Drama and Traditional Story for the Early Years

Francis Prendiville, Nigel Toye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136286698
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is a book that looks at how drama has its basis in good early years practice. Most early years practitioners are doing some drama and are edging towards more structured work - this text will help them go further by building their own skills. Using tried and tested example dramas based on traditional stories, the authors show how clearly dramas are constructed. They move from the simple use if TiR (Teacher in Role) to more complex, full dramas, using traditional stories including Little Bo Peep, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Humpty Dumpty, The Pied Piper, The Billy Goats Gruff and Hansel and Gretel. Drama in the early years covers a number of key areas where drama is of particular importance for this age group including: * drama in the National Curriculum * how drama can help your teaching of the Literacy Hour * personal and social education and citizenship * drama and special needs * assessment * recording and progression * developing a school policy for drama.

Part I

Thinking About Drama

Ideas 1

Why use Drama?

Drama Facilitates the Delivery of the Curriculum

Since the introduction of the National Curriculum (NC) we have witnessed fundamental changes in the structure and content of the curriculum. Alongside these curriculum changes we also have new demands in terms of assessment, recording and reporting of pupils’ progress. This means that the need for schools to be accountable has never been greater. The implications for teachers and their ways of working have been enormous. The changes we have seen in schools demonstrate the shift away from the idiosyncratic and largely incohesive curriculum that dominated primary schools before the NC to a far more structured and homogeneous one. We now have an education system where a child moving from school to school, LEA to LEA, has entitlement to a common curriculum with assessments that are based upon common procedures. Not only is there now a common curriculum in terms of content but we also have definitions of learning, attainment and progression that are used when judgements are made about a school’s performance. The NC describes learning in particular terms, that is, the acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding. Furthermore, the knowledge, skills and understanding of pupils are benchmarked by ‘level descriptions’ so our assessment of pupils is ‘criterion-referenced’, and ‘progression’ is seen as gains in knowledge, skills and understanding.

The prescriptive nature of the curriculum is not without its critics. Initially the NC was over-complex and unmanageable, and more recently it has been largely assessment-driven. There is also the added pressure of published league tables for schools as well as published OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) reports following school inspections. The allocation of time to the literacy and numeracy hours necessitates an ‘efficient’ delivery of the curriculum so that it can maintain the prerequisite of ‘breadth and balance’.

It is one of the purposes of this book to suggest ways of working that make for efficiency in the allocation of time to subjects. Drama in education is, by its nature, a way of working. While many of its functions can be identified within the listening and speaking programmes of study in the NC in English, the fact that it is not limited in its subject content enables teachers to use it for the delivery of many aspects of the curriculum. For example, in our drama about the Billy Goats Gruff (see Ideas 3 and Part III, pp. 233–8) the children will have the role of ‘Troll Experts’; they will be required to make a book entitled Everything You Need to Know about Trolls (literacy – writing for a purpose and audience, the use of non-fiction books etc.); they will need to design machines to move the Troll’s eggs from under the bridge where he used to live to his new home (design and technology); they will have to measure the field where the Billy Goats live and divide it up so that it can be shared (mathematics); and, throughout the drama negotiations with the Troll (teacher in role), they will have demands made on their speaking and listening skills. At a time when external agencies, from central government to school governors, set agendas for teachers to work to, it is imperative that we should find ways to deliver curriculum requirements efficiently. One of the strongest arguments for introducing drama into the curriculum is that it combines into one lesson many of the requirements made by the NC.

Drama Provides the Dialogues for Learning

Throughout the changes that have occurred in the curriculum, teachers have demonstrated the capacity for innovation in their teaching. This book is part of the tradition that claims teaching is as much an art as a science, and, when a teacher is an artist, she is able to go beyond the pre-packaged systems approach that is often born of a prescriptive education. The teacher as artist will spend some of her time planning lessons that encompass a ‘negotiation of meaning’ with her class. In other words, more than merely transferring a body of knowledge she will be helping children make sense of the world in which they live. It is our intention to enhance the prescriptive elements of the educational culture so that the systems approach is balanced with ways of working that engage children in a dialogue about what they experience in school.

Drama offers a unique experience in that it uses fictional situations and people, in particular the use of teacher role-play, that create a distinctive pupil/teacher dialogue, not only one that engages children and motivates them to learn but one which children, particularly in the early years, already know how to use.

Our aim in this chapter is first of all to consider why drama should be used by all early years teachers. One of the strongest reasons is that children find this way of working so accessible. We will examine why that is, and to do this we will look at drama’s roots, in children’s social role-play.

An understanding of early social role-play gives us a strong clue as to why and how drama works in the classroom. This analysis will lead us to the use of drama as a teaching method in nursery and Key Stage One classes because, while children arrive with the skills to do drama, we as teachers have to make management and organisational decisions so that we can use the methods with groups of thirty or more pupils. We shall do this by describing dramas we have used with classes as exemplars of the method in action.

Drama Builds on the Role-Play Skills Children Bring to School

Educational drama has its roots in child play, in particular, ‘social role’ or ‘make believe’ play. We use the term social role-play (also called sociodramatic role-play) to refer to that kind of play where children behave ‘as if’ they were someone else, or ‘as if’ they were themselves in a fictional situation. This feature of children’s development, so familiar to anybody who has watched children playing together, crosses cultural, linguistic and socio-economic boundaries. It is a feature of child development that has been with us throughout history. We played this way, as did our parents and their parents.

The combination of imagination and pretending in play is what makes it important in both child development and child learning. The imaginative pretend play directly leads into drama. As Vygotsky noted, ‘a child does not symbolise in play, but he wishes and realises his wishes by letting the basic categories of reality pass through his experience, which is precisely why in play a day can take half-an-hour and a hundred miles are covered in five steps’ (Bolton 1979 p. 20)

If the child has the capacity to embrace new experiences and meaning imaginatively, then we can utilise it to magical effect in providing content and contexts to take the child even further. Drama operates very effectively in that part of the play space. When children play, what is happening? What sorts of elements are being used that relate very closely to drama conventions? To illustrate how this works we will examine two young children engaged in social role-play.

See Figures 1–6. The stills are taken from a video and the key dialogue is transcribed. Sean, 23 months, and Clare, 2 years 10 months, play together at a family gathering. They play in the living room of their Grandma’s house and they are surrounded by visitors, some known to them, some not. The front door is opened and new visitors arrive with all the associated pleasantries of welcome. Cups of tea are passed around and in the midst of this convivial babble the two children play, and what do they play? They play house (Figure 1). Clare: Come to my house! Can I come to your house? Thank you. Please! Sit down, sit down.

Figure 1 Clare: Come to my house!

The first thing we notice is that they are using symbols, in other words they are transforming objects to help create new meanings. While the adults around her are playing house for real, Clare tells Sean to Come to my house, and her ‘house’ is represented by an upturned coffee table (Figure 2). Sean: In the house. Close the door. The table has enough features to be able to represent a house, the table top acts as a roof and entering the enclosed space gives the feeling of being inside (Figure 3). Clare: Doesn’t fit you. Shall I get a little one for you? While they are both trying to squeeze into the house Clare echoes the language that surrounds her. Clare: Thank you. Please! Sit down, sit down.

Figure 2 Sean: In the house. Close the door.

Figure 3 Clare: Doesn’t fit you.

The room, crammed with guests and visitors, is full of Thank yous’ and ‘Pleases’ and in trying to make sense of this situation and the new people around her Clare models the behaviour she witnesses in a ‘pretend’ game. By ‘acting out’ situations children can not only practise their responses to them within the safety of it not being real but also explore possible alternative responses to these situations by repeating them. We know there is a strong relationship between practice and learning. Social role-play enables children to practise their responses within the ‘no-penalty area’ of a fiction.

In our house full of visitors the pretend game takes a new direction, Sean turns a coffee table upside down, gets astride it and tells everyone that he is Going to the shops (Figure 4). This marks a shift in the narrative. From the context of visitors to a house the role-play is now ‘a journey to the shops’. All this is done by changing the function of the symbol, i.e. coffee table as house = right way up, coffee table as bicycle = turned upside down, with the announcement, I’m going to the shops.

Figure 4 Sean: Going to the shops.

Clare follows this by turning her table upside down to represent a bicycle: in this way she contracts into the new direction of the play (Figure 5). Clare’s Auntie responds with a question, Going to the shops? This is significant for teachers who use drama in their teaching. The intervention of an adult in the children’s imaginary play offers the opportunity to raise the level of thinking in the play to a level above the developmental level of the children, what Vygotsky called the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Thinking About Drama
• ‘Mantle of the Expert' Dramas
• Seven More Dramas
• Appendix Developing a school policy for drama: the key elements
• References
• Bibliography
• Index