Teaching Primary English through Drama

A practical and creative Approach

Suzi Clipson-Boyles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136728778
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"The text is extraordinarily succinct, very well organised and highly readable. Each chapter examines in depth specific aspects of teaching and learning in drama and well-chosen practical examples can readily be adopted by teachers. A 'must' for all primary schools."

Drama (the Journal of National Drama)

Review of 'Drama in Primary English teaching'

Teaching Primary English through Drama builds on the success of the classic text Drama in Primary English, inspiring ideas and techniques for teaching English skills through the medium of drama.

Focusing on the power of drama to promote effective learning in primary education, Suzi Clipson-Boyles demonstrates how reading, writing, speaking and listening skills may be developed in ways that will motivate and engage pupils. She uses specific examples from the English curriculum, and also makes links to other areas of the curriculum. In addition, the book explains how assessment during drama can help teachers to evaluate pupils' progress in English. Further guidance is given on how drama can enrich studying for pupils who are learning English as a foreign language. The book also provides a chapter on developing drama as an art form in its own right, with simple ideas and practical suggestions on how to enhance performances.

Teaching Primary English through Drama presents a wide range of drama approaches from ten-minute starter activities to stimulate ideas such as fun ways to practise reading, through to longer projects that can provide contexts for extended writing or help with presentation and performance. The chapters show how drama can help to bring lessons alive in imaginative ways that not only promote enjoyment but also enhance achievement.

This comprehensive and practical guide offers essential reading for primary teachers and other practitioners, and is a valuable resource to trainees. It also provides an excellent foundation for those who wish to extend their expertise further towards drama as a subject specialism.

CHAPTER

1

Making time for drama

Chapter overview

This chapter aims to help you understand how and why drama can add value to your teaching of English. It discusses:

the time pressures of teaching English

the emergence of drama in primary education

the effectiveness of drama for learning

developing a whole-school approach to drama.

The time pressures of teaching English

Raising standards in English has always been the top priority on government agendas across the years. Similarly, most parents and carers measure the success of a school by how well their child can read and write. As a result, increasing amounts of time have been spent on teaching literacy, sometimes at the expense of other areas of the curriculum, including speaking and listening. Teachers can therefore perhaps be forgiven for worrying that they do not have enough time to fit in drama! And yet, despite intensive and relentless drives to spend more time on literacy in primary schools, standards have barely risen. In particular, the quality of children's writing remains a concern. The reality is that many hours can be wasted when children are given inappropriate tasks that are of no interest, have no meaningful context and do not move the learning forward at a sufficiently rapid pace.

Good English teaching is not just about what is taught, but also about how it is taught. Children need to learn, practise and rehearse literacy and oracy skills in a wide range of relevant contexts if they are to engage with what they are learning and make good progress. The challenge for teachers is to make that process interesting, interactive and sufficiently challenging. Drama is one approach that teachers can adopt to provide such opportunities, and it is an extremely effective tool. Including drama in your planning can add significant value to your teaching, and should be regarded as an integrated part of English teaching rather than an additional requirement and pressure on time. There is a wide choice of drama approaches that can be used to help children to learn, practise and apply the basic skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. These range from five-minute starters to stimulate ideas through to more sustained performance or presentation of work for an audience. The different ways of working along this spectrum are described in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3, and practical examples of how these can be used to teach English are provided throughout the book. However, before going into the finer detail of practical application, let us look first at the wider place of drama in primary education, and how it has reached the point that it is at today.

The emergence of drama in primary education

Finding a useful definition for primary drama has often been difficult because views have sometimes been polarised by different pedagogical debates. On the one hand, there are those who believe that drama is a pure art form, directly aligned with creative expression, theatre and performance. The purists in this camp dislike the notion of drama being used as a ‘vehicle’ for teaching other subjects, seeing such an approach as a dilution of the art form and an erosion of its status. At the other extreme, there are those who regard drama as a process of self-exploration and development - a means by which children can interact (rather than act) during simulated or improvised experiences provided to assist their learning. The purists in this camp dislike any notion of theatricality, rehearsal or performance.

There is also a middle ground in the case of primary drama that is not a watering down of both views at the halfway point, but rather a relationship between the two, within which there is a choice of different approaches. These all have different but equally valuable contributions to make to good-quality primary education, from experimental writing in the role-play area through to sophisticated reinterpretations and presentation of work from Shakespeare. This is a useful, balanced and educationally appropriate model for use in primary schools that can address the learning needs of young children, and the practicalities of fulfilling those needs for a class of 35 as part of a packed curriculum! In order to help you understand how this rich and varied model of drama has developed, let us first look at the emergence of drama in the primary school during the last 70 years.

The 1944 Education Act represented a determination to provide children with a new kind of education that would develop them in a more balanced and holistic way. Freedom and self-expression were of critical importance to a nation that was recovering from the repression of two world wars. The arts were to play an important role in this revolutionary approach to education that had never been seen before in Britain.

In the 1950s, drama in education took a further turn of direction as the focus moved away from the ‘performance approach’ and instead prioritised the experiential elements of child drama. In other words, rather than the more traditional rehearsing and polishing traditional work to present to an audience, children were provided with opportunities to play with ideas and experience situations as a means of gaining insight into and understanding of different themes. The work of Peter Slade (1958) was instrumental in developing these new developmental and experiential approaches. It can be no coincidence that this innovative work was taking place during the same decade as the work of child development theorists such as Piaget (1952), whose research was highlighting the links among interaction, speech, thought and learning development.

This exploratory approach to drama in education continued into the 1960s and 1970s as more and more proponents of the method emerged. Brian Way (1967) was a key figure in providing useful practical guidance for teachers, as was Gavin Bolton (1979) during the next 10 years. The high profile of experiential educational drama culminated in the legendary work of Dorothy Heathcote (see Wagner, 1999), and the impact of her work remains influential to this day. Her work demonstrated astounding results with children nationally: more in-depth learning; improved understanding; effective organisation of ideas; alternative expressions and presentations of those ideas; and high levels of engagement and enjoyment of learning. By this time, drama featured significantly in primary education and was included prominently in teacher training courses, as its value to children's learning and development was widely recognised. This belief went from strength to strength and survived well into the 1980s. However, concerns started to emerge about the lack of depth and rigour in the primary curriculum. Gaps were identified in children's knowledge and skills, particularly in English and mathematics, and the 1988 Education Act introduced a statutory National Curriculum to address these problems.

For the next 20 years, drama in primary education underwent major changes and challenges. Despite the fact that short references to drama were made within the different strands in the Orders for English (DES, 1989), it was now largely forgotten about by schools because of the time pressures of an extremely full and prescriptive curriculum, and this period marked the start of a decline. Educational drama was reduced from a rich and thriving part of primary education to a virtually extinct area of learning. Drama's hidden place within English plus brief references to it as a teaching approach in the Orders for mathematics, history, geography and science were not sufficient for schools to see it as mainstream. The significant reduction of drama on initial teacher training courses also meant that expertise in schools was slowly but surely disappearing.

Concerns were raised at various points along the way. In 1990, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education (HMI) published a report on the teaching and learning of drama in primary schools. This endorsed the educational value of drama. ‘The most successful work in primary schools … shows that drama not only has value as a vehicle for work in other subjects; it is also important in its own right and is widely appealing to primary children’ (HMI, 1990: page 5, paragraph 3). In 1991, the National Curriculum Council produced a poster entitled Drama in the National Curriculum, offering guidance to teachers on ways in which they could use drama to teach across the curriculum (NCC, 1991). The Arts Council England also responded to the omission of drama as a foundation subject by producing its own programmes of study for schools to follow in a full report entitled Drama in Schools (Arts Council England, 1992). In addition to recommending the inclusion of drama as an arts subject, the report highlighted the valuable part that drama could play in children's learning: ‘Drama can contribute powerfully to the quality of learning in many areas of the primary school curriculum’ (page 1, paragraph 1.4).

Despite these determined professional attempts by well-respected sectors of the education world to persuade teachers to include drama in their regular planning, the tide of curriculum content had swept over the land of pedagogy and psychology of how young children learn. A hefty, one-size-fits-all delivery model for English became the norm in most schools. The introduction of the National Literacy Strategy Teaching Framework (DfEE, 1998) was the final nail in drama's coffin, despite sparse references to strands of drama related to speaking and listening. During the final decade of the twentieth century, the tightly structured government approach to teaching English in primary schools left little room for creativity by pupils or teachers, and drama all but disapp...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Teaching Primary English through Drama
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Making time for drama
• 2 Getting to know the tools of drama
• 3 Management and organisation
• 4 The place of drama in primary English
• 5 Developing speaking and listening skills
• 6 Creating contexts for writing
• 7 Providing reasons for reading
• 8 English as an additional language
• 9 Performance drama and theatre
• 10 Drama and assessment
• Appendix 1: Further reading
• Appendix 2: Useful organisations
• Photocopiable resources
• References
• Index