Teaching Primary Drama

Brian Woolland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317863502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Assuming no prior knowledge or experience of drama teaching, Brian Woollands Teaching Primary Drama offers a comprehensive introduction to the teaching of drama in the primary school, and focuses on current initiatives in primary education including the primary literacy strategy.

The text is an invaluable resource for any teacher wishing to adopt a creative approach to teaching in their classroom. It offers guidance on different drama methods, and each practical idea translates to all areas of the curriculum.

[Teaching Primary Drama] is written in simple terms, uncluttered by references, is refreshingly straightforward and succinct and does not fall into the trap of making a complex subject sound complex; a trait of some texts which can push non-specialists away. Amanda Kipling, London Drama Magazine, Summer 2010 issue.

1
Drama in practice

This part of the book looks in detail at the practice and processes of teaching drama. It offers a wide range of possible starting points and various suggestions as to how you might develop these – using both small and whole group work. It offers ways of thinking about drama with the intention of enabling you to generate your own material.

The numerous practical examples which you will find in this part of the book are all genuine examples of work with children in primary schools in culturally, socially and geographically diverse social environments.

‘Drama with children in the early years’ picks out a number of activities which are particularly useful for teachers of children in Reception classes and Years 1 and 2. It suggests ways of adapting some of the techniques and strategies suggested elsewhere which might at first seem more appropriate for use with older children.

Contents

Chapter 1	Starting points
Chapter 2	Working methods
Chapter 3	Organisation and development
Chapter 4	Drama with children in the early years

1
Starting points

• Drama and story
• Posters, photographs, paintings, objects and artefacts and poetry as starting points
• Teacher as narrator

Embedded example:

• Smugglers

If you have never taught drama before, where do you begin? This chapter suggests ways of getting started, using stories and poems, photographs and pictures to provide a strong stimulus for the teacher and the children. It includes several short examples of work in practice. The practical work and the suggestions given here should be read in conjunction with the next two chapters (‘Working methods’ and ‘Organisation and development’), where many of them are amplified and discussed further.

Extended examples which explore further how you might use known stories, a poem and a painting as starting points for drama can be found in Part 4, where planning for these dramas is also explored in greater depth:

Stories:	Cinderella
	The Tunnel by Anthony Browne
Poem:	Whale Island
Painting:	Children's Games

A good starting point is one that grabs the attention of the children, intrigues on several different levels, implies dramatic tension and contains the seeds of dramatic possibilities and explorations; so it is important to prepare beginnings and starting points with care; but, if you have had little or no experience of teaching drama, how do you do this? You can use pictures (whether they originate in children’s picture books or on the easel of a famous artist), photographs, stories, poems, posters or objects as stimuli for drama.

Chapter 6, ‘Planning and assessment’, deals with finding ideas for drama as well as structuring lessons and relating drama work to the demands of the curriculum. It is, however, worth bearing in mind that the key to good drama lies not so much in you, the teacher, having good ideas, but rather in working with ideas, finding significance and helping children to examine the consequences of the ideas that they have.

In 1975 the critic Raymond Williams coined the term ‘Dramatised Society’, referring to the extraordinary wealth of dramatic fictions available to people throughout their lives. It’s useful to consider this term, ‘dramatic fiction’, when thinking about drama in schools; it enables us to see educational drama as part of a broad spectrum of dramatic activity with which you and the children are familiar. Drama lessons need a dramatic structure just as much as plays and films; but you can learn a great deal about dramatic structure by looking at other dramatic forms. A good film, TV play or piece of theatre hooks its audience within moments. If you can do the same in a drama lesson, you will have the children with you and they will want to collaborate with you. In the drama lesson children may not be performing for an audience, but if you can find a starting point or an opening image which intrigues, startles, mystifies and is above all dramatic, you are well on your way to a drama session which at least has rich potential.

Drama and story

Many people start teaching drama in the primary school by getting children to take on roles from stories they know and act them out, following the original narrative. This is a safe starting point for the teacher because it gives you the security of the original story; and it can be a pleasurable activity for the children if it brings the story to life for them. The problem of this kind of activity, however, is that it is potentially limiting and restrictive. Although the children may be ‘doing’ what you tell them to, they are essentially passive. We need to find ways of giving them a personal stake in what they are doing, giving them decisions to make – both individually and collectively – encouraging the class to work with you, rather than simply following instructions. You can start to hand over decisions to the children by asking them simple questions about specific actions and moments in the story.

In Jack and the Beanstalk, for example, Jack leads his mother’s cow to market:

• How does he prepare for this journey to market? What does he need to take with him? Suppose the cow is reluctant to move – how does he persuade her? What might he say to her? How is he to persuade her to go with him? It’s not easy leading a cow when it doesn’t want to move!
• What kinds of things might the bean-seller say to Jack to persuade him to exchange the cow for beans? How might the bean-seller talk?
• How does Jack climb the beanstalk? I wonder what it feels like to climb something so tall if you’re scared of heights? I wonder what he imagines he might find at the top?

By responding to these simple ‘How’ questions, the children are beginning to make interpretative decisions and to make the story their own. It’s also important to note that addressing the question of ‘How’ focuses on the situation: dwelling on the moment, rather than simply moving quickly from one moment to the next. This is an important principle of drama. How you develop situations in depth is examined in the next chapters.

If you choose to use existing stories as starting points, the work can be much more exciting if the drama develops from the story and beyond it, rather than merely illustrating it. When participants are given responsibility for the action, when they make key decisions and then work through the consequences of those decisions, the opportunities for learning through drama are likely to be far greater than if their actions in the drama are decided for them by an existing narrative. You might find, for example, in your work on Jack and the Beanstalk, that the bean-seller is unable to persuade Jack to exchange the cow for ‘magic beans’ – in which case you might devote time to Jack’s attempts to raise money at the market. Thus the situation that Jack and his Mum find themselves in is more important than clinging to the known story, and exploring that situation is going to result in work of greater depth than simply enacting in a prescriptive way a series of predetermined moments.

One of the problems of ‘acting out’ a known story is that the children already know how it ends. Thus they do not feel the dramatic tension of not knowing what will happen next. If the tension of not knowing what happens next is lost, it has to be replaced by some other kind of dramatic tension. When we go to the theatre, we often do know what is going to happen to the characters whose stories we are watching (when we see a production of a Shakespeare play, for example). What keeps our interest then is the exploration of how and why people get into the situations that they do. Here are some further ways of using a known story to develop dramatic situations with rich potential:

• Stop the reading of the story before the end (as written) and work with the children on the situation at that point in the story, slowly working towards their own ending.
• Explore what happens before the written story starts.
• Explore what happens after it ends.
• Look at what’s going on elsewhere while the well-known story is taking place.
• Consider how we can move people from ‘offstage’ in the story they know to the centre of our drama.

Thus, thinking about the story of The Pied Piper in this way might lead you to the following situations, any one of which you might explore in drama:

• The first people who realise that rats are causing serious problems in the town of Hamelin trying to persuade others that that’s what the problem is.
• The people of Hamelin trying to find their own ways of dealing with the plague of rats.
• The people of Hamelin trying to find ways to investigate their corrupt town council.
• Persuading the Pied Piper to return our children to us.
• The children, who have been led off and held prisoner by the Piper, planning an escape.
• In a neighbouring town where they hear The Pied Piper of Hamelin story as a rumour: what if this town has its own plague of rats, and they don’t know what to do about it? Here, we could use the story directly: perhaps the drama might start with a telling of the rumours that they had heard about events in Hamelin....

Note that each of these examples offers a situation and a focus for action, but not a resolution. The dramatic tension arises from not knowing – either what will happen or how we might achieve what we are aiming for.

While still considering using stories, an alternative approach would be to start working on the drama before reading the story. You might set up a situation similar to that in a story you want to introduce, but not let the children encounter it until after they have finished their own version of it. This has the added advantage of arousing the children’s curiosity in the story when they do encounter it, encouraging them to be active, imaginative, speculative readers. The Giant Awakes, one of the short examples in Chapter 5, is loosely inspired by Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man, but most of the children who took part in this drama did not know either of these stories when we embarked on our drama. After the drama had finished, the teacher read The BFG and The Iron Man to the children. They were spellbound; they had a stake in both stories, and were fascinated by the similarities and differences between the drama they had helped create and the published stories. This concept of ‘ownership’ of material is important in all teaching, but especially in drama. Anyone, child, adolescent or adult, who learns enthusiastically and willingly will learn at a far faster rate and at a more profound level of understanding than if coerced into it. Of course, children should be numerate and literate from an early age, but there is something more important than learning to read, and that is wanting to learn to read. Imagine a child going home at the end of school and saying, ‘We’re reading The Iron Man; it’s great, it’s just like our drama, only in the book he....’

Narrative tension and slowing down the drama

It is worth reiterating a point here which will be picked up again later: the importance of a strong narrative in drama cannot be underestimated – you have to ‘hook’ the children into the work – but the really valuable learning takes place when you intervene in the action to slow it down, to examine what’s going on between people at the moment of high tension, not when the narrative is flowing quickly. Children often want to rush on and find out what happens next. You should use their enthusiasm, but channel it: hang on tightly to the reins and stay where you are and explore that moment in detail. It’s been said that drama is simply about people ‘in a mess’. This is useful in that it draws attention to the importance of situation, but there has to be potential for resolving the ‘mess’ if there is to be dramatic tension; and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Contents
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Introduction 'I don't know what it is, but I know it's tickly'
• 1 Drama in practice
• 2 Drama in an integrated curriculum
• 3 Planning and assessment
• 4 Extended examples
• 5 Resources
• Bibliography
• Index