Trivium 21c

Preparing young people for the future with lessons from the past

Martin Robinson

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781781350546
• eBook ISBN: 9781781350850
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

From Ancient Greece to the present day, Trivium 21c explores whether a contemporary trivium (Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric) can unite progressive and traditionalist institutions, teachers, politicians and parents in the common pursuit of providing a great education for our children in the 21st century.

Education policy and practice is a battleground. Traditionalists argue for the teaching of a privileged type of hard knowledge and deride soft skills. Progressives deride learning about great works of the past preferring '21c skills' (21st century skills) such as creativity and critical thinking.

Whilst looking for a school for his daughter, the author became frustrated by schools' inability to value knowledge, as well as creativity, foster discipline alongside free-thinking, and value citizenship alongside independent learning. Drawing from his work as a creative teacher, Robinson finds inspiration in the Arts and the need to nurture learners with the ability to deal with the uncertainties of our age.

Named one of Book Authority's best education books of all time.

Chapter 1

A Trivial Pursuit?

Ringmaster: (with a monkey dressed up as a man) Roll up, ladies and gentlemen. Examine this beast as God created him. Nothing to him, you see? Then observe the effect of art: he walks upright and has a coat and trousers …

Georg Büchner, Woyzeck

Drama Teacher

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. With that hoary old adage ringing in my ears, at the age of 29, I entered the teaching profession. Good grief. What was I, an educational failure, doing here in the very profession that had managed not to educate me all those years ago? But here I was, employed as a teacher of drama and English. I quickly went about ensuring I got my classroom survival sorted out: not smiling before Christmas and negotiating that bizarre relationship between one adult and 30 teenagers, based on ‘Somehow, together, we have to get through this’ and, well, generally, we did.

One thing became clear to me: my main subject, drama, was not really a subject in the usual sense of the word. Somewhere along the line it had become ‘educational drama’, a methodology for exploring sociological issues. On my PGCE I had been introduced to schemes of work covering homelessness, drugs, suicide, and all sorts of other explorations of the seamy side of life. This was drama as social commentary. I was introduced to ‘freeze-frames’ – where social relations between the powerful and powerless could be explored, and ‘conscience alleys’ – where two lines of children would watch the protagonist walk between them and they would call out what was in the protagonist’s head (usually some utterance about misery due to homelessness, drugs, or suicide). It was deadly and strangely uncreative, and I struggled with this approach during the early stages of my teaching.

In the GCSE drama exam children had to work in groups to prepare, through improvisation, a devised piece of original theatre. I went to see what work schools were producing for these final exams. There would be many chairs, with kids sitting on them, talking of misery. Every now and then a character would die, usually at the denouement, and there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Drama education seemed to be firmly stuck in the black-and-white social realism of the 1960s. Paradoxically, it was also extraordinarily unrealistic and it did not move me; its inauthenticity shone through. I decided then and there that this was not what I wanted to be teaching.

Creative Liberation

My first move was to ‘ban’ chairs – a ridiculous act, but a liberating one. This was the time when physical theatre was all the rage and I wanted to embrace that energy. Instead of issues, I wanted physicality; instead of talking, I wanted activity. Theatre is a physical subject; I summed this up with the phrase ‘Movement First’. Our drama lessons were physical because acting is the art of doing. In discipline terms, this became problematic so I introduced stillness too: the act of ‘centring’ where the actor stands still with their eyes closed for a period of time. This then became the beginning of lessons. I would wait until every participant had centred before the lesson would start. We were all actors, so we all had to ‘act’. I got rid of unnecessary homework: writing about misery and colouring in pictures of misery, and replaced it with a notebook in which kids would be expected to collect fragments of writing, experiences, dreams, stories, poetry, lyrics, history, theory. You name it, they got it.

Method in the Madness

This was to be the beginning of the work, ‘Fragments of Movement and Fragments of Text(s)’. We would look at what we had to make sense of – the symbols, the text, the verbal and the physical ideas that seemingly had little connection – and we would try to ‘sense’ what connections there were. Both the students and I would search for links, no matter how abstract. We were alchemists. There might be connections of sound, physicality, coincidence, or juxtaposition, but mostly we would look for an emotional connection, for the sublime, the beautiful, the surprising, or the funny. We would delay knowing what the final piece would look like for as long as possible; we were looking for ‘what the play is trying to say’, in the same way a sculptor chips away at a piece of marble before determining its final form. This then was summed up with the word ‘Emotion’. We would then use the idea of connecting up ‘framed moments’ and collect as many moments as we could. We would then perform them slowly, quickly, forwards, backwards, in differing orders, at the same time, or separately. We would then interrogate the piece that was beginning to emerge, looking for logical connections or arguments.

Once we got to know our pieces, then characters and a theme (or themes) would emerge. This we summed up with the word ‘Intellect’ – this was our thinking about the piece. We would research thoroughly, finding out about what we had and then finally we would pull the process together by honing it as a performance for the practical exam. ‘What is your play trying to say?’ became, ‘If in doubt, spell it out!’ We would then refine our pieces for performance. This then became the process: Movement, Emotion, Intellect, and Performance.

Each lesson began to take this basic shape, and then this shape was practised over increasingly longer periods of time, over days and weeks. But the mantra was there at its core – Movement, Emotion, Intellect, Performance – and the material transformed from fragments to connections. This became the clothesline on which the lessons were hung. We used this ritual, we used it repetitively, and the results were extraordinary. Firstly, literally, the results were extraordinary, but beyond that, and far more importantly, the exam pieces were at their best ‘great art’, as precise and as moving or funny, as Pina Bausch, Théâtre de la Complicité, or Peter Brook.

Tradition

It was at this time that I launched an A level course in theatre studies, which became an altogether more difficult step for me. I had developed a ritual, a way of working, that was successful for devised theatre, but would it work for an A level? Indeed, the A level included a devised theatre piece, but it also included scripted work. Most challenging of all, there were two three-hour written papers on play texts, theatre practitioners, an ‘unseen’ piece, and a review of a play.

The results weren’t great for the first cohort. I had to do something else, so I went about echoing the devising mantra: we would explore, research, and learn about the texts and practitioners; we would learn the language of the discipline; we would ‘give Caliban his language’ through the ‘semiotics of theatre’. I had absorbed linguistics – how we understand theatre – and developed a shared language to ensure we knew what we were talking about. I then fed this language into the GCSE. Gone were freeze-frames and the concepts of the drama GCSE bubble; instead, in came terms from the rich history and traditions of theatre. We would go and see lots of theatre, from a wide range of performers, practitioners, and authors. I refused to take students to see things they would ‘normally’ see, so we never went to Blood Brothers; instead, we went to see Beckett, Berkoff, and Bausch. We saw Greek tragedy and comedy, Brecht, Complicité, and a writer and a play I fell in love with, Büchner’s Woyzeck. Here was a moment of inspiration; this play had so much to offer it would become central to my teaching.

Woyzeck: Where Three Paths Collide

As part of the A level course we were expected to teach one practitioner. In those days there were no exams in Year 12 so I took the chance, and we began the course by teaching three practitioners under the general heading of ‘Truth’. Each practitioner wanted to communicate their truth in very different ways: Stanislavski in a naturalistic way; Brecht wanted to communicate social truth; and Artaud – well, Artaud wanted a metaphysical truth based on the idea of the energy of life, necessity, or what he called ‘cruelty’, that we are most ‘alive’ when we realize our own mortality. Stanislavski helped hone the language of drama and acting; Artaud took my work to another level, the discipline of the art, of the physical, which became even more important; and Brecht helped refine the argument, the dialectic, not only in theatre but in our understanding of how to teach, learn, and challenge by seeing the world in a different ‘scientific’ way.

We looked at the works of Freud, Marx, Socrates, Saussure, Darwin, Gramsci, Breton, Chaplin, and Büchner to supplement our understanding of these approaches to truth. Artaud and Brecht both cited the play Woyzeck as being of great importance, and the implicit naturalism in the play also encompassed the ideas of Stanislavski. Therefore, in Woyzeck, the three great practitioners, with their conflicting ideas, had a place where they could ‘agree’ to congregate, to commune, to argue, and it is this that gave even greater significance to this play and to our studies.

Socratic Method

Other influences came in from the texts we were studying: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Dürrenmatt. These were weighty subjects; this was not dumbing down. The approach I took was: we would find our language, research our texts, look for ways in, and understanding(s). We would then take an unashamedly Socratic approach: questioning, arguing, and prompting. The kids would do the same with each other, which made our sessions lively and challenging. Finally, we would look at how to take our approach into the written exam, and also the viva and notebook which, at the time, were integral parts of the assessment. The exam was a celebration of our exploration; not a ‘jumping through hoops’ approach to getting grades. We had found a way to bridge the divide between practical and theory. That year I was told the A level results were among the best in the country, as were the GCSE results.

Creativity

This approach became the basis for my involvement with education in a wider sense. Professor Ken Robinson was working on bringing ‘creativity’ into the curriculum, and I was invited along to the launch of his report. From this I was asked to become part of a delegation to Chicago to see how a form of ‘creative partnership’ was being used to educate ‘downtown’ kids in schools. This was a very odd experience: it was great to be in Chicago, but odd to see what comprised ‘creative’ teaching. Four actors were teaching science to a very unimpressed group of kids. The lesson was about energy transference and this involved actors pushing kids over (not all the way, Health and Safety …) and, I kid you not, that was it. There was no need for this to be done by ‘actors’, but I’m sure it ticked a box somewhere: yes, we were creative in science because we got actors in. This was a warning: creativity is neither the sole preserve of artists nor are all artists necessarily creative.

I began to take workshops in other schools and countries in what I was now calling ‘creative drama teaching’. My work was controversial, especially in those drama departments where many of the teachers continued with their still images and social work themes. In 2004, The Guardian described one of my sessions thus:

‘This work is in the tradition of the kind of fragmented or cut-up expression associated with the work of William Burroughs,’ he [me] explained as he armed delegates with ‘statement cards’ and invited them to find the person with the words that complemented theirs. Of course, there were no obvious pairings and we were off on an afternoon of free association and creativity that would have us dancing, moving, chanting.

Robinson explained how his preferred working practice was to encourage students to remain as intuitive as they could for as long as possible. He described how his students have become used to researching and bringing ideas, actions, music and other stimuli to their group’s work while at the same time stalling the desire to define the work in hand for as long as possible. ‘In the end, there always comes a time when we have to pause and say, what have we got here? And it is then that they can move on to create something formally for presentation and assessment.’

It was clearly a challenging session for some especially since, as Robinson explained, it relies entirely on the co-operation and commitment of his students – who are required to take wholehearted responsibility for their work. ‘It is a sure-fire way,’ he emphasised, ‘of avoiding clichéd drama work. Of course, preparing the ground so that students are receptive and not alienated by such an approach takes time. But it is worth it – you don’t get pastiche EastEnders after several weeks of this kind of exploration.’ (Monahan, 2004)

Advanced Skills Teacher

I was now an advanced skills teacher and being asked to use my skills to work with not just drama teachers but with teachers in a wide range of disciplines. The stated aim was: how can we get our staff and the lessons to be more creative? I had visitors to my lessons from Japan, the Czech Republic, and a number of organizations looking for hints about how to be creative. Looking back, I’m not sure that the creativity in lessons movement in the UK was after quite the same thing as I was producing. I think many in the educational establishment basically wanted their teachers to be more entertaining because they thought that teachers were boring the kids. However, my view is that creativity is a disciplined process and can be quite contemplative and even boring at times. This difference in position meant that I was sometimes regarded as an outsider even in the creative education movement. No matter, I carried on developing my approach.

Independent Learners

A visitor from the Good Schools Guide sat in on my lesson, a Year 11 class preparing for their GCSE. We chatted and watched as the 28 kids came in, centred, got into their groups, and followed the ritual of Movement, Emotion, Intellect, Performance. I said nothing, I didn’t even acknowledge the kids; they were working, I was chatting. I learned a lesson that day: the mantra had allowed the kids to be truly independent, not at first, no, but by the end, when they needed to be, they were. I had never done this before and, though I didn’t show it, I was just as amazed as the visitor from the Good Schools Guide who watched that lesson. We stayed there for two hours before I uttered anything, which was a ‘well done’ to the class. When the Guide came out later that year there was a special mention for the ‘excellent’ drama lessons. University professors came to watch my classes; they too mentioned how unusual it was that the methodology I had stumbled across had, in the end, enabled me to step away and for the students to work, successfully, in a manner that showed their ability to be truly independent.

Constraints Can Lead to Creative Freedom

At this time, various gurus were all the rage in education land – and they were talking about how to be creative. These included the aforementioned Ken Robinson and the Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking of Edward de Bono, amongst others. Some teachers interpreted creativity as an example of 1960s-influenced progressivism and the idea of free thinking, which was all about allowing freedom and the ethos of allowing a thous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Foreword by Ian Gilbert
• Contents
• Introduction: An Unexamined Life is not Worth Living
• Chapter 1: A Trivial Pursuit?
• Chapter 2: The Trivium
• Chapter 3: Our Dramatis Personae: The Grammarians, the Dialecticians, and the Rhetoricians
• Chapter 4: The Liberal Arts: A New Curriculum is Born
• Chapter 5: The Rise of the Rational: The Fall of the Trivial?
• Chapter 6: Trivium: A Clash of Cultures
• Chapter 7: A Crack in Everything: The Imperfect Arts
• Chapter 8: Grammar: From Rules of Language to Cultural Capital
• Chapter 9: Dialectic: Logic, Dialectic, and Logos
• Chapter 10: Rhetoric: Communication, Citizenship, and Community
• Chapter 11: We Have a Montaigne to Climb
• Chapter 12: The Professors
• Chapter 13: The Grammarians vs the Dialecticians
• Chapter 14: The Contemporary Trivium
• PostScript:: A Bit of Trivia
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography and Reading List
• Index
• Copyright
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