Teaching and Learning through Dramaturgy

Education as an Artful Engagement

Anna-Lena Østern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367549077
• eBook ISBN: 9781000358568
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

The aim of this book is to contribute a dramaturgical perspective to education. The authors write from a dramaturgical perspective about the planning of teaching, leadership in the classroom, the teacher-body, the teacher's oral skills and ethics, communication, and about the spaces in which teaching takes place. The book is written with the pre-understanding that the ways in which art creates knowledge need to be illuminated and articulated more clearly in educational thinking, thereby enhancing artful engagement in education. Dramaturgical perspectives are presented as such a way – a form of knowledge that the artform of drama/theatre can contribute to teaching and learning in general.

Through examples and analyses of empirical material, as well as through theoretical perspectives, the authors show chapter by chapter how dramaturgy and a dramaturgically inspired language and concepts create more possibilities of choice for teachers in planning and carrying out their teaching. Teaching and Learning through Dramaturgy brings to the forefront what will be enabled in teaching and planning of teaching, by making use of a dramaturgically inspired language and action, what in principle is possible in every subject.

1

Dramaturgical action repertoire

Openings, breaches, encounters

Anna-Lena Østern

What does something in an educational context mean?

Our teacher education workplace has been an old farm with a courtyard. When in the morning we, the teacher educators, have driven up a stylish birch alley, parked the car in a place with a beautiful view of a fjord and walked into the courtyard, we have felt affinity with our workplace, with colleagues and students. We can turn around and look up to the fields with forests, hills, mountains and water. We can walk into the yard with a yellow wooden house, where our offices are. We have seen the little store house, the big store house and ‘låven’ (the barn), which is a modern teaching building. There is also a research centre, in the style of a plant bio centre which is also affiliated with the teacher education. This place is a good place for teacher education – a place with atmosphere and character, we think.

Throughout the years we have worked here, we have had access to an extended educational space, through this location. Does the space and environment mean anything to the quality of the teaching? This question has been actualized, because this teacher education unit has now moved twice to more urban spaces on its campus. Both spaces have had a different kind of aesthetic expression, consisting of concrete, open office solutions and a lot of windows.

This kind of change is something many teachers know about. One seldom hears sadness and protest over such a change, but it makes those who are affected by it aware that space and surroundings are of great importance for the teaching that is being carried out and the educational process that is taking place.

The voices of the pupils and the students, and relational dramaturgy

A classroom can be considered a field where three different forms of culture meet and break against each other: a subject-oriented, specialized cultural form, the pupils’ cultural forms (which are not specialized by subject) and a ‘schoolish’ cultural form. The ‘schoolish’ cultural form consists of the institution’s frames and working forms. The ‘schoolish’ cultural form for reproducing and maintaining a distinction between the teaching content and the methods used can be criticized. In other words, it is not very flexible. In describing a dramaturgical perspective on pedagogy, as well as on teaching and learning, the authors of this book wish to open up forms of understanding in which the three cultural forms can be opened, encountered and broken against each other.

In the book we write from a dramaturgical perspective about planning teaching, classroom leadership, the teacher’s body, professional oral skills, communication, about the teaching space, and what views of knowledge different dramaturgies entail. We have written the book based on our foreknowledge that art’s way of creating knowledge must be clarified and appreciated more clearly in pedagogical content and subject content. We see dramaturgical perspectives as a form of knowledge where the art subject theatre can contribute to pedagogy and subject content knowledge in general. Through examples and analysis of empirical data, as well as through theoretical perspectives, in the following chapters the authors show how dramaturgy and dramaturgically inspired language and concepts create a wider range of choices that teachers can use when planning and carrying out teaching. The book brings to the forefront what happens to teaching and its planning, in principle in all subjects, by applying dramaturgically inspired language and action.

In teaching moments, teachers must make many choices. The teacher’s action repertoire is developed when more options are available. This is where access to a language, or in other words a mindset and awareness, becomes crucial for a broader horizon of possibility. In this book, the authors attempt to articulate in words and thereby communicate circumstances that may otherwise only be perceived more or less as tacit knowledge.

The dramaturgy metaphor used in composition of teaching and learning sequences

The dramaturgy metaphor has long been attractive in several areas such as sociology, journalism, organizational development and leadership. Erving Goffman (1959) is known for having presented a sociological concept of ‘role’ through his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. ‘Staging’ is a term that is used both about young people trying out their identity and about teachers planning their teaching. In this book we show some of the opportunities that open up if we use the concept of ‘role’ as it appears in dramaturgical tradition and understanding. We thus bring back our understanding of the word role from sociology to dramaturgy. If at all, dramaturgy is mentioned in connection with teaching just in passing, and often in connection with an aesthetic approach.

Magda Romanska (2014) notes that dramaturgy has turned into a worldwide field of interest in the functions of art. This concerns not only theatre, performance, puppetry, dance, music and opera, but also mass media such as film, television series and digital games. Janek Szatkowski comments on this:

This is by no means a coincidence, but just another example of how the 21^st century will construe one world society in co-emergence with the new media matrix born by the digital alphabet (1/0) and computers’ increased ability to handle everything representable with unprecedented speed, memory, capacity, connectivity, and interactivity on the World Wide Web.

(Szatkowski, 2019, p. 6)

Szatkowski defines dramaturgy as ‘production of and reflection on communication of communication to society about society’ (ibid., p. 6). He thus defines a theory of dramaturgy as a wide-ranging concept. Dramaturgy is used in various contexts beyond the world of fictive storytelling. Dramaturgy is in the news, in music videos and in advertising. We also use dramaturgy in planning of school lessons and lectures:

Life itself also has its dramaturgy, by the way not so different from the Aristotelian model for a linear drama, with beginning, middle and end, as well as turning points along the way. And because we have an intuitive sense of rhythm, pulse and structure, it is possible to communicate through dramaturgy.

(Engelstad, 2000, p. 29f, author’s translation)

I will briefly mention some educators who have pointed out the possibilities of dramaturgy in teaching and learning. Aesthetic quality in teaching through concepts such as balance, continuity, interaction, feeling and perception is mentioned in many texts. Tom Barone, Elliot Eisner and Patricia Leavy have written extensively about the importance of arts education (e.g. Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2018). Of special interest for the perspectives in this book are Eisner’s concepts of artistry and artistically crafted work (Eisner, 1995). He elaborates three features of works of art. The first one is:

Artistically crafted works of art often make aspects of the world vivid and generate a sense of empathy. … [They] create the kind of ‘wide-awakeness’ that Maxine Greene talks about. … artistically crafted work also has the capacity to put us in the shoes of those we do not know and thus foster empathic understanding.

(Eisner, 1995, pp. 2–3)

A second feature is that artistically crafted works of art have a capacity to generate awareness of particularity: ‘What artistically crafted work does is to create a paradox of revealing what is universal by examining what is particular’ (ibid., p. 3). Finally, he mentions the process of being artistically engaged: ‘I believe this process rests upon the ability to negotiate the tension between control and surrender’ (ibid., p. 5). He brings these features further into artistically crafted research:

The conclusion I draw from this brief analysis is that artistically crafted research can inform practicing educators and scholars in ways that are both powerful and illuminating. Hence artistically crafted research helps us understand much of what is much important about schools.

(Eisner, 1995, p. 5)

He concludes that a teacher’s work will benefit from artistry in teaching. This focus on artistic aspects is part of a performative movement in education, where research finds new ways of inquiring and presenting production of knowledge (Gergen & Gergen, 2018).

Tor-Helge Allern (2010) writes about dramaturgy and how it can be used to understand and create the basis for different teaching and learning processes. He further writes that dramaturgy expresses a view of knowledge. Thus, different dramaturgies can be linked to different perspectives on knowledge processes (Allern, 2003).

The work on curriculum is seen here as a dramatic work, which is designed, staged and received by an audience. To understand how the drama works, one must know the role of the author, actor, producer, staging and audience. One also needs to know how the interaction between all these agents works, to evoke the dramatic form in teaching, as through a theatre experience.

Pedagogical reduction?

Concepts such as theatre, dramaturgy and aesthetics are thus central to the teacher educators and researchers mentioned above. They point to the possibilities that these concepts allow for the development of thinking about teaching and learning. I am not aware of any educator who has criticized such thinking, but criticism of using concepts of art form to revitalize pedagogy is, of course, possible. Such criticism might fall under the term ‘pedagogical reduction’, implying a belief that what the world of theatre has to offer in terms of pedagogy can be reduced to a few simple steps. In this book, however, the basic idea is that pedagogy is an aesthetic subject, and that art’s way of creating knowledge is something that also belongs to pedagogy; however, this artistic dimension is not yet a fully developed knowledge field.

By presenting teaching planning and classroom leadership in a dramaturgical perspective, as comprising the curriculum, the authors of this book select some aspects of dramaturgical thinking and use them as lenses to understand and develop, and indeed, help revitalize teaching and classroom leadership. From the world of theatre, the authors take the notion of ‘audience awareness’ and the theatre’s understanding of the crucial necessity of having something important to say – and choosing the right means to say it.

An aesthetic dimension as a navigation tool in a complex information society

The challenge for schools in a (late) modern and increasingly complex information society is formulated in a question by Søren Langager (2010, p. 21, author’s translation) in the following way: ‘what is the learning process that opens up the experience of judging, interpreting and action in situations where the answers are not given in advance, and where the routine is not enough?’

He suggests that aesthetics comes in as a professional dimension, by relying on interpretations and judgments with no unambiguous answers. Young people today must be something special, positively different from others. Therefore, Langager believes that the aesthetic has a task in strengthening the individual pupil’s subjective, expressive and unique expression (Langager, 2010, p. 23). Niels Lehmann (2013) suggests that one can reformulate an aesthetic that captures some of the significance of children’s and youth culture, because aesthetic experiences offer otherness experiences, which are therefore different from what they are used to. An otherness experience can contribute to opening one’s eyes to the architecture of the local community, or to discover nature in new and different ways. Through this book, the authors show how the aesthetic dimension can be radically and fundamentally reconceptualized through dramaturgical thinking into new subjects and professions, thus serving as a navigational tool for both teachers and students.

Chapters in the book

In Chapter 2, ‘Emergence of a teacher-dramaturg’, the author takes the reader on a journey into the world of the dramaturg, a journey that outlines contours of what responsible and good teaching planning can be. In planning teaching with dramaturgical qualities, the teacher makes the usual unusual. The dramaturg Jane Rasch describes a poor play as one that is predictable, without conflict, with the dramatic action in limp and incoherent sequences, with no clear protagonist, no motives, no clear intentions or emotions. This is what today’s teenage student would describe as ‘boring’, a word that students readily use about school education. Predictability is needed in human relationships, even in the relationship of teacher-stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Imaginative leaps and a new language for teachers and artists by John O’Toole
• List of contributors
• 1. Dramaturgical action repertoire: Openings, breaches, encounters
• 2. Emergence of a teacher-dramaturg
• 3. Dramaturgical strategies
• 4. Addressing contemporary educational contexts
• 5. The teacher-body as a dramaturgical axis for composing a lesson
• 6. Artistic precision in professional oral skills: Ethics and dramaturgy
• 7. Dramaturgical montage in a narrative on outdoor education
• 8. The teacher as an atmosphere-creating scenographer of the teaching space
• 9. Negotiating nomadic dramaturgies
• 10. Dramaturgy and values of the professional teacher facing a new normal
• Index