Secondary Drama: A Creative Source Book

Practical inspiration for teachers

John Doona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415811378
• eBook ISBN: 9781134651511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

John Doona is an artist and a teacher of exceptional quality. He brings both artistic and human integrity to a wide range of drama work from the classroom to performance of the highest standards. His significant practice is firmly rooted in principle and knowledge of drama and children and young people. I recommend him to you as an exceptional and effective teacher and practitioner.

Professor Jonothan Neelands, University of Warwick, UK

What is a compelling scheme of work and how do I create one? What are the building blocks of Drama? How do I sustain interest and engagement? What is the purpose and impact of my daily work?

Providing inspiration for daily practice alongside a full range of tried and tested schemes of work, this exciting new book offers support to secondary teachers wanting to create original drama experiences to meet their own unique classroom needs.

The book models a positive and reflective approach to classroom practice offering a thoughtful exploration of the craft and art of drama teaching covering key issues such as classroom management, student engagement, planning, progression and assessment. After considering the theory behind drama in education and the fundamentals of practice, the majority of the text is devoted to the annotated schemes of work. These cover a diverse range of topics such as homelessness, addiction, terrorism and civil rights and show how the ideas discussed can be put into practice.

Featuring a Preface by Dorothy Heathcote and a Foreword by Edward Bond, this resource will be valuable reading for both new and established teachers looking to deliver excellent inspiring drama lessons across the secondary setting and become a vibrant and effective drama specialist.

Part One

Thinking drama

1 Drama and the contemporary landscape

The level of knowledge on which this first section stands is as might be reasonably expected from an alert and aware educator in the contemporary workaday setting; one in which such conceptual constructs are offered to classroom practitioners to help us to understand the nature of our work. So, a level of understanding beginning with a knowledge of the key texts, a spattering of conference workshops, a few in-service training days and some perusal of the web. Even from this lowly starting point, it seems very clear that research-based theorising about the make-up of human personality and human learning offers us the chance to look again at the purpose and meaning of drama. Perhaps even the chance to begin the journey from a peripheral activity in the institutional hinterland, to becoming a core element of a modern approach to teaching and learning: making learning matter.

For those of us with a sense of the richness of the possibilities of drama, the following collection of concepts will come as no surprise. I believe they give us simply a new set of language games to inhabit in order to speak about our work in a credible fashion with a wider range of fellow professionals. It is a new descriptive/explanatory/justificatory language that underlines the value of what we have always known through experience. From these necessarily simplified sketches we commend you to make your own explorations.

Brain-based learning

There has been an explosion in the application to learning of neuro-scientific research into the functioning of the brain. It seems perfectly reasonable that attempts to promote learning in our schools should necessarily follow the contours of the human brain as it has evolved over several million years. Our chief point of access into this area has been the work of brain-based learning populariser, Eric Jensen. And so despite this being a complex, contentious and ever developing field, there are broad (if provisional) things we can usefully say about how the brain learns, that support the approach of drama as a learning medium. With apologies to Mr Jensen and neuro-scientists everywhere, please consider the following:

● The brain is built for activity in the ‘real world’ and learns best in its natural habitat. A good learning environment offers real world challenge and real world contexts for that challenge. Good drama offers ‘lived through’, real world learning contexts.

● The brain cannot escape its multi-sensory expectations – seeing, hearing, touching, scenting, tasting, etc and combines these with functions such as remembering and processing. Good drama is a rich, multi-sensory experience that in its inception seeks to engage participants in its actions in a multi-sensory environment.

● The brain accepts knowledge as truth only when verified by emotional experience. An emotional experience of knowledge drives commitment to and acceptance of the learning. Good drama engages the emotions through character, situation, narrative, language; the learning experiences are felt.

● The ‘whole person’ learns. The greater the involvement of the whole, the greater the learning. Good drama seeks to engage with participants physically, socially, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, spiritually. It makes possible a total, aesthetic engagement in learning

● The brain looks for patterns. To the human brain the creating or finding of patterns and connections allows for the making of its own meaning. A good learning experience is an open one that offers gaps. Working to fill in these gaps, the brain forges new connections, it develops capacity – it learns. Good drama places participants in compelling, open situations which house strings of gaps – questions, possibilities, decisions, problems – human problems in a fictional context.

An additional and intriguing thought is that from a ‘brain chemistry’ point of view, it looks like the experience of emotion (for example, fear when facing jeopardy) in a real context is identical to the experience of emotion in a fictional context. Of course, our understanding of the experience will be mediated by our consciousness – we are not ‘lost’ in the fiction – but from the perspective of raw chemistry, to our brain, fiction is reality. This seems to add credence to the significance we drama specialists naturally give to fictional realities; in this important sense, we are not pretending, we are genuinely living.

An illustrative example from the schemes: Year 8 – Aliens

Miguel, our fragile, unsophisticated Brazilian peasant farmer, claims to have been abducted by aliens. We doubt him – he has too much to win by telling the story. In the teacher's simple in-role presentation of the character, the seeds of suspicion are offered subtly, by the inference of un-intentional tells. He is a low status character, sympathetically drawn to elicit our care and our emotional attachment…but at the same time, our rational sense is piqued by the outrageous grandeur of his claims and the subtle doubts he sows in us. His description of his experiences is hindered by alien-induced memory loss – we leave a gap open for pupils to fill – an alien world, alien technology…visioning a possible world.

From a ‘brain-based learning’ point of view we create a real-enough fiction through character, the ambiguity of the character becomes a real problem for the group – the narrative he presents is a problem for us, we must look for patterns in his behaviour to determine the truth of the story – we must read the subtleties of the presentation – our emotions are engaged as we encounter and challenge him – his story opens up a vast gap of possibility – a genuine and creative gap that the group will fill with imaginative action.

Deep learning

A powerful and very useful distinction in educational thinking has been the cleavage between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ learning. Surface learning is characterised by tasks of simple memory, working to the test, giving teacher what she wants. In surface learning, we chew but do not swallow. Deep learning, on the other hand, takes us up the levels of Bloom's famous taxonomy: deep learning is characterised by personal commitment to the task, intrinsic motivations, the ability to respond to new learning, to make use of learning, to create our own meaning from it and add the learning to our long-term sum of available knowledge. In deep learning, we chew, taste, swallow and digest. The sustenance gained then fuels further explorations.

The richness of a good drama experience might offer a new paradigm of deep learning in the sense that the learning is approached in a significantly ‘holistic’ manner; I experience intellectually, physically, socially, emotionally, conceptually, concretely and in abstraction. There are many facets to the moment of learning as experienced. It is the multiplicity of aspects embedded in a rich moment of dramatic encounter that takes the learning beyond the superficial and down through the strata of significance.

Of course, there is such a thing as bad, or ‘surface’ drama. The kind of drama experience that relies upon closed questioning, simple, direct tasks that haven't been allowed to enter the participants in a meaningful way, that don't stop students in their tracks and challenge their sense of self or their understanding. This variety of drama is about theatrical technique or the techniques of dramatic processes, the bells and whistles of simple effectiveness. For us, it is not enough to be effective, we must be genuinely meaningful.

In a moment of meaningful drama, it is my involvement in the character, the narrative and the situation of the fiction, in a way that reaches out and grabs my full attention, which is likely to create a deeper learning experience. The situation-fed questions that might arise here are questions of reason, motivation, alternatives, possibility, consequence, significance, connection, implication. These are higher-order, creative and speculative processes that stand as emblems of deeper, richer learning.

An illustrative example from the schemes: Year 9 – Piccadilly (homelessness)

To preserve the ‘surface/deep’ distinction we will look at two experiences of approaching the same area.

A Year 9 PHSE Citizenship project

Materials have been produced by the lead teacher in PHSE – there are lists of facts to deliver and discuss, questions to ponder, exercises to do, a word-search, a video about a homeless child and a police officer with salutary tales to tell, then an opportunity for questions and (if there's time) a role play in pairs on ‘staying safe’ and to finish, a facts about homelessness quiz. The lesson offers a useful chance to assess some facts and discuss responses, but by comparison with the drama scheme, we might regard it as a ‘surface learning experience’.

Year 9 drama scheme

Students begin with the enactment of a real event on local streets – they begin to build a sense of reality and to empathise – a character is introduced – we explore his life and our relationship with him. Questions are asked, facts embedded, characters and situations explored, felt and lived through, the challenge is imaginative, intellectual, emotional, social. We speculate, consider, confront, share, experience. The event is vibrant, alive, communal. It is a sample of deep learning that aims to place learners in intimate relation with a topic and with a narrative of significance and dramatic power.

Multiple intelligences

It is almost a commonplace now to speak of ‘multiple intelligences’. When Howard Gardner first introduced the terminology into our language it seemed to have the power of revelation. ‘Of course!’ we cried, it seemed to free us from the padlock of the limited value given to non-academic ways of being and succeeding. It was the democratisation of intelligence. How many ‘intelligences’ Mr Gardner might list as a complete list, seems less important than the simple idea that there is more than one way of being intelligent; that other forms of excelling or simply approaching the world have validity and perhaps even equality. The approach licences the terminology of ‘visual intelligence’, ‘musical intelligence’, ‘inter-personal intelligence’, ‘spatial intelligence’, perhaps even, ‘footballing intelligence’! If there are many forms of intelligence, we might argue, that there must also be many forms of knowledge and many forms of knowing. Philosophically-minded fans of rigorous conceptual analysis might baulk at the stretching of the perfectly proper notion of ‘intelligence’, but the new construction has such general resonance because it supports a widely-held sense of the value of a varied set of skills and propensities; the skilled craftsman, the gifted painter, the able athlete, the outstanding carpenter, the accomplished mathematician, the consummate professional tap-dancer. Where excellence is possible if seems a simple (and forgivable act) of affirmation to assign intelligence.

From a drama point of view, the language of multiple intelligence gives credence to the value of the many facets of the classroom experience. It speaks for the value of understanding another's perspective, for operating as a valuable group member, for identifying significance, for creating solutions, and much more in a list that would never be complete.

An illustrative example from the schemes: Year 8/9 – Hamlet

We explore the central familial situation of Shakespeare's great play; a father murdered, a mother's remarriage to his brother and killer and a son, charged super-naturally with making things right. We encounter Shakespeare's precise language and we mine the rich and complex characters for possibilities, speculating. We enter into a vibrant dialogue with the text, with Shakespeare's great mind and with each other, To be or not to be, really is the question.

From the point of view of multiple intelligence, our drama work exercises the ‘linguistic intelligence’ as we approach and unknot the dense and beautiful text, the ‘emotional’ as we consider the mental plight of the grieving youth, the ‘inter-personal’ as we engineer solutions to the ‘narrative gap’ in full collaboration, ‘intra-personal’ as we are invited to give private reflection to our very existence, and ‘spatial’ as we consider the stage semiotics of constructing the final terrible scene.

Emotional intelligence

Strongly related to the expansion of understanding of intelligence is the development of the concept of ‘emotional intelligence’ as developed by Daniel Goldman and others. Dismissed by some for its pop psychology flashiness, the citing of emotional intelligence does us an important service in rebalancing the tendency towards prepositional knowledge and the rational engagement with it. The allied terminology of ‘emotional literacy’ is equally significant in the ‘felt’ world of the drama classroom. We are emotional creatures; our experience of the world is mediated by our emotional being. To engage fully with the world we need to be able to understand both our own and others' emotional lives, we need to be able to recognise signs of emotional significance and to manage ourselves and others in the direction of emotional maturity.

The landscape of the drama experience is an emotional landscape. An early, essential achievement in our classrooms will be to secure an emotional response – a commitment response – from our students. The narrative development of the drama will be through a progression of emotionally defined episodes. Along the way we will explore and develop an emotional vocabulary – for our characters and ourselves; we will name states of emotional being, we will explore ways of expressing an extended range of emotions, we will experience and manage our own and our character's feelings at critical living moments, we will gain insight into another's perspective, we fill face beyond-real-but-safe jeopardy and we will...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Thinking drama
• Part Two Some fundamentals of practice
• Part Three The schemes
• Afterword
• Bibliography and further reading