starting their discussion with greater gaps
between them, preventing their chances of shared understandings. Very
often in discussion pupils are not really listening to each other because they
are more concerned about what they want to say than what they can learn from
other pupils. All of the pupils still bring ideas and opinions from their
separate experiences, but they are all remade by the creation of a new
context. Drama produces greater motivation for the pupils, motivation
because of their interest in the problem-solving of the drama.
At the time that this chapter was
being written the sort of excitement and interest that drama generates could be
seen in a group of training teachers preparing roles for drama. Drama
gives the pupils plenty of opportunities to think through speaking and
listening. Mistakes can be made and looked at because any particular stage
of the drama can be reworked to make it work better for us. In fact the
making of mistakes is seen as part of the learning, a major part of
helping to negotiate the meaning and to create the drama itself.
What
does dialogic teaching demand of the teacher?
One of the key changes
that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. If the teacher
is the young boy, Daedalus, who has taken his father’s secret project
design, without his permission, and the pupils are the family servants, then
they have important decisions to make about what they do with this
knowledge. They are framed within the drama context to oppose or sort out
this behaviour, all the more motivated by the fact it is their teacher
behaving in this way through the use of role. So the teacher is able to
talk and interact with the pupils in many ways and with many purposes. All of this ensures that the pupils are thinking about
what they are part of, looking at actions and consequences and considering
options, looking at what to do and why. This reflective mode is
special to drama.
How to
Generate Quality Speaking and Listening
It would be odd to stop a discussion
and say, Let’s look at ourselves and what we said, how we were
standing, what it meant. In drama we do that routinely and the
learning from the elements of the drama becomes even more potent.
How is
listening of high quality taught through drama?
Drama is the creation of meanings in
action and pupils have to struggle all the time to make sense of what is going
on around them so that they can engage with it. In drama we can get new
levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the problem-solving of
the drama itself. Pupils feel valued in drama and consequently have more
confidence in what they want to say and show more respect to what other
contributors to the drama say. In order for drama to work the teacher has
to listen very closely as well, to see where the pupils are, to pick
up what the pupils are offering and use it within the drama.
Transcript
from a session on Daedalus and Icarus
This comes from the third hour-long
session of this drama with a class of mixed 8- and 9-year-olds.
I’ll have to have words with the
servants if it’s got in the dustbin. ’ Icarus might go and he might pick
them up and say, ‘I have found them’ and say they were in the dustbin.
Pupils
Liam, why don’t you
swap with Mary.
Conclusions
Lucy, one of the
brightest members of the class, who saw the implications of lying from the
beginning, very shrewdly sees how the teacher is making the pupils face
the consequences of Icarus’s taking of the folder. We have the subtle
language of Sally’s lie as Icarus to ‘her father’, with its clear brief
denials accompanied by non-verbal commitment to the role. Then come the
frank and bold statements of Lucy deciding to be honest and owning up to not
only having taken the folder, but having shared it with her friends, the
servants, servants of the King, Daedalus’s jailor and enemy. Their
feeling of involvement shows clearly by the way they shriek when Daedalus talks
of having to speak to the servants about either the throwing away of the folder, or
in version 2, their knowledge of the plan.
4. How
to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship
This chapter is concerned with the
relationship between inclusion and drama as a pedagogical approach. We
look at how drama, through its idiosyncratic approach, facilitates
inclusion. We then make the link to the Citizenship curriculum and how
drama’s approach to inclusion is an intrinsic part of this area. Drama’s
inclusion is embedded, first, in its dialogical approach to teaching
and learning.
These
are
So inclusion will always be found in
drama’s approach to learning and it may also be part of its subject content. Let
us begin with defining what we mean by inclusion. In the United Kingdom
the Office for Standards in Education Educational inclusion has a broad scope. It
is essentially about equal opportunities for all pupils, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, background
and attainment, including special needs or disability. The inclusive
school will have, within its policies and curriculum, strategies to
‘address racism and promote racial harmony where all pupils know they are
valued and important to the school’ . Inclusion pays particular
attention to the provisions for different groups of pupils. Any children who
are at risk of disaffection and exclusion. We would argue that drama has, by
its nature, a distinctive role and it is this role we wish to explore
further.
What
can drama offer in terms of inclusion?
● Drama
offers ‘new opportunities to pupils who may have experienced previous
difficulties’ .
● Drama
takes account of pupils’ varied life experiences and needs by using fictional
contexts and roles which enable pupils to explore the underlying issues safely.
● For
some pupils drama may offer experiences that are different to those they
experience in the real world, for example taking the role of the outsider
or the role of the one in charge.
The
concept of drama and keeping pupils safe
There is a perception of drama
dealing with issues in a safe way because it uses fictional contexts. It
is almost as if by shifting to the fictional, a safe emotional distance is
automatically created. It would be simplistic to believe that just because
we work within fictional contexts, using fictional roles and events, that
the experience for pupils is therefore immediately safe from the negative and
destructive emotions of real life experiences. In teaching, whether
working inside or outside fiction, we need to be constantly aware of the
need to treat pupils in ways that demonstrate respect for persons and awareness
of their particular social and emotional circumstances in that learning
situation.
On one level, the teacher must
make the content interesting and appropriate for the pupils, that is, it
should be related to their needs and structured in such a way as to grab and
hold their attention. The risk of criticism and humiliation by pupils has
to be removed or at least made clear as an unacceptable way to behave. This
can be done by the teacher modelling how to behave when they make a mistake. Teachers
need to demonstrate how to deal with mistakes made by pupils and by protecting
and defending them if they are subjected to negative response by classmates. The
risk of making mistakes does not automatically vanish because we are using
role-play. The principle of protecting pupils from humiliation and
embarrassment remains inside and outside the fictional world of drama, in
fact, it underpins good teaching and helps raise the social health of the
class by modelling positive ways of treating each other.
Gavin
Bolton makes an important distinction when writing about pupils and emotion in
drama
I cannot stress enough how
important it is for teachers to realise that because drama is such a powerful
tool for helping people change, as teachers we need to be very sensitive
to the emotional demands we make on our students. The notion of
‘protection’ is not necessarily concerned with protecting participants from
emotion, for unless there is some kind of emotional engagement nothing can
be learned, but rather to protect them into emotion. This does not
mean we do not take risks or put pupils in situations that feel risky but these
risks are perceived rather than actual.
He
suggests three ways to deal with a topic indirectly
1. Enter
the topic at an oblique angle to the main issue.
2. Put
the pupils in a role that only obliquely connects them with the topic.
The drama teacher plans dramas with
these devices in order to shift and adjust the emotional proximity of the class
in relation to the social event they are examining. You go into role as the
workhouse boss and aggressively tell them to stand when you enter the room. One
of the class has a rolled up cardigan to represent her baby and takes the role
of Martha. This living-through style of confrontational drama with its raw
emotion can be received with derision and light-heartedness by pupils.
Later
in the drama one child is asked to stand upon a chair with the label
They are totally
inappropriate as ways of structuring a drama lesson. We have no right to
subject pupils to this kind of treatment because it is under the cloak of drama
and fiction. Our first concern is to take the class to looking at the
disturbing reality of the nineteenth-century workhouse and to do that we must
find a role for the pupils which gives them power. As the drama progresses
and trust in the teacher and the medium is built then the pupils can move
closer to the role of the inmates. The
stopping and starting of the drama helps defuse the raw emotion and allows
pupils to reflect, negotiate and manipulate the fiction to clarify their
own understanding. That does not mean we cannot move closer to these
issues as the drama develops, but it does mean we need to find a way into
the drama that will not generate counter-productive learning, behaviour
that will seek to undermine or destroy the drama.
Let us
draw an analogy with the social ritual of the funeral services in
Usually the closer to the coffin or
front of the service you sit, the closer your relationship to the deceased, with
family and close friends in the pews at the front, more distant friends
and relations further away. How to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship
55 emotionally charged topic or one where the cultural taboos of our society
are to be examined, we need to take the class there very carefully. We
need to build their trust in the fictional world we create through the roles we
put them in and the strategies we use. It is this that makes it safe for
the participants, for as long as we, as teacher and manager of the
fictional world, intervene and reflect upon it, we can facilitate
learning and protect the vulnerable.
The dramas we include in this book
cover some challenging ideas. The gradual making of meaning out of this
moment unites the class and fully allows for a variety of levels and activity
in response so that it is truly inclusive. When doing this drama in school
we were not surprised when a child with autism asked Christopher’s Mum whether
she thought he might be autistic?.
With
the protection of the class role – people who can help worried parents
– he
was able to distance himself from the drama being about him, using the
given role of someone who can help parents of pupils with autism.
Another
example of a powerful and demanding moment occurs in the
‘Macbeth’ drama when the servants
are meeting to discuss what to do. Unexpectedly, TiR as Macbeth
shouts for them to report to him. This is a shock and can cause anxiety to
the members of the class in role as servants. ● The servants know they
have knowledge about him at this point which gives them power, unlike the
powerless inmates of the Workhouse. In both of these cases the class are
protected by the fiction and if necessary the teacher can go OoR to negotiate
what to do, so that the class is never in any danger from the moment of
anxiety.
Having
a voice in society
If we return to the central idea in
drama of creating an ‘as if’ world we see that it is a world that is, at
least in part, created by the participants through their ideas. As we
have seen in the planning section, good planning creates gaps and spaces
for pupils to input their ideas. If we plan for pupils’ ideas to be part
of the drama lesson and we are creating a safe environment for this to happen, we
are in effect giving them a voice to express their understandings and
perspective on the world in which they live. Figure 4.1 describes the
pupils who have the confidence to express an opinion in the drama lesson.
There
will be a relative congruence or not in the relationship between these
components. Whether what I think is close to what I say, whether what
I say bears any relationship to what I do will shift in relation to the social
circumstances of the moment. One can imagine that more secure pupils whose
self-worth is high will present a more congruent view of these three factors. If
the concept of ‘giving pupils a voice’ means enabling pupils to express their
feelings, their ideas and their suggestions for action, then drama
holds the possibility of being a truly inclusive experience. It can do this by shifting pupils into a fictional world where they are
no longer speaking as themselves but through the fictional context the teacher
has structured for them and the class. The safe distance enables them to
say and do the things they may not say or do in the real world. The
dialectic that exists between the real world and the drama fictitious.
The
real world outside the drama
They can of course be involved in
the school itself and learn about responsibility by taking part in school
activities and institutions like the school council. To a limited extent
they can have experience in the community as part of their school experience. They
can make trips out or relevant visitors can be brought in to make pupils aware
of the important structures and ideas that community involves. Indeed, if
children get very committed to a real-world project there is a dilemma for the
school.
Drama’s relationship to citizenship
works on two levels, as a methodology that demonstrates aspects of
citizenship in action and when the content is specifically focused upon issues
of citizenship. When we consider that drama can link citizenship with
personal and social education, and spiritual, moral, social and
cultural education, then we can begin to understand the importance of
drama as a teaching method.
So any whole class drama carried out
in the methodology represented in this book is strong on the model of democracy, corporate
learning, responsibility and tolerance.
A drama
for teaching about citizenship
If we want the pupils to experience
a particular political idea or social situation, the fictional world of
drama can provide that situation efficiently and with an immediacy that reality
cannot provide. Whilst the fiction also protects the pupils into learning
at the same time and allows all avenues to be explored without the real
consequences that we indicated above. As one example let us consider the
use of ‘The Governor’s Child’ drama as a vehicle for uniting these areas. The
drama builds the pupils’ roles as citizens of a mountain village and places
them in the situation where the community is under threat.
As citizens the pupils have to take
on the responsibility of hiding the woman and baby, thus endangering
themselves. The drama opens up the issues of justice and revenge as sought
by a revolutionary soldier, the idea of what you undertake when you give
someone hospitality and ultimately the question of the worth of the single life
against the community. We can see from a summary of the drama that a
number of citizenship issues are immediately contextualised and presented to
the children. Drama ensures that they have to explore them and get
involved in them, to challenge and seek solutions in a number of ways.
Here is
a list of the issues and ideas that were identified as present in this drama by
a group of teacher trainees when they examined it
Giving the children something
they can relate to. They have their say – they have ownership of the key
decisions in the drama. We can see that the ideas listed cover important
aspects of the Citizenship curriculum. In addition, the content of a
specific drama can be planned to highlight key Citizenship areas. If we
examine the thinking behind the planning of the stages of ‘The Governor’s
Child’, we can see how by the nature of the tasks, techniques and
content, it promotes elements of the Citizenship curriculum. We have
given examples from ‘The Governor’s Child’ so that you can see how abstracts
like fairness, democracy, identity, community, belonging, responsibility, can
be made concrete through the process of drama. The process makes them more
of a community that can work together to the benefit of each individual’s
understanding.
And
later describe these learning outcomes for 7- and 8-year-olds
They will continue to
build on their capacity for empathy and on their awareness and management of
feelings, particularly fearfulness in relation to meeting new
challenges . Drama makes one of its greatest contributions in
modelling and generating this sort of learning. For drama to operate most
effectively we need to understand what is happening and how we most effectively
create the conditions for empathy to thrive. A phrase commonly linked with
empathy is ‘standing in someone else’s shoes’, the idea of, at least
for a short time, seeing the world from someone else’s
perspective, as if you were standing in their shoes. The inference is
that in some way we can see the world through someone else’s eyes, we can
think and feel as they would and in some way put ourselves in their
position. However, even the most superficial engagement with this idea
uncovers deep-seated problems with it in practice. Let us take for example
a drama/history lesson where we wish to get the pupils to empathise with the
plight of London’s street children of the 1870s. The Nike-shod
twenty-first-century pupil is as far removed from the barefooted ‘street
urchin’ in dress as in life experience.
We want them to look at, engage
with and reflect upon the lives of children of that time. Victorian life
for poor children and understand it in relation to their own. To do this
we make a shift into a fictional world, where time and place can be
reallocated and we can behave ‘as if’ it were happening now, where it is
possible to dialogue with fictional ideas of people who no longer exist and
where we have an understanding of the empathetic process that engages
emotionally without the cruel consequences of the real Victorian world for
children. Empathy, like drama, is framed in the particular and
so we need to move from broad-brush emotions to their demonstrable particularity.
Drama works by focusing upon the particular and
moving from the particular to the general. To understand drama’s
relationship with empathy we need to deconstruct the process of empathetic
behaviour and see how this is replicated in drama.
A working
definition of empathy
We need a definition that not
only belongs to the real world but can be replicated inside the drama lesson. Pupils
will then be able to empathise without having to bear witness to or have the
actual life experiences of those to whom they are directing their empathy.
Professor
Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Centre at
Cambridge, suggests that
‘empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and
to respond to them with an appropriate emotion’.
The
components of empathy
The idea of a ‘cognitive’ stage and
an ‘affective’ stage in the empathetic process is taken from the writings of
Alan Leslie in his work at London University, as summarised by Simon
Baron-Cohen .
Component
One – the cognitive component
Piaget called this aspect of empathy
«responding non-egocentrically» as it entails the «setting aside of your own
current perspective» and «attributing a mental state to the other person . » .
Component
Two – the affective component
‘The second element to empathy is
the affective component. There is here a desire to do something, to
take action, and therefore empathy is not just about recognising the
emotional state of someone but also doing something about it.
An
example of structuring drama for empathetic response
Let us use these ideas to analyse
how empathy might be generated using as an example ‘The Workhouse’ drama. In
the next part of the drama the pupils are told that a new inmate is expected
and that they are to witness her induction to the workhouse. First, they
look at the Workhouse Master as he watches the girl walking towards the gates.
This
strategy of conscience alley will enable the class to sympathise with
Martha’s
circumstances. The first stage of structuring for empathising is the
cognitive stage.
The
cognitive stage
3 Martha’s purpose – to enter the
workhouse and save the baby. Martha’s approach to the doors of the
workhouse, in other words, the pre-text. Workhouse Master –
cruel, untrustworthy, manipulative – and finally the low status role
of Martha, vulnerable and limited in the choices she can make on her own. The
context If we then put these roles in the context of a workhouse – dangerous, forbidding
and the last resort of the poor – while at the same time requiring the class to
make judgements and a report about the workhouse, we are giving them power
to take action.
Events
leading up to her approaching the workhouse The pre-text to
When the class meet roles with cruel
and negative attitudes, i. The second stage of structuring for
empathising is the affective stage.
The
affective stage
The roles First the pupils’ role as
commissioners is high status, fair-minded, responsible, not
easily fooled and trying to make the world a better place. Events leading
up to their debrief of the Workhouse Master The pupils share the experience of
witnessing the induction of a new inmate. While the class’s attitude to
Martha represents the cognitive state, the second stage of the empathetic
process is the affective state. Martha.
Of course, this situation is
manipulated by the teacher structuring the roles and events in a particular way
– the initial meeting with those who run the workhouse, listening to their
attitudes and witnessing their deceitful behaviour. How to Generate
Empathy in a Drama 67 take place. Of course the nature of the response may
vary from mere sympathy with Martha’s predicament to a more dynamic response to
help the person by initiating action to help. What distinguishes empathy
as a response is its appropriateness to the person’s circumstances.
Those pupils who find it difficult
to empathise will have the opportunity to see the skills modelled and the
positive consequences played out.
5. Can
we plan for generating empathy?
We can generate empathy through
structuring roles and creating a drama frame where it is likely to happen.
The
role of the pupils
While placing the pupils in a
positive, problem-solving and high status role gives them the power to
make judgements about people’s circumstances from a positive point of view, it
is also possible to generate empathy for the dispossessed. Later in the
workhouse drama the pupils shift their role to inmates, demonstrating life
in the workhouse through tableaux based upon the workhouse rules.
The
role of the teacher
The role of the pupils needs in the
first place to be a community one so that they see the situation from one point
of view and are not divided in their attitude. Just as the role of the
pupils gives them a perspective from which they can empathise, the role
you plan for the teacher is also part of structuring for an empathetic response. The
Workhouse Master generates an empathetic response towards Martha from the
pupils by his lack of humanity. The modelling by the teacher of roles who
are unable to empathise enables the pupils to witness their shortcomings and
therefore have a sense of how disabled they are without these skills.
We are
not historians, and in writing this chapter we shared our approach to
using drama to teach history with Professor Hilary Cooper at St Martins
In using the arts pupils
are creating their own interpretation or account, based upon
sources. We have a responsibility to the historian to make clear the
dangers and risks in a dramatic approach. As was discussed in Chapter
5, the phrase ‘to stand in someone else’s shoes’ is one often used to
describe the concept of empathising and it is never more liberally tossed about
than in the History and Drama curriculum. To expect a child to ‘step into
the shoes’ of a 10-year-old evacuee or a servant in the household of a wealthy
family in the nineteenth century, is ignoring the impossibility of this
shift for pupils with twenty-first-century minds.
Dressing
up to go back in time
One popular method of ‘empathising’
in the teaching of history takes the form of dressing up in costumes from the
past. Alternatively, schools will suspend the usual timetable and
devote lessons and other activities to a particular period in
time. Teachers may even be locked into roles from the
past , thinking, misguidedly in our view, this will
generate ‘empathy’ in the pupils with people from history. While dressing
up in costumes is a very popular history/drama experience, we must be
guarded about what we think children may learn by the experience.
In drama we are particularly
interested in the last element. It is here that drama synthesises story
and past events. As a teacher planning a history-related drama this does
not mean abandoning facts and reasons. If we are asking pupils to take on
roles of people from the past we need to frame this task in such a way as to
respect the need for authenticity and to give them roles that will enable them
to look at the past in a way that respects the work of the historian.
Of course, the research is not
just a task for the teacher but one that can be shared with the pupils in
lessons introducing the topic and before the drama work takes place. The
drama then has an assessment function, as knowledge gained in the research
activities will be exposed during the drama.
Balancing
the tensions – stories and history
Much of drama in education operates
from creating fictions and telling stories. Of course this is not
necessarily in conflict with history as we can approach individuals’ viewpoints
in history as their stories of the past. We need to be clear about our
learning objectives, about what we are trying to teach. We are going
to use a drama about Victorian street children to illustrate how drama and
history can be structured to work in harmony. In using drama we are using a
dense form of teaching, because the currency of drama is language, listening
and speaking, and we have a cross-curricular approach that will touch upon
learning objectives from several areas of the curriculum. Let’s begin with
the English and the History National Curriculum learning objectives.
In this way drama confronts pupils
with the ideas, beliefs and values of people from the past. The
juxtaposition of values and beliefs from the past with pupils’ own values and
gives them the opportunity to ‘use techniques of dialogic talk to explore ideas, topics
or issues’ through the prism of history and the safety of fictional contexts. The
‘Victorian Street Children’ drama illustrates how the tensions between history
and drama can be managed. 72 How to Approach Speaking and Listening
through Drama history can work together it must be remembered that the drama
lesson should not be seen in isolation from history lessons that precede or
follow it.
It is part of a series of lessons
and issues raised in the drama can be dealt with in other more appropriate
teaching and learning settings. The starting point for this drama is a
photograph . Alan Lambert in their book Drama Structures , although
we have used it to develop a different drama. The photograph immediately
nails the first important rule of drama and history, the importance and
value of historical authenticity.
Photographs and artefacts are a key
approach because they can grab the attention of the pupils. They can also
generate a context, a time and a place, roles and even a possible
dilemma, all ingredients of drama. We need to take the class to the
drama. The initial viewpoint is that of the outsider, the historian.
The subject matter is delicate, the
plight of the poor, and more poignantly, poor children. We are
making a conscious decision to move into the fiction of the drama using the
authenticity of a primary source, a photograph. We are taking the
pupils to the harsh reality of the past by distancing them through the
collective role of historians. We manage this through their role, as
historians, we give them high status, the Mantle of Expert.
In this way we generate and manage
the commitment of the class by ‘beguiling them’ into a fictional world of the
poor at this time in history. We can examine how the past is represented
and this begins the process of enquiry into the past that is central to the
function of the historian. We need to go to other sources in our teacher
research, and a chapter by Blake Morrison in Too True provides us with
another source to validate our understanding. This in turn juxtaposes
pupils’ own attitudes with those adopted by the roles. In confronting the attitudes of the roles, for example, the
acceptability of the physical chastisement of children, pupils are looking
at issues of continuity and change. Analysing the photographic process in
the 1870s compared to digital photography today would be an example of pupils
dealing with similarity and difference. Continuity and change, similarity
and difference are key concepts in the teaching of history and through drama
these are made concrete experiences. The drama begins as a history lesson, with
the idea of taking on roles in the lesson introduced from the beginning.
What
skills do they need?
The discussion of the role of the
historian is a preparation for this. We need to frame the class’s thinking
in such a way that they are constrained to think like a historian. This
approach replicates Facts – Hypothesis – Research. The ‘think we know’
section opens up the possibilities for the class, for example, an
observation such as the boys are poor will present a possibility based on the
evidence of their dress and demeanour. This may generate further research
and it may not be resolved. However, it may also draw the pupils’
attention to the fact that girls did live on the streets and were taken into
Barnardo’s homes.
This in turn raises the
opportunities for further research outside the drama lesson.
● There
are five boys and one man in the photograph.
● The
name of the man in the photograph is Edward Fitzgerald.
●
Edward Fitzgerald is holding a lamp. Having collated some evidence, hypotheses
and research questions we can use drama as a means to test out some of their
observations.
This question is there to
gauge the pupils’ knowledge at this early stage of the lesson.
Already
there are hints at the evangelical nature of Barnardo’s exploits and these can
be further examined out of role. ‘after’ photograph to show the immediate
and dramatic change Barnardo’s home had made to them. He will open up the
issues related to the technology of the photography, how the children
would have to stay still for up to half a minute.
Having
drawn the class into the photograph through their interviews with
Not all pupils will feel comfortable
in taking on the role of the children in the photograph at this point, so
a process of selection and contracting the demands inherent in adopting these
roles is critical to the success of the next part of the drama.
Modelling
the roles
Part of the process of setting this
up is the modelling of roles by the teacher before asking pupils to take on
this responsibility. We’re going to move the drama on now and meet the
boys in the photograph we have been looking at. You must be good at
keeping a serious look on your face because, as you can see, the boys
in the photograph are going through unhappy times. Finally, I will be
with you as Edward Fitzgerald and so you won’t feel left on your own to do this.
The
rest of the class will be wealthy ladies and gentlemen who are keen to support
Their task is to decide upon the
questions they wish to put to Fitzgerald and the boys. The role of the
majority of the class has two facets. The role will put them in a powerful
position in relation to Edward Fitzgerald. While the boys may be in fear
of the beadle the questioners will not, as their class and superior
education puts them in a position of power. Should they wish to talk to the
boys on their own, without the inhibiting presence of Fitzgerald, they
may request to do so and this will be acceded to, albeit reluctantly by
TiR as Fitzgerald. Away from the rest of the class , those who
have decided to be the boys meet with you.
Setting
up the boys
Avoid any names of pupils in
the class. In the photo some of the boys do look like brothers, others
do not. In Saõ Paulo gangs of street children go round together and refer
to each other as ‘uncle’, hinting at a family-like grouping.
Having
answered these questions and built up a history, there are four
Without the agreement of the group
on these the next part of the drama will not work. 1 We must agree that
you are afraid of Fitzgerald. If the drama is to work you must agree that
you are afraid of him.
2 They
must agree that they want to go into the home. This very carefully
engineered setting up of the boys is essential for the success of the task. Whatever
happens as teacher you will be moving in and out of role, managing the
teaching and learning process, checking understanding, negotiating
the next question, the next move and using the as-if-it-is-happening-now
to engage the pupils attention. They are the scriptwriters, but they
are constrained by the ‘givens’, the non-negotiables of frame through
which they are exploring how they make sense of this part of history. In a
session with some students, those taking the role of the interested
wealthy benefactors asked Fitzgerald to leave, which he did, warning
the boys to be best behaved as he left. This was a marvellous opportunity
to discuss the implications of his request. Should they give money and
food now?.
What
are the implications of this?
From that moment we can
incorporate it into the drama. We can tell the pupils in their planning of
the boys that if Fitzgerald leaves they can ask for food and money.
Whole
class participation – a sculpture of children living on the streets
In this drama each frame takes the
class closer to the children who are the subject of our historical
investigations. The next task is to engage the whole class as a sculpture
of the children living on the streets. Welcome to our new exhibit on the
theme of children in the nineteenth century. In the next room we have an
interactive exhibit, a sculpture of children who were known as street
children. What is exciting about this exhibit is that not only can you
view it, but you can, through the wonders of modern technology, hear
what the children represented in the piece are thinking. They are
programmed to say what they are thinking at this moment in history. As half the
class watch, the teacher touches each of the pupils on the shoulder and
they voice their thoughts. Of course, not all pupils will speak and
some will repeat what others say, but this is not a problem because the
overall effect is to create a sound collage of their thoughts in this situation
while at the same time not putting unnecessary pressure on those who cannot
think of anything to say and would prefer to listen. This slowing down of
the drama and looking in detail at a particular moment is important and a
feature of how drama in education works. Unlike performance and
product-orientated drama, the purpose here is to negotiate meanings and
consider implications of particular issues. The pupils have been moved frame by
frame to make sense of the world of the street children by a gradual edging
towards their perspective.
Whole
class improvisation
We can use the sculpture
and thought-tracking work as a starting point for a whole class improvisation
or ‘living through’ part of the drama. I am going to take the role of a
wealthy gentleman who comes across these street children on a bitterly cold
night.
The
teacher begins to narrate
Dozens of children huddled
together desperately trying to keep warm in front of the dying embers of a fire. He
immediately organised his servants to bring soup, bowls and bread to the
children and as they greedily ate bread and soup he sat with them.
Teacher
as narrator
The next section is a
transcript of some 10- and 11-year-olds at this point in the drama The teacher
realises the class is too far away and that only the children close to him are
responding verbally to him, although they are all engaged with what is
going on. The class have taken a position
that exposes the ignorance and patronising attitude of the wealthy gentleman. The
lesson has been structured to ensure their inclusion and their responses are
spontaneous and offered genuinely from the viewpoint of the roles they are
representing. They connect with the plight of the street children by
recognising the lack of understanding of their position embodied in the teacher
roles.
Hence
the misdirection of much well-meant effort into charity of the
The drama approach must be
seen as a particular pedagogical approach to the subject. Drama needs to
be recognised for what it does best, which is to negotiate meanings
through engagement with imagined realities.
6. How
to Link History and Drama
I think I will study well
and then help children like myself. We can see from this that the ‘Street
Children’ drama acts as a metaphor for now and enables us to open up issues
that may be hindered by prejudice in a way that uses history as a prism through
which to view global issues.
Speaking
and Listening through Drama
The two of us were
initially unclear as to what exactly a chapter on drama and assessment would
contain. We have in our work used many approaches and many ideas for the
philosophy and practice of assessment. The result of the hour-long
discussion, much of it focused through looking at drama work with pupils
on video, was that we had the powerful sort of dialogue, exchange of
ideas, challenge of assumptions, that we are putting forward in this
book.
What is
assessment?
Drama is not just about speaking and
listening, but the creation of a fiction, where the art form of drama
is essential and the success of that enterprise depends on valuable interaction
between all participants. However, we must stress we are primarily
looking at assessing speaking and listening, the focus of this book, and
we are not providing in this chapter a framework for the assessment of theatre
skills, the art form of drama, for personal and social development, nor
other learning areas that drama can address. The currency of drama is
speaking and listening and in its nature it is swift, fleeting and
ephemeral.
Listening
attainment levels of the English National Curriculum in any significant
How to Approach Speaking and
Listening through Drama way. It is easier to assess, of course, because
it is an isolated target, one person delivering a set structure in front
of the teacher and class, a performance.
Since
the inception of the National Curriculum, assessment of Speaking and
Our approach is not to produce
league tables, but to give a snapshot of pupils’ communication skills in
order to recognise achievement and to chart possible development. The
prime requirement on teachers when doing assessments is to listen to the pupils
and to look carefully at the activity. In the formative role of assessment
we need to be feeding back to the pupils during and after the drama.
How do
we collect data more formally?
Assessment in this context is the
detailed study of episodes of speaking and listening. We need to describe what
we see and teachers need to operate as researchers of the dialogue in their
classrooms. To set this up properly, the senior management team need
to become involved in planning a whole school strategy for the assessment and
development of speaking and listening. One teacher can be freed to observe
a partner.
With A as a critical friend, a
lesson or lessons can be carried out by B and the events are logged by the
observer A, as well as noted afterwards by B. Then they reverse roles
for the other class. From the evidence, judgements need to be made of the
speaking and listening and pupil profiles built up based on the thinking and
the empathy demonstrated during a drama. Further evidence is collected by
the class teacher from other contexts to check out whether what has been
observed in the drama is unique to that context or a general tendency and
ability.
Other
issues to consider
We must learn to read body
language, including facial expressions during the drama. If a pupil
only speaks once we must look at that single contribution and at other evidence
drawn or written after the event to see what they know from the drama. We
have to manage the exchanges in a drama so that the naturally dominant voices in
the classroom learn to listen and we allow others space to talk. Such
pupils may distil ideas in a way that frequent contributors fail to do because
they do not listen as well. Other class
members are naturally quiet and we will not change people’s personalities so we
should not expect them to be as vociferous.
Capturing
the samples of speaking and listening
There is readily available
technology that can record work and allow us to consider it at greater length
after the event, particularly video recording. Again, if
teachers are paired to do the assessment, one can handle the camera while
the other teaches. Some teachers object to the use of video recording on
the grounds that it distorts the drama process.
We will now look at a transcript
from a video recording of a drama lesson at a key moment and consider the way
it can be assessed. At this point teacher OoR is standing up talking to
the class.
Charlie:
They’re here because they’re trying to get the
Highwayman. The Highwayman
stole some gold for the landlord’s daughter to get the keys.
7. How
to Begin Using Assessment through Drama
There are a number of critical
moments to assess here. Because you, as historians, can find a
lot about the legend. Tim and then with his dilemma about whether to tell
on the Highwayman to the soldiers, which is the central focus of the drama
at this point. Alan’s contribution is worth assessing for its value.
In answering him in role I can
expand on why Tim is wishing himself away, something terrible’s happened, hinting
at but not telling what is happening. Other members of the group are then
able to interpret what this means and are keen to introduce the Highwayman
themselves. Neil introduces the subject and at once the tension of the
situation can be raised. Charlie is creative in developing ideas of what
he thinks the soldiers and Highwayman are doing, They’re here because
they’re trying to get the Highwayman.
The level of engagement in the drama
for him is very high. He is introducing storyline ideas that are original
to him and can be used by me in developing the drama later if the class agree
to take on the ideas. The nature of the situation changes as these
historians from the twenty-first century are drawn into the mesh of Tim’s
difficult situation.
Alan’s contribution can be seen to
have opened this up and he can be rewarded for empathising with Tim from the
previous exchange.
Teachers
should talk to children after drama sessions in order to elicit their understanding. Children
need to reflect separately and together on the process.
Talk
for writing – the wholeness of communication
We can get clear evidence
for assessment of the effectiveness of speaking and
listening, particularly the latter, from other forms of communication
like writing or art work.
Key
findings
The project cited here was set up to
do concentrated Literacy work involving more visual stimuli and drama.
Here
are some outcomes observed by the teachers
One teacher observed, ‘the
children have become more involved in the texts that we read’ ... ‘it
was clear that those who use drama as part of their integrated planning were
beginning to choose specific drama conventions suited to the overall learning
intention.
And the
project report summarises
The expectation of many was that
drama would become a regular – at least weekly – feature of Literacy and that
in particular more work needed to be planned to prompt adults to model drama in
order to support the children.
She is
not a member of this family so how can we trust her?
If Maria doesn’t give the baby to
his mother she will feel guilty by ruining an innocent baby’s life. We can
see from this work that the two 10-year-old children are very focused by the
arguments that were rehearsed orally within the drama as the villagers
discussed the decision as to what to do with Maria. The writing has become
a way of formalising the argument.
How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama
In addition, they have been
motivated to write by the drama and produced creditable pieces. In
conclusion, we know that assessing and recording speaking and listening is
a demanding task, but we would contend that is no more demanding than
other assessment if it is approached in the right way.
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