The value of the teaching of drama as part of the secondary curriculum is now broadly accepted in the UK. It empowers students, assists in problem solving and team building, reinforces confidence and actually trains for public performance and presentation skills.
In a generally holistic secondary school approach, drama develops critical thinking, discussion, experiment, role play, experience of social, historical and cultural differences and allows youngsters to explore moral dimensions to issues, ideas and feelings.
By using drama and drama conventions, a deeper understanding of everyday life is fostered. The teaching space (studio, hall, classroom, corridor) where drama is developed, is a valuable asset in the resources of the entire school.
Learning In and Through Drama
Teaching in and through drama are two strands of the same educational rope, as far as drama is concerned. Learning in drama is the use of techniques such as mime, still images, roleplay, plot/action, gesture, voice, thought-tracking, narrator(s), characterisation, cross cutting and using music and different stimulus material. Learning through drama is to teach something through the elements/medium of drama, like a piece of history, or to make a political or other point.
Initial Teacher Education maintains a useful list of books to study about assessment at Key Stages 1 and 2. There are fewer books aimed directly at secondary teaching, although the Avon Valley School Performing Arts College posts a rationale behind teaching the subject, typical materials used and how assessment and examinations are conducted.
Brian Way in Development Through Drama (1967) said: "Answers take two forms, either information or direct experience. The former belongs to academic education, the latter to drama." He said that it was comparatively easy to develop drama, but "more difficult to develop people."
This concern with the holistic, personality-driven drama framework has occupied educationalists and practitioners ever since. The Report of the Schools Council Drama Teaching Project (10-16) published in 1977 as Learning Through Drama (Lynn McGregor, Maggie Tate, Ken Robinson) looked at aims and objectives of drama teaching, ways of assessing outcomes and how drama in the curriculum might be organised. The project team comprised experience in drama teaching, sociology, linguistics and philosophy.
The study considered whether drama is also theatre (it is not necessarily so) and this is where the separation of learning in and through drama arose. The quality of the drama experience (the experiencing life through the eyes, hearts and minds of others), the examining/assessing of the experience, drama as art and drama resources focussed debate for years to follow. Even in the 21st century, how drama should be taught in schools buildings evolving in the future, is uncertain.
Mantle of the Expert
The British educator Dorothy Heathcote, felt what she did wasn’t creative dramatics, role-playing, psychodrama or sociodrama, but a conscious deployment of the elements of drama to educate. In her book Dorothy Heathcote: Drama As A Learning Medium (USA 1976, UK 1979), Betty Jane Wagner said of her: "She is at her most dissatisfied when she senses that her class is doing theatrics, performing tricks, acting in a phony or artificial way. That is not what she’s after. She’s always looking for the precise dramatic pressure that will lead to a breakthrough, to a point where students have to come at a problem in a new way, to fight for language adequate to the tension they feel."
A group of drama students become characters blessed with specialist knowledge about something which informs others and allows students to progress dramatic ideas. Heathcote was an expert at appearing to know little, so students could, through skillful questioning, develop the drama themselves, owning every stage of the process.
This term "expert," in which somebody might literally wear a mantle or cloak to convey a superiority in status and wisdom, is one of many schemes employed in drama teaching, like hot-seating, thought tracking, cross cutting, forum theatre, conscience tunnel, still images, role-on-the-wall and physical theatre: all designed to develop drama for the exploration of people, situations and problems, some of which may or may not be used in performance.
Theatre-in-Education (TIE) uses people usually from outside school to present a prepared piece on a given theme, historical event, political situation, disaster, cover-up, controversy, policy, plan or person. It can be done in-house in schools as part of community theatre, but often it is brought in by a professional team. It may be participatory at least in part; it may be based on witnesses accounts (verbatim theatre) or be entirely improvised. Whatever it comes from, it’s another teaching tool.
Teacher-In-Role is Cheap, Cheerful and On Hand
In TIR, according to Jonothan Neelands and Tony Goode in Structuring Drama Work (1990): the drama teacher "manages theatrical possibilities and learning opportunities by adopting a suitable role within a context to excite interest, control the action, invite involvement, provoke tension, challenge superficial thinking, create choices and ambiguity, develop narrative and create chances for the group to interact in role."
In other words, the drama teacher becomes a character, interacting with students to achieve some or all of the above objectives. Within this technique, the teacher is not acting spontaneously but is trying "to mediate the teaching purpose through involvement in the drama."
In role, the teacher can be a neighbour, a tired old man in the pub corner, a shopper, a mum hanging washing on a line. He/she can be a narrator, an opponent, a friend, a spy, a news reporter going live to a scenario. There is no limit.
Heady stuff. Teacher as resource. Teacher performing with students. They generally love it, and want more. It keeps everybody on their toes and is a lot of work with some risk. But that’s what drama teaching is all about.
David Porter - Member of Parliament (1987-97), district councillor, party political organiser, former teacher of drama and now retired Head of Performing ...
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