Issues in Educational Drama (1983)

Christopher Day, John L. Norman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351264709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Published in 1983, this book is a collection of original papers which explore concerns in the teaching of drama in education. All chapters have been written by significant practitioners of drama in education and attempt to locate the growing understanding of the educational drama process in the real world of schooling. Thus the collection sets out to identify and explore the many social, economic and ideological factors which influence the status and development of drama and propose strategies by which the work might be better established.

3
Planning and Evaluating Drama in Education

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5 Curriculum Planning and the Arts

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Desmond Hogan

The author believes in the needs of contemporary society for more personal and decision-making opportunities. His particular concern is with institutionally-based curriculum development, and the contribution that drama teachers may make by virtue of their specialized knowledge and skills in social interactive learning processes so necessary in implementing this.

He presents a critique of the widely used and accepted models of curriculum planning which are characterized by ‘an essential reliance on “cold”, objective analysis of objective needs and strategies’ and argues that it is divorced from the reality of the learning process which he regards as essentially exploratory, responsive and social. He suggests that the planning of teaching should be based not so much on an often diversive discussion of ‘aims’, but on the use of the more pragmatic device of viewing classroom action in terms of specific teacher intention in relation to observed practice. This kind of planning, so much an implicit part of the drama teacher’s work, would contain within it a consideration of both instructional and expressive objectives.

In focussing on the traditional divide between curriculum planners and those who teach the curriculum, Hogan’s chapter emphasizes the contribution that drama teachers may make both in school through their knowledge of group dyamics and negotiating strategies; and on behalf of schools as they debate with local and central government issues of the common core curriculum and assessment and performance and attempt to resist pressures for a firmer central control of the curriculum.

In discussing a subject as potentially vast and complex as the title ‘curriculum planning in the arts’ suggests, it seems necessary to focus on what is really only one facet of the planning problem but one in which drama teachers have a unique contribution to make.

I am increasingly unhappy with titles which may imply that curriculum planning is a process whose nature is constrained more by its subject-matter content (for example, the arts) than by the ‘cultural’ assumptions of the planners. I feel increasingly strongly that, in curriculum planning, we are concerned with the whole problem of how people learn. Learning, if we leave aside maturational issues (and acknowledge honestly that, as a whole, it is a phenomenon about which we know shockingly little), is a process which must have similar characteristics whether the central actor is a child facing new material in a lesson, an adolescent facing his first job, or a teacher in mid-career facing a new curriculum proposal. When we have widened the definition to cover all people faced with the problem of how to respond to, and how to make use of, new knowledge or new situations, then we surely begin to enter territory with vaguely familiar landmarks for drama teachers.

The learning process seems to involve probing and exploring the new information or situation; to involve tentative responses in interaction with other people involved to test whether our interpretation is similar to theirs; consequently, to involve a process of negotiation in which broad agreements on meanings and acceptable responses are hammered out; and, as a result of all this, to be a form of ‘successful coping’ which, operationally, reduces what was at first unknown and potentially threatening to something broadly ‘familiar’ and predictable. Thus, platitudinally, learning is a process of social interaction; and social interaction is characterized – at periods other than those of acute confrontation and crisis – by a rising spiral of shared experiences, shared emotions, shared meanings, which, in turn, facilitate the process of environmental control, if one uses the term ‘environment’ to embrace the social, cultural and psychological, as well as the physical, context of thought and action. The implication of such a view is that hitherto accepted models of curriculum planning, characterized as they were and are by an essential reliance on ‘cold’, objective analysis of objective needs and strategies, bear as much resemblance to reality as the basically identical and equally mythical image of the natural scientist alone in his laboratory pursuing objective truth. However, it is a model which is so deeply embedded in contemporary culture that it is dangerous to underestimate its strength. It is the model behind the expenditure of £100 million on the planning of a new Ford car, or several thousand million pounds on a Concorde, and it has as its goal the production of a user-proof commodity. It is also the model behind certain crucial aspects of the work of the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council in which sums in excess of £10 million have been spent in an attempt to produce curricular plans which will guarantee improved learning outcomes in spite of deficiencies in large sectors of the teaching profession.

I want to focus on just a few aspects or issues in the planning process. Firstly, I am conscious that there are, in our present social situation, two conflicting forces at work which have relevance to this discussion: on the one hand, there is a growing alienation experienced by almost all of us – by the industrial worker through the separation of his daily work from the ultimate product, and by the teacher faced by a separation between the planning and design process involved in a new curriculum package and his or her daily work in the classroom. In a sense, there is a dehumanizing division of labour between those who plan and those who implement, and this has expression, at least in some of the extreme versions of detailed course planning, in a sort of contempt for the user. The ‘good’ package is one which is user- (that is, pupil and teacher) proof – one which guarantees results regardless of the idiot consumer. Of course, this is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy: treat someone this way and boredom and backlash follow. I suppose one of the most extreme (short of full, programmed learning courses) versions of this was the Holt Social Studies Curriculum kit¹ which came out in the 1960s: here you had, in a neat plastic attaché case, pupil books, teachers’ guides (replete with hundreds of detailed aims and objectives), Banda masters for duplicating notes, OHP transparencies to obviate blackboard work, slide or film strip sets for ‘enrichment’, together with records for media variety, and assessment tests and mark schemes to ensure ‘correct’ evaluation. I leave you to imagine the impact on users in the British cultural context of such an approach: great, if your consuming interest is golf or gardening rather than teaching. And, given more teachers turning to golf, you have an inexhaustible demand for more teacher-proof packages.

On the other hand, and emerging from the same complex of social conflict which generated the first response, is the demand for participation – hardly yet recognized in teaching at a level of involvement above consultation. This demand is not only associated with a politically divergent view of what a healthy society needs to be, but also with the idea that one cannot, usefully, separate wholly the design and implementation phases of an innovation. For one thing, the study of organic systems has forced industrial and economic planners to think in terms of ‘feedback’: unless the field experience of use is ‘fedback’ into the ongoing design/redesign process, disaster is ultimately inevitable. In education we call this process, in the jargon, ‘formative evaluation’.² Its recognition as a central link in curriculum planning calls into question the whole previous model – as well as the model of a hierarchically organized (as opposed to an organic) society with which it is basically linked. This is an area where no easy solutions can yet be seen but I would suggest that one useful approach already exists in education and has its roots as far back as the early 1950s in the birth period of the Welfare State: it was Aneurin Bevan who questioned the detailed planning approach which derived from the Soviet GOSPLAN machinery and suggested that it was impractical for the modern, complex, advanced technological economy. He preferred, instead, a process of planning involving control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – below which individual initiative and local circumstances must be allowed to apply creative initiatives. I would suggest that the British economy is no more complex than the learning process and that the ‘commanding heights’ concept involves a very difficult but potentially fruitful approach to our work.

Only a little thought will lead to the conclusion that this model, if it is to work, will involve a far greater attention to the people involved: rather than a process of abstract analysis (of ‘needs’, of objectives, etc.), ‘planning’ will involve attempting to influence social process – ‘social’ in the sense of the dynamics at work within groups of users. Once one has reformulated the problem in this way a whole new area of research findings can be brought to bear. For example, it seems clear that the flow of new information into and through a ‘social system’ (that is an ongoing group engaged in a common task), is affected by, for example, the ‘location’ of those receiving the information: new ideas are often first picked up by ‘loners’ who are relatively isolated and who, perhaps as a result, are primarily members of other groups. In practice, in the staffroom, they may be the chronic ‘course attenders’ who may not, as a result, be very popular but who, if properly ‘managed’ may be vital channels for new ideas. I say ‘properly managed’ because, by definition, as they are peripheral to the group their ideas and information are not quickly or easily passed on in ‘normal’ circumstances: their ideas only slowly percolate until, quite suddenly, they can become ‘respectable’ and important. Here, again, research suggests that someone may be playing a vital role in the group – that of ‘opinion-leader’, who can judge both the needs of the group and the potential of innovating ideas and bring them together. Without being too cynical, it seems to me that a good head is one who uses the peripherals like an old-style general used his cavalry: their function was to find out where the enemy was and in what strength. Basically the only way to do this was to get shot at – so they were expendable. The head encourages new ideas and experiments by and from peripherals (young enthusiasts with nothing to lose and everything to gain?): if they are failures then the failures are those of the authors; if they are successes they automatically enhance the authority of the leader who ‘encouraged’ them. That is an example of the management of a group learning process and can be seen as ‘natural’ because the survival of the leadership is often closely linked to the survival of the group.

We must recognize how basic are social interaction processes like these. Most of us, for example, don’t carefully analyze a possible new textbook: rather we rely on ‘old Joe’s’ opinion – and if many of us turn to him, he is an ‘opinion leader’. Similarly GPs with new drugs or girls with new fashions. However, we must also recognize the strengths of the R.D. and D. model and somehow synthesize the two – for example, by restricting central planning to decisions on broad knowledge structures in a curriculum (for example, the traditional decision to treat physics under heat, light, sound), on the basic concepts to be acquired, and on a range of exemplificatory resource materials. Adaptation, implementation and development would be left to local initiative. This would be the application of restricting central planning decisions in complex systems to the ‘commanding heights’.

Contemporary ways of looking at behaviour in organizations are derived from the same social and philosophical assumptions as are modern ideas on drama. For example, it is argued that the communication of ideas just does not happen unless there is a degree of ‘openness’ in the climate of the audience group; that ‘openness’ depends upon a sense of security, a sense of trust, as well as on an awareness of the need for new information if current problems are to be successfully solved. There is a fine line between these countervailing faces of need, often associated with a growing sense of insecurity, and security itself as the foundation for the risk-taking inherent in change. And the dynamics of a sense of group security based upon trust – a characteristic of all good ‘lessons’ surely? – is, to me, complex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Issues in Educational Drama
• Section One: Overviews of Drama in Education
• Section Two: Concepts of Drama in Education
• Section Three: Planning and Evaluating Drama in Education
• Notes on Contributors
• Index