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Category Archives: July 2014

Whew, how do you blog a full-on, five-day drama process? Especially when each day mysteriously built up to a final performance where 95% (a reasonable estimate) of the preparation gets thrown out in favour of the 5% of individual contribution that appears on the Freddie Wood stage. As much as I wants to post daily reflections, the seven hour classes had me enthused yet exhausted by the end of the day — also still needed to find the time to complete final assignments for other courses this summer. Perhaps next year, if I am able to sign up for this Institute again, I will clear the rest of summer activities to give a full report. Of course, next year will be vastly different from what could only be described as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Special thanks to George Belliveau and David Beare for offering such an amazing theatrical experience, and I do my best in this post to add up all the 5% contributions to make up our final performance.

Performance inspired by Augusto Boal

Performance inspired by Augusto Boal

The virtues project was the structure for the whole show, where each of the eleven teams would perform one of the virtues at a school assembly which the virtues themselves had attended, bringing back to their Valhallian council a snapshot of what each school discovers in the process. So for instance, my group had selected to represent Responsibility, and we staged a science experiment (capillary action) that got thrown off by one student forgetting to bring a beaker. Responsibility herself watched and reported on our actions. Other virtues included: Flexibility learning that adding one dance step after another only stretches her team too far; Tolerance tries to get her ELL students to perform, and they sing a different version of “Sweet Caroline” for a newly appointed dean; Integrity discovering that anyone can be an Iago during a rehearsal of Othello; Justice attempt to right wrongs inadvertently reproduces the injustice of 19th century head-tax when an MP3 player goes missing; and Creativity admires the straight purple lines of Harold’s city splashed with paint, glitter and feathers. Only a few of the wonderful performance can I recall in this much detail, and while it it possible to watch the entire performance on the video recording, it is not going to have the same energy and virtuosity as when each of us shared one day in July.

Here is one of the four assignment due for this summer’s Academic Writing course: my very first PowToon – possibly my last with all the trouble this website has caused with updating my last YouTube upload. Hope you can enjoy watching it on my blog.

Lots of positioning ourselves with words as the three remaining classmates presented assignment two. Mine started with an exploration of stance in Shakespeare’s plays and a look at the corpus of co cording words used throughout his plays.

After an introductory activity of examining the unfamiliar words in Shakespeare’s plays, I started this presentation.


Giltrow (2005) “Modal” Conscience – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

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…

Here it is, the project I have probably spent too long making, and only covered three of the songs on Mother Mother’s excellent 2012 album, The Sticks. The whole concept of this album is about the desire to leave behind the busy-ness of urban life and go into the wild, or rather the sticks. When I was reading the Ernest Callenbach novel Ecotopia last summer, this became the soundtrack to the groundbreaking environmental message: the old world can be ripped apart to make one of the most awesome and ecologically-sound countries in the world (combining Northern California, Oregon and Washington state – plus British Columbia would have made it Cascadia!). Unfortunately, no feature filmmaker adapted this fictional tale, but if I could have had it my way, it would have resembled one of the best movies of the 21st century, Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Here is a sample of what is to come:


Omen Saito

The process of taking someone else’s creativity and making it into something new seems to belie creativity – others might argue it is genius. If I had the huge budget Nolan earned from directing a few Batman movies for Warner Brothers, I could make my own Ecotopia movie, perhaps even get a hip edgy band like Mother Mother to score the film with original music. I started work in the film industry around the same time as Nolan made his first feature film, the shoestring-budgeted The Following in 1998 (interestingly the main character share the same name and occupation as the theif Dom Cobb in the later film Inception). Obviously Nolan and I took different paths in life, and I sometimes wish I could be on the same sets and getting such amazing movies produced. Instead, I found that the remixing via YouTube, iMovie and other digital tools gets me closer to what I really want to see: a complex storytelling that contrasts familiar sounds and images. Here is the second video based off the track listing on The Sticks:


The Sticks Robert

Each song matches up to one of the characters in this fascinating, mind-bending movie. If I had the time and the computer storage space, I would have got the entire album covered. Instead, I have to work “bit by bit” and will not be able to get to that song until later on in August. It will be matched up with the character Browning, the elderly businessman seen at the beginning of “The Sticks Robert” video above. Next up is perhaps the most familiar track on the album (the one that had the most radio play, in any case) “Let’s Fall in Love” dedicated to Mrs. Cobb, what seems like an anti-love song. It’s not, really, and hopefully the video captures some of the emotional roller-coaster-ness of the original sources.


Let’s Fall in Love Mal

Next, in honour of Kedrick’s choice words for our friends at Sauder, here is the fourth track listing, and perhaps the one that could get me in trouble with the law-abiding citizens these students purport to be. Yes, there is something inherently underhanded about what I am doing to the music and movie, and if I didn’t post the Copyright Act disclaimer on each of the YouTube uploaded video, they would be muted or taken down in the blink of an eye. I object to this irreligious piety towards restrictions on materials meant to be shared digitally. I point to masters of remix like the Gregory Brothers, Daft Punk or even Bob Dylan (see genius link above), and really hope to make something as new and catchy with this recycled material for this project.


Business Man Projections

Every really good movie has that one character who stands out from the others, not necessarily the protagonist, but the one who seems to be the most fun. Like how every kid playing Star Wars in the 1980s wanted to be Han Solo instead of Luke Skywalker – admit it, adults who never watched the series, you had the unwanted good guy role thrust upon you by more calculting schoolyard friends. If there is any song on this great album that matches Inception‘s trickster character, it is the ominous-sounding “Dread in My Heart” – apologies in advance for the inventively obscene language.

As wonderfully complex as the movie is, there is only so much material to be mined. Nolan is not so fond of releasing outtakes or alternate endings on DVD releases of his films, so no way that I will have access to a stash of Michael Caine as Miles footage, and as he is only in three key scenes, I have to find other ways to include these characters in more environmental ways – also fitting seeing as this blog post is for environmental literacy. You can follow this link to see what I have already posted for my current number one hit off the album, “Infinitesimal” but in the spirit of the completionist ethos I set out to achieve in this project, had to come up with something creative. Hope this works…

Stop me if this whole project seems a bit too hipsterish. Seriously, write a comment and send it to me saying STOP (you would probably be doing me a big favour so I can focus more of my attention on comps and grant applications). It goes against every fibre of being a hipster, even explicitly condemned in the handbook only a few of us are cool enough to know about have read. If you are ready to press on, you’ll next see the origin of this whole project, the one song that got me thinking about how Mother Mother and Inception could, nay must, be mashed up together. But first, here’s another version of “Happy” – yeah, not the Pharrell Williams one that has been done to death.

More to be posted soon 🙂

Back at one of my favourite places on campus. After walking in the woods with the class and so close to my home, I return to the Mac lab in the Scarfe building— one of the quietest rooms I have been in class plus there’s lots of computers to use! During my BEd and my masters, I could spend hours working on videos and other projects on Mac12 which is tucked far enough in the back so that I can peek out the windows. It seems like a poor trade-off, being able to walk around in the woods compared to be stuck in a stuffy computer lab, but I got used to it. I hope that I can be equally fascinated by the outdoors as well as the digital environment. At any rate, I have got one of my videos completed, and I might be able to finish off another two before tomorrow’s class. And who knows how many rainy August afternoons I will be in here to complete the rest of the album.

When I started my PhD, I had one of the coolest jobs in this building: AV Services. Not only did I have to help students and faculty with their powerpoint/projector problems, but had access to all the digital equipment stored in room one – now locked up for good. At AV Services, we had access to the latest apps and equipment, now that it is shut down and I am out of this job, we have to wait for someone from Technical Services to come from wherever they are on campus to deal with a problem easily solved with the proper password nobody in this building seems to have! Even the computers in the Mac lab, with all their storage space, prevent me from copying files created on the computer onto my hard drive. I will have to hurry to post all the videos from Mother Mother’s album The Sticks onto YouTube, since anything saved on each of computers will be wiped by August 18th.

The thing I like most about this online technology, however, is that there are creative ways to get around locked out and copyrighted material. For the Inception/Sticks project, I found a way to record from my iPad onto the computer using iMovie’s voiceover recording. Necessity being the nature of this business, I will have to see how long my first video survives on YouTube before it is taken down or mutated again. I figure by the time I finish the album I will have amassed a bucketload of tricks for uses previously recorded material. Right now those greedy Google people have tracked down that I am using a previously recorded song, and are threatening to post ads in the bottom of the screen unless it is removed. Thankfully my iPhone and iPad don’t seem to be having this issue – let’s see what happens tomorrow!


Video One: Omen Saito

Great discussion on the last class of this too short term, observed by another colleague in the department. Discussion of whether practitioners and researchers are from two different worlds or not led to many interesting connections between artistry and fiction of audiences, the figured world the hyphenated people enter, and even some quantum physics’ superposition to make the argument for go really far out there.

Landa talks rats and squirrels

The non-human animals get a lot of attention today as the hairless apes in the classroom discuss many of our conflicted attitudes towards the co-inhabitants of our many environments. Usually the scary stories of mistreatment and abuse, or bizarre notions that pop into the heads of unfortunate tourists who see this pride of lions or that formerly hibernating bear would make for an awesome family photo. Kedrick shared a heartwarming story of a backyard rat who who playfully greeted him each day, and his conflicted attitude towards the neighbour’s cat for doing what cats have been doing for millennia. Some animals, particularly horses, made the perhaps unwise despising to get to know humans a bit better, and so much of our civilization has been established by riding them to an early grave (and by grave, read processing factory). Kind of glad we didn’t get in to the Beatty Biodiversity Museum today, not sure I wanted to see every former living species on display.

Johnson and Okamoto try to empirically research the NHA and human connection, but it has always been an unfair comparison: the creatures that most resemble us get spare (unless too many of their chromosomes resemble ours, and then it is off to the laboratory they go) and those scary, non-human things get what they deserve. That’ll teach them for not evolving thumbs or grooming themselves in a more humane manner. Perhaps if I never got around to reading Timothy Findley’s The Wars, I could be a bit more positive in my outlook towards human/non-human interaction, but I am glad that we started to open up class discussion to include a more spiritual element. Without getting into a big debate about the transmigration of the soul, the fact that so many species have been ground between the teeth of unthankful human seems like karmic proof that most “decent” people will reincarnate as a cow. And the cats will soon be running the Internet.
Until then, enjoy this brief glimpse of caged animals let loose in the pre-CGI enviro-movie, Twelve Monkeys:

We did it!

The push and pull between Hyland’s bird’s-eye-view of research in every field (with the possible exceptions of digital literacy and a/r/tography, the two topics most of the class are focusing upon) and Giltrow’s down-on-the-ground specificity gets examined today with the interactive features of text, the points where the author is signalling for the reader to do something. Some of these cues are subtle or even innocuous, as if the hand could pluck the readers back while shoving them on (how’s that for a Shakespearean gloss?). When it gets to the point of the not-so-shy “I” intruding on what should be neutral and objective flow of ideas, the learned peer becomes a bossy show-off, or at least that how I see it (Emphasis in the original).

Found another article related to my research proposal, Patrick Howard (2014)’s Affinity Spaces and Ecologies of Practice which not only quotes extensively from Dobson and Willinsky (2009) and James Paul Gee, but features a young pre-service teacher named Kyle who uses digital tools to make a pirate-themed video. Ah, the path not taken, as it seems like this was me in another lifetime. Seems as good a time as any to reflect on the truism Kedrick famously exclaimed yesterday: “F*ck you, Frost!”

Academic writing has really done a number on me, and it is only this summer session that I am figuring out how it works. From 11:30 until 2:30 each day, I take an LLED course on this very topic, learning how the social practice of getting my ideas published in journals and presented at conferences isn’t rocket science (as Dr. John Robinson was won’t to say) but certainly requires an amount of skill. First, being able to identify what counts as research instead than the wishful output of corporate thinktanks takes some getting used to: both Apple and Mircosoft would like academics to believe that their view of digital literacy, for instance, aligns perfectly with research produced at top universities. Their reasons are quite obvious, as it is better for their bottom line if the ivory tower elite institutions buy into their research. But all of this supposes that there is pure source of scholarly articles on digital literacy, and it is just a matter of finding it.

Where does one look? Cambridge University Press seems to have made it their business to keep tab on the various forms of legitimate (ie. non-commercial) research. Earlier today, I was tracing down an article my advisor co-wrote on digital literacy, and found it in the reference section of the Education Library, the Cambridge Handbook of Literacy – a book so high-stakes that the university cannot let you leave the library with a copy. I might as well post again from the library for the amount of time it will take to sit down with the book (yeah, I could photocopy it, but that is more paper an ink I’d have to store somewhere, while the digital copy (PDF) could just as easily be uploaded onto my iPad within seconds. So what sort of deal does Cambridge UP have with UBC? Would the situation be different if I had gone to Cambridge as a grad student?

Of course, Timothy Clark’s book on ecocriticism is an introduction to the environment and literature, not a more prestigious-sounding “handbook on” this topic (Cambridge has such a handbook on learning sciences, but none exclusively on environmental literacy). Clark’s criticism of standard social science method (SSSM) was my entry point into his evolutionary view of this uniquely human habit of storing our collective knowledge in publications and libraries. And it only seems to confuse readers and academics into narrow categories: are we looking at Darwin’s theory or Social Darwinism, two very different concepts spawned from his “survival of the fittest” understanding. Ideas will continue to evolve, and the only thing we can say with certainty about a play by Sophocles or Shakespeare is that the word are somewhat in the order the author intended, but thanks to SSSM, meaning can be all over the map. Thankfully there are handbooks and institutions to straighten all of us out, but then adds to the possibility of misunderstandings and sometimes disastrous decisions that effect the plants, animals and non-living inhabitants of our ecosystems. But at least we still have tonnes of books in libraries, that ought to keep the bookworms happy! :-S

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