Teaching Classroom Drama and Theatre

Practical Projects for Secondary Schools

Martin Lewis, John Rainer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136480461
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This revised and updated edition of Teaching Classroom Drama and Theatre will be an essential text for anyone teaching drama in the modern classroom. It presents a model teachers can use to draw together different methodologies of drama and theatre studies, exemplified by a series of contemporary, exciting practical units. By re-appraising the different traditions and approaches to drama teaching in schools, it offers innovative, contemporary projects and lessons suitable for a wide range of teachers and learners.

Divided into eight units with each one offering photocopiable resources and exploring a different theme, this book has been updated to reflect current trends in drama teaching and important themes in contemporary society such as:

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• Myths and urban folklore

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• Moral decisions

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• Asylum seekers

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• The transition from primary to secondary school

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• Conflict resolution and propaganda

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• Protest and resistance

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• Medieval plays

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• Transportation

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• Crime and punishment.

Each unit provides ideas and lesson plans which can be used as they are or adapted to suit your own particular needs.

This book will be an invaluable resource for anyone who teaches – or is learning to teach - drama in secondary schools as well as those who work with young people in other drama settings.

Section 1

Introduction and rationale

Introduction

Drama is a human need. Throughout time and culture human beings have enacted events in order to understand them or gain power over them. In schools, students and teachers have come to recognize the power and efficacy of drama to simultaneously learn about and create art and culture.

In this book, teachers will find examples of well-researched and carefully resourced projects that attempt to integrate models of drama teaching often seen as separate, or even in opposition. The eight teaching units provide dramas that will engage and motivate a wide range of learners: dramas that are, simply, worth doing. In addition, the dramas provide a vehicle for a structured approach to the explicit teaching of theatrical ideas and concepts. We believe that this is in tune with recent theoretical developments in drama teaching.

Writing this book has led us to seek to re-examine the emphasis and the conceptual basis of our own teaching and we hope that this process might ultimately result in a dynamic, integrated methodology of direct practical use to teachers.

Readers who are interested in the theoretical background for this book are referred to the next chapter, where we explore something of the historical context of drama teaching in the UK, and outline the ideas that have informed its writing.

For those who wish to ‘cut to the chase’ and start teaching, we invite you to start exploring the practical units that begin withUrban legends.

Each of the eight teaching units is designed to give very detailed step-by-step guidance to the teachers and workshop leaders facilitating the drama work. However, we would like to stress that the tasks and instructions are not intended to be prescriptive. We hope that teachers and facilitators will make the units their own, tailoring the work to suit the needs and learning styles of their students – and this may well mean wandering ‘off-text’! Such departures should be seen as part of the experience of the units. Similarly, the units are designed to enrich, rather than replace any existing curriculum. As the units are comprehensive and fairly substantial in content and length, a brief ‘map’ of the activities, as well as follow-up evaluation materials, which encourage students’ reflection and self-assessment, are provided. Each unit has its own photocopiable resource sheets.

Unit 3 outlines the ‘organizing concepts’ around which the units are based, and which form its assessment framework. It also provides more detail on how teachers might get the most out of using the book. Grids are provided that allow teachers to track student progress and which show how the various units address elements of the UK citizenship outcomes.

We think that you will find the units offer rich learning resources that should lead to memorable drama experiences for your classes and hope that you enjoy teaching them.

Classroom drama and theatre – a manifesto

I am suggesting that in this coming century we re-educate practitioners to think theatre. If everyone knows that everything they make is theatre then the term may indeed appear more often in titles, but more important than that is the desirability that all teachers would recognise they are sharing the same common ground.All drama courses, all drama activities will be seen as practising one or more theatrical genres. All attempts to weave new theories will have the basic principles of theatre as their shared point of departure.

(Bolton, 2000:28)

The late 1980s can now be seen as a watershed in relation to the teaching of drama in schools in the UK. At this time two events took place that were significantly to alter the way in which drama teachers thought about their subject. The first was the publication of the Education Reform Act (1988) and the (soon to be discarded) 1989 version of the National Curriculum for England and Wales – which included drama only as a subcategory within English.The second was the publication of David Hornbrook’s polemical and iconoclastic bookEducation and Dramatic Art.

It is well-charted territory that the challenges of this period had a profound effect on the drama teaching community. Since then, however, influential writers on school drama have – explicitly or implicitly – responded to Hornbrook’s various challenges in a number of ways. Writers such as Jonothan Neelands (1998), John O’Toole (1992), Cecily ONeill (1995), and Michael Fleming (2001) all made attempts to broaden drama teaching’s theoretical base and to reframe ‘drama-in-education’ or ‘process drama’ as legitimatetheatre practice. Gavin Bolton – a practitioner long concerned with exploring the relationship between educational drama and theatre – has also recently and persuasively argued (2000) that a broad conception of theatre should now be adopted and that this would allow drama in education to be regarded as a legitimate ‘subgenre’ of theatre.

By looking to the work of theorists from other fields of enquiry, school drama practitioners during this period began to develop a moreinclusive conceptual model of practice.

In general terms, they attempted to:

• Legitimize drama in education (or ‘process drama’) as a ‘subgenre’ of theatre in its own right.
• Clarify its relationship to other ‘mainstream’ theatre genres.
• Re-emphasise theatrical outcomes in their teaching, alongside more instrumental aims related to personal and social development and thematic content.
• Seek to clarify thenature of learning in drama/theatre and explore issues of progression and assessment.
• Acknowledge that a drama/theatre curriculum should bebroad and balanced.
• Establish a broadconsensus of opinion in relation to the preceding points.

As to the effect of these developments, recent writings on teaching drama have made much reference to an emerging consensus amongst practitioners and the widespread acceptance of ‘inclusivity’ as its watchword. Although many current teachers would include themselves inside this consensus, Mike Fleming, one of the writers who first identified the move ‘beyond the fragments’ of previous in-fighting and disagreement has since begun to question what is meant by inclusivity:

What exactly does an ‘inclusive’ approach to the subject mean? Does it mean that any form of practice is acceptable? Does consensus mean simply that there is a greater level of tolerance of different approaches, rather than a coherent theoretical rationale or consistent set of practices?

(Fleming, 2001:2)

What is beyond dispute is that the drama landscape shifted in decisive ways during the 1990s. As a result, drama teachers have sought to recast their subject in ways that are having profound effects, not only on what is taught in the name of school drama, but also on how and why it is taught. Some of this ‘post-Hornbrook’ thinking about drama teaching has influenced our own understanding and we identify some key elements in what follows.

In an early response to Hornbrook’s critique, Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland (1992) provided an interesting analysis of then current drama teaching practice in relation to theatre – specifically, what they labelled as ‘post-Brechtian modernism.’ This interesting article was one of the first explicit attempts to root school drama in a particulartheatrical tradition. In so doing, the authors were consciously seeking to use the conceptual language of theatre to describe a particular example of teaching – in distinction to the assertion that drama in education was somehow outside ‘the aesthetic field’ (Abbs, in Hornbrook, 1989:ix).

Of particular note in the article were references to the similarities drawn between ‘Brechtian’ acting and the drama teaching technique ofteacher in role. Previous assumptions about role playing had largely assumed it to be qualitatively different to ‘acting,’ but Lacey and Woolland were able to point persuasively to conceptual similarities. Although Gavin Bolton (1998) has more recently explored the nature of classroom acting in some detail, others have looked to other traditions for theoretical models that would help to clarify this and other relationships. In our own work, we have been increasingly drawn to the work of contemporary practitioners consciously operating in a radical ‘art theatre’ tradition.

In his bookA Formalist Theatre (1987), Michael Kirby helpfully frames the issue of what is meant byacting in terms of the contemporary theatre’s ‘flight’ from naturalism:

As recently as the fall and winter of 1964 the Tulane Drama Review devoted two complete issues to Stanislavski; now the method no longer has the absolute dominance it once did in this country, and certain alternative approaches have attracted great interest. Everyone now seems to realise that “acting” does not mean just one thing – the attempt to imitate life in a realistic and detailed fashion.

(Kirby, 1987:14)

He also makes interesting observations about the general changes occurring in contemporary theatre practice that seem to resonate with the concerns of school drama:

Everyone now seems to realise that ‘acting’ does not mean just one thing – the attempt to imitate life in a detailed and realistic fashion …(E)very aspect of theatre in this country [the US] has changed [since the 1960s]: scripts have lost their importance and performances are created collectively; the physical relationship between audience and performance has been altered in many different ways and has been made an inherent part of the piece; audience participation has been investigated; ‘found’ spaces rather than theatres have been used for performance … there has been an increased emphasis on movement and on visual imagery.

(Ibid:14–15)

Kirby also provides a useful ‘continuum of acting behaviours’ in which he attempts to classify acting within a broader context of performance:

Acting can be said to exist in the smallest and simplest action that involves pretence.

(Ibid:7)

Kirby’s continuum of ‘acting behaviours’ provides a taxonomy that can be applied to all performance contexts from ‘not acting’ at all, through ‘simple’ to more ‘complex’ forms of acting. Interestingly, he also suggests that contemporary theatre has seen a shift away from the ‘complex’ end of the continuum, towards simpler, perhaps less naturalistic styles of performance. Viewed in this perspective ‘role play,’ commonly encountered in educational contexts, is clearly a form of acting and may legitimately be seen alongside other forms of contemporary theatre practice. Kirby’s analysis of non-naturalistic acting allows a number of classroom practices – including that ofteacher in role – to findtheatrical legitimacy. Within Kirby’s framework, role playing can be seen as consonant with the notion of ‘simple’ acting; neither less nor more legitimate as ‘art’ than other forms.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and Dedication
• List of figures, tables, unit maps and resource sheets
• Foreword to the Revised Edition
• Section 1 Introduction and Rationale
• Section 2 Teaching Units
• Bibliography
• Index