Starting Drama Teaching

Mike Fleming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315460550
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Drama

Why teach drama? How can a newcomer teach drama successfully? How do we recognize quality in drama?

Starting Drama Teaching is a comprehensive guide to the teaching of drama in schools. Exploring the aims and purposes of drama, it provides an insight into the theoretical perspectives that underpin practice alongside activities, example lesson plans and approaches to planning. Written in an accessible style, the book addresses such practical issues as setting up role play, how to inject depth into group drama, working with text, teaching playwriting, as well as common problems that arise in the drama classroom and how to avoid them.

This fourth edition has been updated to reflect the latest educational thinking and developments in policy and includes:

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• a new chapter on researching drama;

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• an extra section on digital technology and drama;

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• guidance on different approaches to drama;

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• advice on how teachers can achieve and recognize quality work in drama;

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• a discussion of drama concepts including applied theatre, ensemble and rehearsal approaches.

Acting on the growing interest in drama both as a separate subject and as a teaching methodology, this book is full of sensible, practical advice for teachers using drama at all levels and in all kinds of different school contexts. Written by an internationally recognized leading name in drama education, this book is valuable reading for trainee teachers who are new to drama and teachers who wish to update and broaden their range.

Chapter 1 Teaching drama

Why teach drama?

There are many reasons given for teaching drama. How would you rank them in the following list? Are there any you would prioritize or remove? To what extent do they overlap?

• to provide future artists and audiences;
• to help pupils to think;
• to develop personal qualities;
• to develop imagination and creativity;
• to provide insight into human situations;
• to improve teaching of other subjects;
• to educate the emotions;
• to develop confidence;
• to provide entertainment and relaxation;
• to develop appreciation of the cultural heritage;
• to develop understanding of how drama works as a genre.

Lists of aims for drama are commonplace in books about teaching the subject, but the bald statements on their own do not capture depth of meaning and often hide underlying assumptions. The two aims ‘to develop personal qualities’ and ‘to develop appreciation of the cultural heritage’ at first sight may suggest very different orientations — the first implying an emphasis on active participation in making drama, the second suggesting a study of texts of different sorts. However, the statements may just as easily be seen as entirely compatible, depending on their interpretation; after all the study of texts by authors such as Shakespeare, Ibsen and Brecht does not have to be passive and will almost certainly lead to personal growth if taught well. In order to discriminate between the items on the list, it may be helpful to distinguish between those statements that say something about the value of the subject and those that are more focused on the aims of the teacher as intentional agent. On that basis we can recognize that ‘developing confidence’ in pupils may be a useful side effect of drama but it is less useful as an educational aim because it does not serve to give distinct purpose and direction to the teaching of the subject. (This will be explored more fully in Chapter 3.)

Another way of gaining more insight into the list of aims is to explore other differences in emphasis that lie below the surface. For example, there is an implied distinction in some of the statements between ‘education in drama’ (understanding drama as a genre) and ‘drama for education’ (developing understanding of the world through participation in drama). There is also clearly a distinction between ‘drama as a method for teaching other subjects’ and ‘drama as a subject in its own right’, but the statements themselves do not indicate whether the different orientations are deep-seated or whether there are implications for practice.

Another way of approaching a list of aims is to seek to identify any gaps. For example, this particular list says nothing specific about citizenship education, language development, literacy or interculturalism, that have featured strongly in recent writing about drama. One could keep adding to the list, but the problem then is that it can easily appear overblown, overambitious and excessive. Advocates of drama sometimes claim too much for their subject.

The identification of ‘interculturalism’ as an aim for drama provides an interesting example. It shows how the term itself needs to be unpacked in order to appreciate its potential impact and resonance. There is a tradition in intercultural theatre whereby practitioners borrow from other cultures to develop new hybrid forms, a practice which has not been without its critics. The term ‘interculturalism’, or the development of ‘intercultural competence’, has similarly been used in foreign language teaching to refer to the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of another culture. However, there is a more profound understanding of interculturalism when the development of intercultural competence is seen as a deeply moral concern and central to personal development, involving openness to ‘otherness’ and being able to see things from another point of view. Here the term is extended outside its normal use (to describe interaction between two national cultures) to embrace any human situation that involves an encounter with the new. Key aspects such as ability to decentre and willingness to engage with others are deep-seated attributes and personal characteristics, and take further the more surface notion of ‘becoming familiar with a foreign culture’. This example is particularly significant because the deeper aspects of interculturalism are closely related to drama as an art form and to art more generally. Art often challenges us to see things in new ways and to question assumptions. Drama in particular allows us to step into someone’s shoes and can prompt us to see the world differently. A simple statement of an aim does not necessarily carry the full impact of its potential meaning.

Often ideological or political considerations may be ignored or the implications may be concealed in a bald statement of aim. Drama education practice is often associated with criticality and critical pedagogy. The aim of using drama to develop citizenship may conceal the crucial question of whether the intention is to develop ‘obedient subjects’ or ‘critical citizens’.

The simple list conceals other complexities. Do all the aims apply equally to the full age range or should there be a change in emphasis as pupils get older? Do all the aims apply equally to all drama activities? For instance, might not a module on the study of Shakespeare (cultural heritage) be followed by a project with cross curricular links? Does the list of aims contain contradictions and tensions between, for example, feeling and cognition, process and product, making and responding? The list of aims given above focuses primarily on the benefits of drama for the individual. This is inevitable because it is in the nature of educational aims to function in that way. However, arguably it is in the social, collectivist and communal nature of drama that much of its value lies.

One of the reasons why a simple list of aims cannot capture the complexity of underlying issues and intentions is that language is not entirely transparent; this will be a theme underlying much of the discussion in this book. One way of expressing this insight is to say that for much of the time the meaning of language does not reside inside the individual but is discovered between people. The aim ‘to provide entertainment and relaxation’ may appear trivial and superficial on the surface but could instead be associated with arguments about the intrinsic value of art. Shusterman (2003) has questioned the widely accepted polarity between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ arguing for a deep concept of entertainment with overtones of ‘sustaining, refreshing and deepening concentration’. This type of argument can lead to linking drama to well-being, not necessarily in the narrow sense of using of drama as a method to develop understanding of specific health-related topics, but in the broader sense of contributing to pupils’ social and mental health. The moral dimension of teaching drama has been to the fore in much of Winston’s writings. He draws attention to the process of ‘unselfing’ through engagement with art that can happen when ‘we forget about ourselves, our anxieties and our day-to-day preoccupations’ (Winston, 2010: 51). As with the term ‘interculturalism’, unpicking the nuances and possible implications of a simple statement of aims needs dialogue and negotiation of meaning.

The approach to aims taken by O’Toole et al. (2009: 4) is productive in that instead of supplying a simple list they identify and discuss what they call a ‘bewilderingly knotty diversity of purposes’ that blend into each other. The four paradigms they describe are linguistic/communicative, expressive developmental, social/pedagogical and aesthetic/cognitive, the latter representing a more contemporary synthesis of competing perspectives. That does not mean to say a new teacher faced at interview with a question about aims should refuse to answer the question on the grounds that it is too complex an issue. Nor is it an argument intended to dismiss the lists of justification offered in various drama texts and policy documents. There are times when a succinct and concise summary may be what is needed. The purpose here is rather to urge caution that such statements in themselves may either be empty or misleading and may conceal crucial differences in belief. The practical implication is that for a group of teachers to make a statement of aims work to support learning, they need to be brought alive through negotiation and discussion in a community of practice, not just exist as a bureaucratic imperative. We live in an age of sound bites and easy solutions. However, true understanding of drama’s potential value and purpose needs more considered discussion and will be one of the theme addressed throughout this book.

One way of exploring some of the tensions and differences of emphasis underlying simple statements is to examine drama teaching from a historical perspective. This will be the subject of the next section.

Historical perspectives

It can be baffling to newcomers to the subject to learn that the history of drama between the 1950s and 1990s is to a large degree the story of a division between advocates of ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’. This may be even more confusing to teachers outside the United Kingdom, because in most other countries the divisions, even when they existed, were neither as dominant nor as virulent. It is therefore tempting for writers on drama to want to leave history behind and herald a new age of consensus which embraces an inclusive approach to the subject. What that means is that all sorts of activities may be found in the modern drama classroom from spontaneous improvisation to performing a play, from drama games and exercises to monologues, from creating tableau to watching the performance of a visiting theatre group. Despite the contemporary eclectic approach, some understanding of the recent history of the subject is important because it can provide considerable insight into present practice and into the notion of ‘quality’ in drama.

The developments in drama teaching since the middle of the twentieth century can be summarized in Figure 1.1. At first glance the diagram appears to show that there has been a long period of argument and debate focused on the separation of ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ which has brought us right back to where we started. However, a closer scrutiny recognizes a crucial difference in the understanding of ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ as a result of the debate in the intervening years. This is represented in the diagram as a move from ‘Drama1’ and ‘Theatre1’ to ‘Drama2’ and ‘Theatre2’.

Figure 1.1 History of drama teaching.

The most emphatic and widely quoted statement of the difference between drama and theatre was made by Way (1967): ‘“theatre” is largely concerned with communication between actors and an audience; “drama” is largely concerned with experience by the participants, irrespective of any function of communication to an audience’. To the modern drama teacher this rejection of theatre may seem incomprehensible and extreme. However, it is important to realize that what was being rejected was a particular approach to theatre practice with young people represented in the upper right side of the quadrant (Theatre 1). This was a reaction against a conception of theatre that involved children acting out in a rather formal way the words of others rather than developing ideas of their own. The teacher/director was the authority telling the pupils how to perform, with little guarantee that they understood what they were doing. At worst, it involved the development of pompous child stars.

The type of lesson that most typifies the child centred approach to drama in the early 1960s was very straightforward. The teacher would divide the class into groups, tell them to make up a play on a particular topic and then sit back. Such an approach had all the ingredients of the progressive paradigm: self expression, creativity and minimal intervention by the teacher. Although in practice it often created chaos, such lessons could virtually guarantee that pupils would experience excitement, engagement, concentration and the exercise of imagination — ingredients that were often not found in the traditional subject lesson next door. ‘Drama’ had in fact become ‘playing’ and could thus draw on the various burgeoning writings in psychology on the value of child play. The pupils might be invited to show their work to each other at the end of the lesson, although some purists even saw that practice as a step too far into theatre and performing. Interestingly, neither Slade nor Way took this ‘get into a group and do a play’ approach themselves (we will see how the later work of Heathcote and Bolton also became distorted in practice). A typical Slade lesson might involve the pupils acting out to the teacher’s commentary ‘You wake up and stretch … don’t forget to wash behind the ears’. Way used a lot of drama exercises in his workshops. Both were very strong theatre practition...