Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education

Theatre, Literature and Philosophy

Matthew DeCoursey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350170506
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350026735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

If it is a good thing to use drama for education, there must be something specific about drama that makes it good for the purpose. It has power of some kind: it makes things meaningful that would otherwise be meaningless, or things memorable that would otherwise be forgettable. Or perhaps it enables independent thought in an area that would otherwise become mere rote learning. Many practitioners believe that drama has the power to develop learner autonomy, or even to give learners power over their lives. In the last twenty years, a widespread view has developed that this 'something' that creates the benefit of drama is 'aesthetics'. There are many views of aesthetics, but what unites them is the special significance that art has for our lives. This book is about the relation between aesthetics and education in the use of drama. Within it, philosophy appears as the essential connecting discipline between the practice of arts-based education and our advancing knowledge of the interrelations of cognition, emotion, and embodiment.

Matthew DeCoursey argues that the power of dramatic art is to be found in its bodily, emotional nature. Drawing on recent work in the aesthetics of theatre, he shows that much of the power of theatre can be attributed to a specific range of ideas and techniques, notably including double meaning-making, aesthetic focus and dramatic tension. Finally, the author relates different forms of drama education to different educational results, holding that the conventional improvised forms are neither superior nor inferior to scripted theatre, but merely serve different purposes. Among those educational results discussed are the emancipation sought both by Rancière and by many practitioners of applied theatre, but also curricular areas, including language education.

1

Aesthetics, Ethics and Education: Dewey and Rancière

Even before Dewey became influential in the field, drama education had points in common with progressive education. In the early years of the twentieth century, Harriet Finlay-Johnson argued that drama education could make children ‘self-reliant, mainly self-taught and self-developing’ (Bolton 1999, 11). Since the 1930s, a large part of what we call ‘drama education’ has found its place under the umbrella of Deweyan progressive education. Dewey’s emphasis on experience and reflection upon it, his critique of merely fact-based learning and the high value he placed on the arts have all been congenial to drama educators. His work on aesthetics has not been broadly influential, however, and recent years have seen a new Deweyism, emphasizing his aesthetics and finding a basis in neuroscience. Mark Johnson and Jenefer Robinson find their place in that context. As we saw in the Introduction, recent years have seen the rise of Jacques Rancière as an important philosophical influence in drama education (Franks et al. 2014; Conroy 2015). This chapter will first examine the relation of Dewey’s ideas to those of Rancière. They have many points of contact, but important differences must be clarified. The last part of this chapter will deal with the new Deweyism, or ‘neuropragmatism’, briefly looking forward to the function of this view of embodiment in the next chapter.

Both Rancière and Dewey seek to define how the artwork can affect practical life. We shall see how the two are compatible, and I will make efforts to resolve contradictions. Rancière brings a new focus, a sense of purpose, to drama education in a way that has to do with the growth of possibility for all in a democratic society. This chapter will argue, however, that his view of aesthetics is incomplete and needs to be supplemented from the tradition of embodied cognition.

Dewey and Rancière are of very different generations and, partly in consequence, come from very different philosophical backgrounds. Dewey died at an advanced age in 1952; Rancière was then twelve years old, and is still alive as I write in 2018. Dewey was one of the leading lights of American pragmatism, along with William James and Charles Sanders Peirce; Rancière comes from a background of Continental philosophy and incorporates elements of post-structuralism. For all that, they share certain elements of philosophical background. Both have close and critical relationships with Plato. Though no one would think of Dewey as a Continental philosopher, he has something in common with them from having been a Hegelian in his youth. Though Rancière is of a much younger generation, it remains that his studies of philosophy have mostly to do with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as his period in the study of literature is early nineteenth century. More than any other major current philosopher, Rancière is immersed in the thought of German Idealism, not only in the thought of Hegel but also in the thought of Schlegel and Schelling. Though no one would say that Rancière is a pragmatist, he does subscribe to a core pragmatist principle: the ideas he finds important are those that make action possible.

The two philosophers also share some central concerns: democracy, education and the pragmatic impact of aesthetics on human perception and action. The thrust of their views on these matters has to do with the growth of possibility for the learner, conceived in different ways. In each area, they have some common principles that appeal to drama educators, which we shall see.

Democracy

In a striking parallel, Rancière and Dewey both cite the elitism of Plato’s Republic and come up with similar critiques of it. Dewey says the Republic is ‘the most perfect picture of the aristocratic ideal which history affords’. But ‘according to Plato (and the aristocratic ideal everywhere), the multitude is incapable of forming such an ideal and attempting to reach it’ (EW 1: 241). Dewey saw this lack of inclusiveness as a fault. Rancière, in his turn, denounces Plato’s assertion that an artisan must take no place in political life because he is too busy doing his job: he says that according to Plato, ‘[t]‌here simply are bodies that cannot accommodate philosophy – bodies marked and stigmatized by the servitude of the work for which they have been made’ (Rancière [1983] 2004, 32, emphasis in text).

Nor does either of the two believe that democracy is satisfactorily embodied in the institutions of Western liberal countries but think that democracy must find its place in social relations. A key book for understanding the thought of Rancière for this, as for many issues, is The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Le Maître ignorant [1987] 1991), and this is the most influential of his books in drama education, or education more generally. Its relevance to democracy lies in its rejection of hierarchy. In this book, he sets out the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French university lecturer who found himself working in Leuven, Belgium, in 1818. His lectures in French achieved a certain popularity, and some Flemish students, knowing no French, wanted to come. Having no time to teach them French, he asked them to buy a bilingual edition of a novel with the original French and a Flemish translation on facing pages. He told them to learn French from it and write their thoughts about the novel, in French, six months hence. By the accounts of Jacotot and his allies, this was a stunning success, and he was greatly surprised by the good quality of their essays in French. Jacotot went on to formulate a philosophy of education that placed all emphasis on the independent ability of the learner to learn. He suggested that even illiterate parents could teach their children to read if they went about it intelligently, because each person is capable of learning well if the problem is stated appropriately.

Rancière believes that Jacotot got one thing very right: he did not explain anything to his students, depending instead on their native intelligence to solve the problems of learning. He suggests that teachers betray their students when they explain:

Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. ([1987] 1991, 6)

Rancière’s assertion is that the teacher, in explaining, creates a specious need for his or her services. He sees such a significance in most conventional teaching, saying that conventional education, instead of educating learners, makes them stupid and easy to manage. That is why he speaks of ‘stultification’ (abrutification). The student, by being primarily the recipient of explanation, becomes, not temporarily but permanently, a subordinate. That subordination is part of a larger structure of subordination in the whole society. The student conventionally should not step outside of his or her place as the recipient of education just as the labourer in Plato’s Republic should not step outside of his or her place as a labourer to become involved in politics. For Rancière, it is a first principle of democracy that everyone must be treated with radical equality. For him, this involves the presupposition that everyone is equally intelligent and can learn independently. He is very clear that this is not an empirical observation, but a necessary presupposition for valid and ethical education (Rancière [1987] 1991, 46). Carl Anders Säfström (2012) points out that Dewey is parallel to Rancière insofar as he redefines intelligence so as to resist the inherent elitism of believing that some are born more intelligent than others (p. 419).

Rancière’s radical view of explanation finds a parallel in the formative practice of Dorothy Heathcote in drama education. In the television film Three Looms Waiting (1971), Heathcote is playing the part of a Nazi officer preparing an infiltrator (really an English schoolboy) to gain the confidence of British prisoners of war. The Nazi officer wants to know about the firmness of the infiltrator’s backstory. Where are you from in England? London. What part of London? Coventry. Though Coventry is a separate city, and she knows this, she just says, ‘Good place.’ The BBC interviewer asks in a follow-up interview why she hadn’t corrected him. She replies,

Because I don’t give a damn where Coventry is. At that point, he felt right. He was working on an intensity of feeling, not on facts at all. I was saying, ‘You’ve got to convince the Englishmen’, and he said, ‘Yes!’ And that’s the level we’re working at. If he’d said the Man in the Moon, as long as he believed it at that point, it’s OK by me. After all, what’s a fact? I just happened to know Coventry isn’t in London. But there’s loads of things I could have said equally stupid if you’re looking at this kind of stupidity. (1971, 9:15–9:44)

Heathcote’s position is not identical with Rancière’s. She does not state in principle that one should never explain. What they have in common is a determined respect for the learner, strong enough so that there is a refusal, or at least a strong reluctance, to explain what is true and what is not.

Rancière’s concern with equality and his rejection of explanation were consistent with his view that education should be emancipation. Rancière writes, ‘We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations – the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will – emancipation’ ([1987] 1991, 13). A structural change is necessary both in the teacher and in the learner. In order to be an emancipated learner, one must first believe in one’s own abilities. The ‘emancipated master’, on the other hand, is one who refuses to subordinate the learner, trusting instead the learner’s own abilities: ‘To emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one need only be, emancipated oneself, that is to say, conscious of the true power of the human mind’ (Rancière [1987] 1991, 15). This last formulation appears quite consistent with Heathcote’s portrayal of her own role as a teacher in the quotation above. Her conception of the power of the human mind differs from Rancière’s, as she stresses not intelligence as much as intensity of feeling and belief. We will have more on this difference later.

Dewey, while less radical than Rancière, has a certain number of principles in common with him. He also wants the individual teacher to be emancipated:

Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter. (Democracy and Education (1916) MW 9: 116)

Similarly, he fears that ‘the work of both teacher and pupil’ may become ‘mechanical and slavish’ (p. 117).

Like Rancière, he refuses to identify democracy with elections, legislatures and so on. He sees democracy as an attitude to others in society, to a way of life. He writes,

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. (MW 9: 93)

‘Conjoint communicated experience’ presupposes equality in similar terms to Rancière.

Like Rancière, Dewey is a critic of traditional education. Both see it as seeking to pass inert ‘knowledge’ to students:

The accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction recitation and examination is made too much of. (MW 9: 168)

Nel Noddings summarizes Dewey’s position:

Teachers in democratic societies should not try to pass knowledge – like bricks – to their students; they must engage them in patterns of communication that will help them to develop democratic habits of association as well as the requisite habits of mind. (2010, 279)

Dewey thinks that traditional education is a problem on much the same terms as Rancière, and to some extent they agree on what to do. Like Rancière, Dewey believes that teachers should set problems for students and they should make a project of solving them (MW 9: 159–70). The ‘project’ aspect of Dewey’s philosophy might well agree with Rancière, because the structure of a project resembles the structure of Rancière’s ideal education. Rancière writes approvingly about Jacotot:

His mastery lay in the command that had enclosed the students in a closed circle from which they alone could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book. Thus the two functions that link the practice of the master explicator, that of the savant and that of the master had been dissociated. The two faculties in play during the act of learning, namely intelligence and will, had therefore been separated, liberated from each other. A pure relationship of will to will had been established between master and student: a relationship wherein the master’s domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and that of the book – the intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between master and student. ([1987] 1991, 13)

Here is one reason why drama educators might find the two philosophies compatible with their practice. When we do drama activities, it is very much the usual thing for the teacher to design a task and ask students to carry it out, using their own resources. The common emphasis in drama education on the independent use of students’ own abilities is equally compatible with both philosophers. The two philosophies might well produce a difference of practice in the classroom: a Deweyan drama teacher would feel freer to make suggestions, or even to teach aesthetic principles before the students do their project; a Rancièrian drama teacher might well feel constrained just to design the task and let the students do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Aesthetics, Ethics and Education: Dewey and Rancière
• 2 Aesthetic Experience and Learning
• 3 Drama Education and Emancipation
• 4 Drama Education and Curricular Learning
• 5 The Aesthetic as Intrinsic Motivation
• 6 Double Noesis, Metaxis and Learning
• 7 Dramatic Tension
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page