Volume 2 Number 18 - 30/10/04


Hi Folks,

Kim's Drama Blog  

Well, we are two weeks into the final term of the year and today I said farewell to my Year 12 class.  This is the first group I've taught all the way from Year 8 - 12.  An interesting process as they grow and develop.  We talked about them staying involved with Drama activity through the youth theatre company, SHY (Seen and Heard Youth), that I incorporated in 2000.  It should be interesting as a few slowly become the prime movers in the organisation.  I doubt may are reading this but they may stumble across it in archive one day - Good Luck Guys!!  

I had the pleasure of seeing new Australian play "Yandy" a few weeks ago.  A real privelege to be in the audience with Peter Coppin present with so many of his people from the Port Hedland area.  Stay in touch with Black Swan Theatre's other offerings.

Leadership Team required.

The DramaPlayShop is interested in finding a few people to take on responsibility of becoming facilitators.  If you have a specific interest in Drama and IT that you'd like to explore, I can help you set up a section of the DramaPlayShop (and provide some mentorship) where you can gather together a loyal band of investigators and document your explorations and findings.  I have set up a "Facilitator's Testbed" that is essentially a little playground for potential facilitators to learn how to use the interface and develop some confidence before running their own course... contact me if you'd like to be a leader in this area.

Credentialed Professional Learning

Edith Cowan University in Mount Lawley is offering a range of courses during its Summer Institute (first weekend in December). I am involved in delivering two of these courses - one is a specific look at approaches to the new Post-Compulsory Drama courses and the other is about technology integration in the Arts.  These courses are a great way to gain credit towards post-graduate qualifications - I'm not entirely sure but I believe that one of these weekend courses will give you 1/3 credit towards a Master's coursework unit.  You would need to check the ECU website for specific and accurate details.

TEACHING METHODOLOGY

" In the book Drama of Colour Saldańa discusses a study done by researchers Gourgey, Bosseau, and Delgado (1985) with lower socio-economic Black and Hispanic students in elementary school. After a six month improvisational drama project, gains were observed in vocabulary and reading comprehension. Survey results also suggested that students also showed improvement in attitude areas including trust, self-acceptance, acceptance of others, and empowerment "

from: http://www.angelfire.com/ego/edp303/whydrama.html

Julia Balaisis in her paper The Challenge of Teaching "in role" attempts to analyse and understand why drama teachers find the "teacher-in-role" strategy so challenging and looks for ways to further support teachers in applying this strategy in their classroom practice.

She examines how teachers, in qualifying in drama education, have many opportunities to participate in dramatic exploration where the various aspects of working in role are employed, worked and analysed. While teachers are struck by the power of teaching in role, many still have considerable difficulty integrating it into their daily drama programs while others avoid it entirely.

And it is at this juncture that I find myself confirming her assertion, as I encounter a wide range of schools in my roles as curriculum moderator and supervisor of training teachers, Drama teachers seem to be abandoning drama strategies like teacher-in-role and even student-in-role, in favour of traditional transmission models.  These transmission models are widely regarded to be the least effective on the active-passive learning continuum and yet drama (and other) teachers are opting for them.

The following chart looks at the continuum.  It isn't hard to see where the best Drama approaches sit, they are generative, liberational and broad in scope.  I am especially impressed by the work of people who can reflect this sort of approach.  And I find that amongst Drama teachers, most teachers on the "MORE" end of the scale will declare some influence of of the work of Dorothy Heathcote in their practice.

Common Best Practice Recommendations*

 

LESS

MORE

  • whole-class, teacher-directed instruction (e.g., lecturing)
  • student passivity: sitting, listening, receiving, and absorbing
  • presentational, one-way transmission of information from teacher to student
  • prizing and rewarding silence in the classroom
  • classroom time devoted to fill-in-the-blank worksheets, dittos, workbooks and other "seatwork"
  • student time spent reading textbooks and basal readers
  • attempt by teachers to thinly "cover" large amounts of material in every subject area
  • rote memorization of facts and details
  • emphasis on competition and grades in school
  • tracking and leveling of students into "ability groups"
  • use of pull-out special programs
  • use of and reliance on standardized tests
  • experiential, inductive, hands-on learning
  • active learning in the classroom, with all the attendant noise and movement of students doing, talking, and collaborating
  • diverse roles for teachers, including coaching, demonstrating, and modeling
  • emphasis on higher-order thinking; learning a field’s key concepts and principles
  • deep study of a smaller number of topics, so that students internalize a field’s way of inquiry
  • reading real texts: whole books, primary sources, and nonfiction materials
  • responsibility transferred to students for their work: goal setting, record keeping, monitoring, sharing, exhibiting, and evaluating
  • choice for students (e.g., choosing their own books, writing topics, team partners, and research projects)
  • enacting and modeling of principles of democracy in school
  • attention to affective needs and the varying cognitive styles of individual students
  • cooperative, collaborative activity; developing the classroom as an interdependent community
  • heterogeneously grouped classrooms where individual needs are met through inherently individualized activities, not segregation of bodies
  • delivery of special help to students in regular classrooms
  • varied and cooperative roles for teachers, parents, and administrators
  • reliance on teachers’ descriptive evaluations of student growth, including observational/anecdotal records, conference notes, and performance assessment rubrics

 *excerpted from Best Practice for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools, by S. Zemelman, H. Daniels, and A. Hyde, Heinnemann, 1998.

And to my mind, this chart is a validation of Process Drama/Applied Theatre approaches to Drama education.  Unfortunately, some people  around the globe, and many of them close to home seem to focus very much on the process of producing plays, and do so in quite mechanical ways.  I would say that the product of groups like the XLD-Express done in Queensland (I saw the Mayne Inheritance in 2003) are the exception and are able to reflect exemplary process and exceptional product... My own belief is that the mechanical approach to Drama education limits educational opportunities and that the actual learning in "putting on a play" is minimal, let's face it, play production is not really all that demanding a process except in terms of time management. Too often I witness "training" over "education", where "training", is a single path, single purpose and single methodology approach.  Students are led through "the right steps", they are not challenged to discover their own understanding, or device their own approaches to creating work, be it original or scripted.

Once again, I am certainly not say that we don't work towards performance, what I am questioning is the most effective LEARNING pathway to get to the final product.  I guess most of you would agree that teacher as autocratic "director" is likely to be the least effective.  It is possible, and more interesting, to use teacher-in-role strategies, mantle of the expert, and other in-role forms, to work towards play production. 

We need to remember that kids strutting on stage is not the purpose of school Drama.  We need to question what LEARNING is occurring and if our list doesn't include critical thinking, reflexive praxis, and a raft of other skills as articulated in such documents as curriculum frameworks:

The arts and the life of the community
The arts play an important role in the life of the community. While some works of the arts are presented in formal settings, such as galleries and theatres, the arts also permeate everyday life. Their influence is evident, for example, in the design of the clothes we wear, the buildings in which we live and work, and many of the objects we use every day. The arts are important for the expression of the life and culture of communities, and contribute to the transmission of values and ideas from generation to generation. They play a major role in the forms of communication and entertainment we experience on a daily basis. They also have major industrial and economic significance and arts industries form a significant part of the modern Australian economy. All students will experience the arts in various forms through their personal and working lives beyond school. For some, the arts will provide an avenue to a specific artistic career. For others, their learnings in the arts will be applied in other occupations, be part of their leisure or feature in other parts of their daily lives.

The arts and communication
The arts are a major form of human communication and expression. Individuals and groups use them to explore, express and communicate ideas, feelings and experiences. Each arts form is a language in its own right, being a major way of symbolically knowing and communicating experience. Through the arts individuals and groups express, convey and invoke meaning. Like other language forms, arts languages have their own conventions, codes, practices and meaning structures. They also communicate cultural contexts. Students benefit from understanding and using these ways of knowing and expressing feelings and experiences.

The arts and values
Artistic works can inform, teach, persuade and provoke thought. They can reproduce and reinforce existing ideas and values, challenge them, or offer new ways of thinking and feeling. They can confirm existing values and practices, and they can bring about change. As a result, the arts play an important role in shaping our understanding of ourselves as individuals and members of society and our understanding of the world in which we live. The Arts Learning Area contributes to the development of core shared values in students, in particular, helping them to critically reflect, make personal meaning and show enterprise and initiative.

The arts, creativity and satisfaction
The arts provide a major means of personal creativity, satisfaction and pleasure. They allow the opportunity for creative problem solving, self-expression and the use of the imagination in a range of different forms. The study of the arts can provide students with immediate satisfaction as well as providing the basis for lifelong enjoyment. The opportunity for creativity in the arts develops students’ abilities to plan, visualise consequences, experiment, try different approaches, solve problems and make decisions in situations in which there may be no standard answers.

The arts and life skills
Working in the Arts Learning Area involves the development of students’ skills across a wide range of human activities. Learning in the arts promotes the integration of skills from different areas of human potential, promoting ‘multi-sensory' learning and the development of ‘multiple intelligences’. The arts develop verbal and physical skills, logical and intuitive thinking, interpersonal skills and spatial, rhythmic, visual and kinaesthetic awareness. They promote emotional intelligence, a way of understanding, using and making responses through the emotions and students’ intrapersonal qualities and experiences. Through the arts, students learn to use and experiment with a range of traditional and emerging technologies.

WA Curriculum Framework http://www.curriculum.wa.edu.au/

I would advocate that we all continue looking at our practice, and whether or not we are getting the kudos of school community - as we all do when kids present work - we need to honestly interrogate our approaches and the quality of learning we are offering.  If the work we do with students is not about them discovering, visualising, questioning, deciding, problem-solving, experimenting with drama elements and steeped in values, then it may be that our practice simply doesn't measure up to best practice.

Drama is pedagogy as well as product...  and I think it sage to remember that we as Drama educators reflect that - ANYONE can work towards putting on a scripted production - it isn't brain-surgery, and despite the efforts of great practitioners (Robert Wilson, Peter Brook and their ilk) the type of work produced in most schools doesn't really push the packet very far....   what is important in our work with students is the different approach to learning that we offer...  and lately I have been disappointed to find that it very hard to distinguish Drama teachers from any others, because there is nothing significantly different in the way they teach, and I believe that is the critical difference that should be immediately apparent...  and to that end I encourage you all to revisit, or discover, the work of Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton, John O'Toole, Philip Taylor and others and really hold your own practice up in comparison... you may not yet be the great teacher they are, but you are able to model their practice, isolate and identify key strategies and incorporate them in your own practice... regardless of whether you are doing investigative group devised work, play production, text study or skills development, process and in-role methods can be applied to enrich the learning experiences of students and expand the scope of their learning beyond mere "training". 

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES

A summary of  Heathcote's methods and techniques, as they are laid out in Betty Jane Wagner's Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium (Washington: National Education Association, 1976).  For anyone interested in role-playing, from educators and theatre artists, to game designers and players, it is a useful resource.

PROFESSIONAL NEWS

PLEASE ADVISE OF ANY UPCOMING PROFESSIONAL EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES AND I WILL LIST THEM HERE

Choose one of these workshops

Dec 6-7: THE NEW POST COMPULSORY COURSES;  GETTING A HEAD START

Day One:       

            Session One:  Outcomes-based education in the post-compulsory years; big change/little change; pedagogies under pressure.

            Session Two:  Teacher panel – what this new course is doing to me!
            Session Three:  New content and contexts for your Course of Study

Session Four:  Attitudes and values across the new courses

Session Five: Assessment futures in years 11 and 12; Issues behind scales of achievement; workshop format

Session Six:  New courses – group meetings to explore/contest/develop tomorrow’s specific course of study agendas

.

Day Two:    Session 1:  VET implications: Different content same classes.

                   Sessions 2-6

 

A.  COMPUTER SCIENCE – Newhouse

systems/Outcomes, Networking/Hardware, Programming/Databases

OR

B.  DRAMA:  McKenna and Flintoff

the emphasis for this workshop is on how to develop an understanding of and access to industry using the recommended WA post-compulsory guidelines. Teachers will explore their expectations and the outcomes for post-compulsory drama context by using varied teaching strategies. 

OR

C.  VISUAL ARTS: Young and Paris

Review of existing courses of study at PC level including TEE Art and Art & Design syllabus documents; Familiarity with the consultation draft for the proposed PC course of study for the visual arts; understanding of the historical framework which supported the PC education review and development of the 50 new courses of study; Acquisition of content in respect of the Course of Study units 1a-3b; Examination of proposed COS assessment structures (school-based and external); Consideration of VET component of proposed course of study; Production (group work) and oral presentation of a project planner/student brief aligned with one unit from the course of study; Develop capacity and confidence to return to the school setting and trial the project planner/brief produced in this workshop.

CPL@ECU

Educators are able to claim 5 credit points (1/3 unit) towards participating Graduate Certificate (or Masters) programmes at ECU if they:

1. Attend 2 days of ECU-endorsed professional learning events.

2. Provide documented evidence of school-based application of the professional learning events, in order to facilitate best practice within their educational context.   This application would be over a four-week period (approx).

3. Maintain a reflective journal throughout this timeframe, and

4. Enrol at Edith Cowan University within 12 months of the professional learning event. (10 and 15 credit models are available)

VENUE AND COSTS

VENUE:  Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley Campus, 2 Bradford Street, Mount Lawley.

COST:  Option one:  workshop only - $300

Option two: credentialing the workshop towards a postgraduate qualification - $380

Group and ECU staff/student discounts available

Ask about the ‘two workshop’ discount.

WELCOME COFFEE, MORNING TEA, LUNCH AND RESOURCES INCLUDED IN COST

WHEN:  December 6 - 10, 2004:  8.30am-4.30pm

CONTACT: To find out more about discounts, parking and registration contact Paula Pettit, Edith Cowan University.

Phone: 9370 6810,  Email: p.pettit@ecu.edu.au

The University of Arizona College of Fine Arts Committee on Arts Education, Department of Language Reading and Culture, and the Arts and Learning Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association invite researchers and educators in all aspects of the arts join us for a three day conference focusing on our international connections in the arts. Keynote speaker is Max Wyman, President of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, member of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts, and author of The Defiant Imagination: Why Culture Matters.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

So You Want to Use Role Play?: A New Approach in How to PlanSo You Want to Use Role Play?: A New Approach in How to Plan
by Gavin M. Bolton, Dorothy Heathcote

Role-play has established itself as one of the most effective learning techniques in language, literature, history, geography and other curriculum subjects. It is also a crucial component of most management and human relationship training courses. This book demonstrates, through use of proven, practical strategies and techniques how role-play can be applied to all kinds of interactive contexts.

 Dorothy Heathcote's Story: Biography of a Remarkable Drama TeacherDorothy Heathcote's Story: Biography of a Remarkable Drama Teacher
by Gavin Bolton

Dorothy Heathcote is the most public drama-teaching figure in the world. She has taught classes of children in five continents. The numbers must run into millions. In addition, innumerable teachers have watched her teach in person or on video and television.

How did someone who left elementary school at 14 become a world authority? Heathcote has now asked Gavin Bolton, who has worked extensively - and co-authored several books with her to write that story. Dr. Bolton describes Dorothy Heathcote's upbringing, her work as a mill girl, her theatre training, her unprecedented appointment to Durham and Newcastle Universities and her extraordinary rise to fame. He examines the basis for her genius and shows how being a wife and mother contributed to her work.
The Dramatic Arts and Cultural Studies : Educating Against the Grain (Teaching and Thinking, Volume 2)
by Kathleen S. Berry, Dorothy Heathcote

With the current, fast-paced, major philosophical challenges to modern life and its institutional constructs, artists and teachers involved in the dramatic arts are faced with demands to create a lucid postmodern play of ideas and forms. This text presents a wide range of contemporary theories borrowed from cultural studies augmented with practical implications that support dramatic artists in their struggle to create possible multiple realities for a postmodern future. Teachers, directors, writers, students, and others involved in the dramatic arts should benefit from the discussions included in the book which relate to cultural studies and dramatic arts. An introductory chapter by Shirley Steinberg, a leading educator and drama teacher, provides a context for the basic premise of the book.

This book presents a wide range of contemporary theories borrowed from Cultural Studies augmented with practical implications that support dramatic artists in their struggle to create possible multiple realities for a postmodern future. Teachers, directors, writers, students, and many others involved in the dramatic arts will benefit from the discussions of Cultural Studies and the connections to the Dramatic Arts. The first chapters mix theory and practice while the last chapter provides questioning strategies and conventions that can be used in actual sessions to deconstruct scripted or improvised dramatic texts. This is a useful introductory text for artists, directors, teachers, students, and others involved in the Dramatic Arts who would like to energize their work through contemporary theories and practices of Cultural Studies.

 ErrorDrama for Learning : Dorothy Heathcote's Mantle of the Expert Approach to Education (Dimensions of Drama Series)
by Gavin Bolton, Dorothy Heathcote

This text seeks to push the boundaries of learning, using drama to create an impetus for productive learning across the curriculum, from language arts to history, maths and science. Any one thing taught becomes meshed within broad curriculum knowledge and skills.

Drama for Learning pushes the boundaries of learning, using drama to create an impetus for productive learning across the curriculum.

Dorothy Heathcote : Drama as a Learning MediumDorothy Heathcote : Drama as a Learning Medium
by Betty Jane Wagner

This book gives us a close-up detailing of this gifted, dynamic teacher in a variety of classroom settings, along with analyses of Heathcote's remarkable improvisations with young people.

BOOK REVIEWS

I've just recently received a couple of book purchases and am really excited as I begin reading!  Has anyone else started with these?

First Person : New Media as Story, Performance, and GameFirst Person: New media as Story, Performance and Game
edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262232324/dramabooks

What has particularly excited me is the opening chapter on "Cyberdrama"...  it discusses approaches to story, game play and engagement in terms that echo what we are trying to achieve in Drama education.  Throughout the book (and this is from preliminary browsing) there are discussions about narrative and simulation and distinctions being drawn between perceptual positions of players ... the writers that have contributed to this book have a very clear sense of the notion of "role" and I am starting to think that this book may well serve as the basis for investigation into the role of technology in Drama ( and possibly other) education for the next few years.  Other promising looking chapters include such discussions as "Moving Through Me as I move: A Paradigm for Interaction", "Unusual Positions: Embodied Interactions in Symbolic Spaces", "Narrative, Interactivity, Play and Games: Four Naughty Concepts in Need of Discipline", " Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance and other Trivial Issues", "A Preliminary Poetics for Interactive Drama and Games"

The authors contributing to this book are well known to anyone who's started looking into Drama and technology - Janet Murray , Espen Aarseth and Brenda Laurel are all there, alongside more familiar "drama' voices such as Richard Schechner... 

As a high school drama teacher, I have a keen interest in new media applications in Drama education - it seems that many of our number are still focussed totally on their Drama classrooms and while they have an interest in technology are not actually making much headway with developing knowledge in the area - this retards developing discussions when there isn't a common language and some basic concepts upon which to build our discussions and investigations...

I think this book "First Person" is probably as good a starting point as is available at the moment.  It provides a broad overview of the scope of "new media" interactions and there is definitely what I would call a "drama sensibility" contained within it. 

The other book I've just started looking into is Marie-Laure Ryan's "Narrative as Virtual Reality"

Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801877539/dramabooks

What looks promising here is Chapter Nine: "Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama".  I've yet to properly digest the chapter - I've been intrigued by some of the statements I've encountered, for instance "For interactivity to be reconciled with immersion, it must be stripped of any self-reflexive dimension"... I'm not sure that is exactly what we are trying to do with Drama (or any form of) education - we are generally trying to become aware of the symbolic forms we are engaging with... although in a Stanislavskian sense, it might just be that this new dimension of building belief is somehow well placed in Drama... I tend to think the Brechtian requirement for distance might be better suited...  but that can be a discussion for another day... for the time being we need to start to come to grips with some key concepts in the new paradigm we have the opportunity to define...

Once again... I rely on the membership of this group to pursue and extend this... as Drama people we know the need for social constructivist approaches... I'm hoping we can live that rather than just posit it....

Has anyone else started looking into these areas??  Are members of this egroup looking into the developments that are occurring in new media forms and how it relates to Drama practice?? 

We are trying to establish a special interest group called DramaPlayShop at http://sig7.org... you're welcome to drop in!

Kim Flintoff

Copyright © October, 2004

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