The English Teacher's Drama Handbook

From theory to practice

Nicholas McGuinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136520174
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The English Teacher's Drama Handbook is a rich, thought-provoking introduction to teaching drama within the English classroom. Divided into two sections, the first part of the book explores deological influences that have shaped drama's relationship with English over the past 250 years and aims to help you locate your own practice within a theoretical and historical context. Starting with Rousseau's seminal text Emile, it considers the theories of key thinkers and practitioners and a range of complex issues including the construction of 'childhood', children's play, the teacher and student relationship, the implications of linking drama and English and the impact of national curricula on drama and English teaching.

The second half of the book offers a collection of comprehensive, practical schemes of work to inspire and support you and your students to realise the power of drama in bringing English language and literature vividly to life. Suitable for a range of ages and abilities, each activity makes explicit links to the key thinkers and issues explored in the first part of the book and explores a particular aspect of work in English - from grammar and spelling to poetry and play texts. Together with guidance on how to begin and progress the activities, each sequence includes ideas for exploring issues further in the English classroom.

Written for English teachers at any stage of their career, The English Teacher's Drama Handbook offers new ways of looking at drama and English that will ensure meaningful and enjoyable teaching and learning.

Part 1

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Influences and issues

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Chapter 1

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Early influences

Rousseau and Froebel

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No teacher enters the classroom without an ideological agenda, be it consciously or subconsciously addressed. This is as true for English teachers interested in the educational potential of drama as for any other subject practitioner. Part 1 of this book explores some of the ideological influences that have shaped drama pedagogy over the past 250 years. Its aim is to help teachers locate their own practice within a theoretical and historical context and to gain an understanding of the conceptual frames in which the practical activities of Part 2 are embedded. First, it is necessary to consider some of the metanarratives that have contributed historically to the construction of the concept of ‘childhood’.

Exploring contemporary attitudes towards childhood during the period 1640–1800, Stone (1977) identifies four fundamental approaches. There is the biological view that a child’s character is genetically determined at birth. In contrast to this, the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argues in his influential study Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) that the child is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, which is ‘written upon’ by experience through interaction with the environment. Important though these two positions are, it is Stone’s two remaining categories that are of immediate relevance to this contextual section of the book.

Although very different in ideological perspective, both of these categories have been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian metanarratives. On the one hand, there is what might be called in today’s jargon a ‘deficit model’. According to this account, brought to prominence by the teachings of the early Christian theologian, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the child, afflicted from before birth by the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, enters the world in a state of moral as well as intellectual inadequacy. In the words of the educationalist and Evangelical Christian Hannah More (1745–1833), children ‘bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify’ (More, 1799, p. 64).

The duty of responsible adults is to try to make good the deficit as quickly as possible by hurrying the child into sober and industrious adulthood. Almost 2,000 years ago, Plutarch (c. ACE 46–120) warned that ‘the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up’ (1704, p. 429); but his simile has resonated through time and still serves to describe the transmissive educational processes that are assumed to make this remedial work possible. The child is constructed as a passive recipient of received codes of knowledge and ethical behaviour. Thus armed, he or she must shoulder the burden of Adam’s Curse – work – and struggle with patience and endurance towards salvation.

The famous opening lines of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–1778) educational treatise, Emile (1762), offer a very different perspective:

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man…. In the present state of things a man abandoned to himself in the midst of other men from birth would be the most disfigured of all…. All the social institutions in which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature in him and put nothing in its place.

(Rousseau, 1979, p. 37)

If, as Coveney claims, ‘the eighteenth century … turned from the Christian doctrine of original sin to the cult of original virtue in the child’ (1957, p. xiii), Emile had a major part to play in that paradigm shift. Coveney notes: ‘The vital genius of the book inspired the whole progressive school of educational thought in the nineteenth century … it is Rousseau’s Emile that dominates the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until Freud’ (p. 9).

As Coveney’s comments suggest, Rousseau’s words speak to a construction of childhood that is diametrically opposed to the Evangelical position represented by Hannah More. Its metanarrative, too, tells a story about salvation and is informed by Christianity; but the Christ it evokes is not the wrathful prophet who claimed to bring ‘not peace but a sword’ (Matthew 10:34); it is rather the teacher who, as Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), the founder in 1837 of what was to become the first kindergarten, put it: ‘says, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” Is not the meaning of this’, Froebel continues, ‘Forbid them not, for the life given them by their heavenly Father still lives in them in its original wholeness – its free unfolding is still possible with them’ (Froebel, 2005, p. 280).

The story this alternative metanarrative tells is of movement away from, not towards, paradise. It reaches back to the pre-Christian era, at least as far as the writings of Plato (429–347 BCE) where, first in the Meno and later in the Phaedo (e.g., Sedley and Long, 2010), Socrates expounds his concept of anamnesis: the idea that human beings have an immortal soul; that the soul exists in possession, from before birth, of ideal knowledge and that this knowledge is forgotten at the moment of entry into the terrestrial world. All subsequent striving for knowledge throughout life becomes therefore an attempt at recollection of what was once known.

Early and medieval western thinkers’ attempts to accommodate Platonic philosophy to Christian theology led to the neo-platonic idea that the soul journeys from God or heaven at the moment of birth. This in turn invites the suggestion that the younger the human being, the closer he or she must be to divine perfection. Far from being deficient, therefore, children, in what Richardson describes as a ‘transcendental’ (1994, p. 9) expression of this position, are regarded as a source of natural wisdom and holiness. The ‘transcendental’ vision of childhood is presented vividly in the mystical writings of Thomas Traherne (1636–1674), particularly in poems like Wonder and The Salutation (Traherne, 1903); but it achieves perhaps its most radical articulation in William Wordsworth’s (1770–1850) Intimations of Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

(Wordsworth, 1807/2012)

The pedagogical implications of this ‘organic’ (Richardson, 1994, p. 11) approach to childhood are significant. It asserts, in the words of Rousseau, that ‘Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking and feeling which are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours [the ways of adults] for theirs.’ It insists on taking childhood – and the activities of children – seriously: ‘Love childhood; promote its games, its pleasures, its amiable instinct.’ (1979, pp. 90, 79). It requires the power relationships between adult and child, teacher and student, to be reconfigured. To take children seriously, to acknowledge that they are different from and not merely imperfect imitations of adults, to ‘promote’ their ‘games’ – to adopt this ideological position implied a willingness to pay attention to something children appear to engage in the world over: (Roopnarine et al., 1994) play.

Play has an ancient heritage (Lowenfeld, 1935; Courtney, 1989). As Frost observes, ‘Records of children’s play date back to antiquity, even earlier than classical Athens and Greece’ (2010, p. 9). However, it is the discussion of the value of play presented in two particular educational treatises – one written at the dawn of the so-called ‘Romantic’ period (Richardson, 1994, pp. 3–4) and the other towards its close some sixty years later – which merit particular attention for the purposes of this book.

Not only did the influence of Rousseau lie behind ‘the whole progress of interest towards the child in the second half of the [eighteenth] century’ (Coveney, 1957, p. 5); his Emile helped to shape the course of drama teaching in Britain almost 200 years later (Hornbrook, 1989, p. 5). Froebel’s The Education of Man (1826) also deserves consideration by anyone interested in the heritage of drama teaching. While Rousseau is happy to ‘promote’ the ‘games’ of childhood, to suggest that learning can be constructed by tutor and student engaging in play together (1911, p. 9) and even to recruit ancient authorities like Plato and Seneca as witnesses to the pedagogical value of play (p. 71), he does so largely because a child at play is a child in harmony with nature: ‘Is there anything better worth seeing, anything more touching or delightful, than a pretty child, with merry, cheerful glance, easy contented manner, open smiling countenance, playing at the most important things, or working at the lightest amusements?’ (Rousseau, 1911, p. 126).

Froebel is charmed by the same image into using a very similar rhetorical question: ‘Is not the most beautiful expression of child-life at this time a playing child?’ (2005, p. 9). Whereas Rousseau, in one of his many contradictory statements, is not averse to using ‘child’s play’ – jeux d’enfant – in a dismissive context (1911, p. 9), Froebel endows play with a sacred quality infused by his deep Christian faith:

Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage, and, at the same time, typical of human life as a whole – of the inner hidden natural life in man and all things. It gives, therefore, joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world…. To the calm, keen vision of one who truly knows human nature, the spontaneous play of the child discloses the future inner life of the man.

(Froebel, 2005, p. 55)

Through the medium of play – including the use of ‘gifts’ (such as balls, cubes and building bricks) and ‘occupations’ (such as drawing, paper cutting and wood work) (Lawrence, 1952, pp. 238–239) – Froebel insisted that children ‘were to be placed at the centre of their world, there to act directly on their world’ (Walsh et al., 2001, p. 98). Rousseau would certainly have agreed that children should act directly on their world and that play is an essential element of this engagement (see below); but The Education of Man presents a far more sustained pedagogical engagement with play than does Emile. It is difficult to think of an earlier work in the western canon that takes play so seriously. Froebel attempts to identify and classify the different phases and characteristics of play, argues for the importance of playrooms and playgrounds and, in the latter sections of the book, describes a detailed curriculum informed by play and games (Froebel, 2005, pp. 303, 107, 236).

From a drama practitioner’s perspective, one of the most significant points on which Rousseau and Froebel are particularly united is their insistence that, from birth, children are actively engaged in the construction of meanings. A child’s play, Froebel argues, ‘is not trivial, it is highly serious and of deep significance’ (2005, p. 9). If adults cannot understand this, it is because they do not know how to interpret what they see. ‘If you attend carefully’, writes Rousseau, ‘you will be surprised to find …’ (1911, p. 9). And Froebel makes the point more forcefully:

We call it [a child’s ‘quiet, busy activity’] childish because we do not understand it, because we have not eyes to see, nor ears to hear, and, still less, feeling to feel with the child; we are dull, therefore the child’s life seems dull to us.

(2005, p. 73)

To those who know what to look for, the hum of a sleepy child is ‘the first germ of future growth in melody and song’ (p. 71); a baby putting an object in its mouth is seeking to ‘know all its properties, its innermost nature, that he may learn to understand himself in his attachment’ (p. 73); climbing a tree brings ‘the discovery of a new world’ (p. 103). ‘Let them run, jump, and shout to their heart’s content’, says Rousseau: ‘All their activities are instincts of the body for its growth in strength’ (1911, p. 9).

Equally important from a drama perspective is the emphasis that both Rousseau and Froebel place on the idea that children learn by engaging directly with the physical world through the medium of their senses. By apprehending ‘the near’, the mind reaches out to comprehend ‘the remote’ (Froebel, 2005, p. 66). The ‘objects of thought’ are ‘attained’ by means of ‘the objects of sense’ so that where once ‘we were concerned with what touches ourselves, with our immediate environment … all at once we are exploring the round world and leaping to the bounds of the universe’ (Rousseau, 1911, pp. 131, 130). The child’s manipulation of the environment through play leads to the comprehension of abstract ideas:

The ball that is rolling or has been rolled, the stone that has been thrown and falls, the water that was dammed and conducted into many branching ditches – all these have taught the child that the effect of a force, in its individual manifestations, is always in the direction of a line.

(Froebel, 2005, p. 76)

Although it is now considered to mark only the starting point of Froebel’s interest in the subject (Frost, 2010), The Education of Man contains many examples of how, through play, children can explore, for example, numeracy (counting games), rhythm and voice projection (singing games), concepts of self and not-self (hide and seek), tolerance and co-operation (team games) and higher order cognition (synthesis and comparison through the classification of found objects). Similarly with Rousseau: anticipating by over 150 years the American educator John Dewey’s (1859–1952) argument that students learn most effectively when presented with a ‘genuine situation of experience’ and a ‘genuine problem’ as ‘a stimulus to thought’ (2007, p. 9), Emile’s tutor regularly seeks opportunities to channel the child’s propensity for play into purposeful learning: ‘Children will always do anything that keeps them moving freely. There are countless ways of rousing their interest in measuring, perceiving, and estimating distance. There is a very tall cherry tree; how shall we gather the cherries?’ (Rousseau, 1911, p. 105).

A third aspect of Emile and The Education of Man, which is of particular significance in terms of its influence upon the ideologies of drama teaching, is Rousseau and Froebel’s configuration of the relationship between teacher and student. Rousseau’s work is notorious for the blatantly unequal treatment meted out to Emile’s supposed partner, ‘Sophie’, in terms of her education and life chances. It so incensed Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), the campaigner for women’s rights, that she famously declared in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792): ‘The most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart…. This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men: I extend it to women (1975, p. 9).

It would be easy to forget that, as Cunningham points out, an important component of Emile’s radicalism is that it attacks the tradition ‘established at the time of the Renaissance that fathers must take charge of child-rearing’ (1995, p. 9) and thus challenges the ‘foundational narrative’, which for centuries had interpreted the story of Adam and Eve as one in which ‘a woman mediated fatal knowledge of good and evil … plunged humanity into sin and thereby introduced death into the world (Bottigheimer, 1994, p. 51). ‘Tender, anxious mothers’, Rousseau declares at the beginning of Emile, ‘I appeal to you’ (1911, p. 9). Froebel concurs. ‘The child … cared for by the mother’, he writes, ‘is well-conditioned in a human, earthly, and heavenly point of view’ (2005, p. 9).

By proposing a model of teaching and learning predicated on the relationship between loving parents and their child, both Rousseau and Froebel replace the trans-missive didacticism of those who, supposing ‘the child to be empty, wish to inoculate him with life’ (Froebel, 2005, p. 70) with the concept of the tutor as someone whose task is ‘to guide’ the child ‘from birth to manhood [sic]’ (Rousseau, 1911, p. 18). This is achieved by creating practical situations in which purposeful learning might take place and then by drawing understanding from the child through the careful application of what today’s educationalists might describe as Socratic questioning techniques. ‘If we do not fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 Influences and issues
• PART 2 Applying theory to practice
• References
• Index