Literacy/Technology

Personal Notes on Eight Readings

As a former participant in drama education, without having studied it in secondary school (as neither a high schooler nor a teacher candidate), I approached these readings with some curiosity: fond memories of acting exercises that worked to bring out my creative self as a child, yet little technical awareness of the process drama educators go through in deciding how to lead their class to important discoveries. As I read through the articles listed on the syllabus, I took note of when “process” was mentioned. My reflections and comments on each article will hopefully reveal what I think about the process from a student’s point of view, searching for the reason drama happens in the classroom, as many authors argue it is already happening in daily life – like literacy, multimodality and many other concepts learned in my PhD studies, any attempt to define what “process” means in drama gets further into generalities so that everything is process, multimodality, literacy, etc. Nevertheless, each article presents a valid argument for making sure teachers take note of the steps their students take.

My first moment of pause and reflect on this mysterious concept of process comes in Pamela Bowell and Brian Heap’s (2005) article, where they appeal to all teachers: “we all know that the acquisition of human knowledge and understanding is not an immediate thing. It is gained slowly, in action, often over a period of many years” (p 62). The emphasis in my mind falls on the word “action” which makes words and ideas lift off the page, away from the tedious study of play texts and theatre history. If students are aware that they embody the play by acting out how they feel and respond to situations, drama becomes less of a mechanical and more of an organic process. In many plays where murder, lust or darker emotions drive the plot, it seems like an easy out for the student to say “but I never murdered/assaulted/did that to anyone in real life!” It seems like to goal for the drama teacher is to guide the students through imaginative and collaborative hypothesizing on how could anyone do that sort of thing. The article’s authors write about layers and levels as they map out the drama process, the students can explore together and test out the actions and reactions as they consider the “quadripartite” roles they play. It is a well-worn theatrical statement that “all the world is a stage,” as both knowledge and understanding for the students will come when they accept and adopt this outlook as part of their life-long learning process. How does it come without overt teacherly or product-orientation instruction, the “I want you to really get Jaques’ Act II scene vii speech” that many of the process drama proponents seem to avoid? Is it still possible to focus on process and have such traditional goals in mind like “understand a play so they can pass a test” end points on the drama teacher’s map?

Another author to consider the mapping out of drama teaching techniques, a constructive approach to how students engage in the process, is Michael Anderson’s (2012) chapter on the ensemble. Here his focus is on how “[t]he teacher must have knowledge of the students and a deep knowledge the aesthetics of theatre and drama pedagogy” (p. 68) which comes as a personal revelation: he cannot be the only author to consider the aesthetics involved with the process, can he? Yet why hasn’t aesthetics been a focal point for other articles? This elusive eye-of-the-beholder quality really is the thrill and excitement that students should feel, and in most cases do if they commit to open-minded collaboration in their drama studies. It is more than just willingly falling back into the receiving hands of their partners during the trust exercise, but knowing that the game only (and always) works because each person is embodying the simple tasks they have been assigned. Already under the spell of Australian drama education researchers, I found that Anderson not only makes an eloquent point about aesthetics, but states a compelling case by invoking another important player for my field of studies, Lev Vygotsky. It is necessary for drama educators to scaffold their students at each step of their process by accessing their knowledge of what students can do, and motivating them to the place just beyond their comfort zone in order to make theatre. Yet most educators tend to fall back on the “easier said than done” understanding of Vygotskian scaffolding, as in “great if the theory had practical applications in my classroom.” As I keep my mind open to other approaches and pedagogies, Anderson has hit upon what it takes to get others into the higher developmental frame of mind. It is also important to reflect on how early in his career, Vygotsky was a drama educator for adult learners, and his theories of cognitive development activated by play are relevant to teachers and dramatists alike.

With cognition in mind, I must include the fascinating research by Evelyn Tribble, who considers distributed cognition among the Lord Chamberlain/King’s Men as a way into understanding how Shakespearean drama was crafted as training material for novice actors. It is already a theory I explored for my English 515A course, so doesn’t need to be rehashed in this paper – I would be happy to share my research with others in the Drama Institute if time permits, but will shift into another author mentioned on the syllabus, Penny Bundy (2013), who considers Vygotskian scaffolding in principle without naming him specifically. “A spectator experiences empathy as an emotional and cognitive response to the apparent emotional experience of the characters or actors. The emotion experienced is not identical to that experienced by the character or actor” (p. 117) is a fine way of saying we know how to act and respond by observing the emotional states of others. She frames her research by interviewing children in the audiences of modern theatre experiences including Wicked, Shape of a Girl and The Importance of Being Earnest. In each case, Bundy explores the young spectator’s response to the actors on the stage, and the empathic connection they have with performers. She also makes reference to the feelings experienced by the audience, citing both Schoenmakers and Sauter, who name the spectator’s empathy as “aestheticised emotions” which also be brings to mind Sir Ken Robinson’s elaboration on “when senses are operating at their peak” from his famous Changing Educational Paradigms lecture.

In the same way as Anderson suggests a virtual map of the process of development in the theatrical art, David Beare and George Belliveau (2007) take the idea of mapping a step further by providing diagrams of the stages of development in theatre woven together with an understanding one’s self. It is a flow between working together as a group and discovering a more complex social identity, so that theatre and self become the external and internal makers of meaning for students engaged in the process. Not every student is going to get to the same point, but it is important for the teacher to understand where the students are coming from and find ways to direct them toward a reflective vision stage. “Youth tend to keep self and theatre separate, or at least very private, until they feel firmly secured with a network of close friends. When a support system is not quite formed, youth are still vulnerable, and these students are more at risk of dropping out if repeated attempts to form friendships fail” (p. 10). It is important, then, for students and teachers to make an effort at the beginning stages, as I have experienced in longer collaboration and group activities in LLED 536, kind of like a graduated process of ice breakers leading up to a distributed cognitive play where listening to others becomes more essential to getting your lines right.

Judith Ackroyd-Pilkington (2001) gives many fine examples of teachers and professional actors who make a distinction between representing and acting a role, starting with Richard II who plays an English king and must take on a new role halfway through the play. For an actor in such a role, there are several layers to work through in the script before (or after) accepting that the person in front of the audience is not standing-in as a representation, but creating something new, based on historical and theatrical conventions. Even her revealing interview with Simon Callow, who famously performed Charles Dickens performing some of his well-loved characters, provides insight for students still figuring out who they are and how they should behave as theatre students. Once again, the importance of a teacher’s knowledge of process and child development is essential: “We [teachers] are audience to the children, reading, interpreting, assessing how best they can be stretched, challenged, reassured, for example. It might be that it is the way the teacher’s role next communicates, with consideration of nuance and gesture, which will be precisely what enables the role to stimulate children’s learning or take the drama on” (p. 15). It has to be more than just assessing for learning, which seems to be providing evidence that drama is a legitimate course for high schoolers to study, compared to other STEM courses that seem to overshadow the humanities. By distinguishing the different approach to creating a character and being in a role, such as the teacher in role, students get to move beyond a simple view of acting and learn the process of becoming someone other than oneself.

The move from improvisation, students creating roles for their own learning, and taking on a scripted role, seems to be an important yet elusive part of the process through which drama teachers lead their classes. At what point is the class ready to pick up their scripts and start auditioning for parts? It seems likely that while much of the groundwork in identity creation gets established for students, there is some learning about the role playwrights and authors have in the process: without them, it seems like drama education would be an extended theatre-sport activity (not that there is anything wrong with this type of performance) rather than a communal effort. Patrice Baldwin and Kate Fleming (2003) explore the knowledge that authors bring to the drama education process, in the context of engaging other with their emotions. “Good authors use the way in which language can be ambiguous, subtle and rich and metaphor. By creating multilayered text, they leave gaps for the readers to fill, involving individual responses to make the text complete and original” (p. 19). The best playwrights, it seems, have an intimate understanding of the players’ process, whether it means having performed on stage themselves, or have an intricate knowledge of how words, images and emotions are best combined to provide an empathic link between actors on the stage and the audience. For students, part of their learning must include insight into the text, being able to read it like a professional musician looks at a composer’s score and is able to figure out what parts to play, but in a more personal way too, as the drama students will access memories and the imagination, unique to every individual, rather than the more or less mechanical skill of playing an instrument. Each emotional cue for the drama student will create ‘equal and opposite’ emotions for others, and the drama teacher should open this empathic door for each of the students.

Picture books offer another way into interpreting dramatic text, and the chapter written by Robyn Ewing, Carole Miller and Juliana Saxton (2000) write about inspiring picture books that can act as the leaping off point for middle school drama lessons. As an elementary teacher candidate at UBC, our math and science instructors gave us the valuable insight that picture books have great appeal for students beyond the primary grades (often the years that seem to be exclusively about pictureless chapter books). Whether they are more mature graphic novels, or well-crafted stories like Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, illustrated text will engage students to think visually when adapting a text into drama. “Through the collaborative scripting process of a chosen story or poem, students become aware that all readers bring their own past experiences to the meanings they make from texts. Picture books can provide a useful beginning for the scripting process. Sometimes an author’s use of font types and organisation of the text on the page can provide a particularly helpful beginning in understanding what the author intended” (p. 128). While the process written up in Ewing, Miller & Saxton’s chapter seem to be more of a prescription than an organic co-construction, their teaching strategies encourage drama teachers to search for deeper themes and antitheses than what can be drawn on the page. Many of the drama activities are similar to those listed in Baldwin & Fleming’s later chapters. Both textbooks will provide a wealth of strategies for drama teachers who have established a process-based theory of teaching, following the advice of the above authors.

Finally, Saxton and Miller (2006) work together again on middle school (or level) drama education, here focusing on the fascinating multiple literacies theories that acknowledges how different styles of learning require modification on teaching theory. The authors problematize the often perceived use of constructivist teaching methods as simply adding some fun to an otherwise straightforward skill-and-drill drama lesson, encouraging drama teachers to make the activities more student-centred and layered. “Process drama educates through “knowledge in,” through a multiplicity of metalanguages; it requires that each student bring his/her own personal context and feelings into play, for they are the fabric with which the fictional world is woven” (p. 15). What follows this section, however, is a series of activities more prescriptive than their chapter co-written with Ewing: most of it is presented as a dialogue and even suggests the number of minutes each activity should take. It seems strange that the theory which they return to for their conclusion is open to interpretation and encourages drama teachers to make use of whatever works best, while the middle section reads like a recipe for activities limited to what has already worked for them, with some alternatives permitted in the tightly scheduled process. Undoubtedly, every set of instructions for drama teachers needs a grain of salt in order for the novice teachers to learn about what works while also experimenting with motivation for their students.

My brief four weeks as a drama instructor at a summer school two years ago was an eye-opening experience, one that could only happen as there was a need for drama classes for intermediate students, but my lack of drama education theory made each day a struggle with disorganized lesson plans. Now, having read these eight readings and finally having an opportunity to take the summer drama institute (partially due to teacher union job action preventing summer school from running as usual this year), I look forward to learning the skills to make me a competent drama teacher for constructivist process-based education.

Reference
Coming soon…