Education In Drama

David Hornbrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136615252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Hornbrook, referring to current legislation, argues the case for an organized curricular framework for drama in the 1990s which develops in children the activities of designing, directing, acting, writing and evaluating - all within the range of the historic context of dramatic work. He asserts that recent drama teaching in Britain has been child-centred and psychological, and viewed as a learning medium rather than as an aesthetic study in itself. This, he believes, has had the effect of cutting children off from the variegated world of the theatre and, in the broader sense, from any collective aesthetic or historical dimension. This book is intended mainly for the use of primary and secondary school teachers.

Chapter 1

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Setting the Stage

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Drama in schools is a practical artistic subject. It ranges from children's structured play, through classroom improvizations and performances of specially devised material to performances of Shakespeare.

HMI, 1989¹

Actors, Theatres and Plays

It becomes increasingly clear that the incorporation of drama-in-education within English in the national curriculum poses a threat to the disciplinary independence of drama in schools in England and Wales. While primary drama specialists may be pleased that the statutory arrangements for English ensure role-play and improvization a place under ‘speaking and listening’, few, I suspect, are happy with the way the 1988 Education Act effectively split the arts into national curriculum (visual art and music) and non-national curriculum (dance and drama).² In secondary schools there is a real danger that small but hard-fought-for drama departments will be colonized by their English neighbours, while lecturers on the few remaining initial teacher training courses in drama may well speculate on how long it will be before they become reduced to teaching options within English majors.

As a response to a situation in which there is a real danger that drama could slip quietly from the curricula of our schools altogether, this book challenges the idea that drama is best thought of as part of English and offers instead a new theoretical basis for drama as a subject and a framework for dramatic practice. By acknowledging the importance of theatre culture as well as classroom culture to a balanced drama education, it proposes a dramatic curriculum based on the acceptance of drama's legitimate place within the arts and sets out to provide a structure for understanding education in drama in primary and secondary schools which will make sense to specialists and non-specialists as well as to students,³ governors and parents.

A dramatic curriculum which pays careful attention to theatre practice will allow drama teachers access to a subject framework within which they will be able to focus on the quality of the dramatic product as well as on the issues disclosed by it. Other arts disciplines manage successfully to combine attention to form with concern about content, and there is no reason why this should mean a retreat into elocution classes and lectures on theatre history. As Peter Abbs comments, one of the problems with drama-in-education in the past was that a ‘desire for immediate spontaneity of expression ousted stylistic constraints — and, hence, the formal possibilities — of inherited culture’.⁴ In fact, experience suggests that sensitive induction into a culture of theatre with its conventions and accepted body of knowledge and skills is likely to stimulate rather than inhibit creative autonomy. Mastery of form goes along with the ability to express content, and form is only learned through experiencing a rich variety of options. Exposure to theatre culture should begin in the primary school.

Sadly, the relationship between classroom drama and the theatre world outside has never been as close as it should have been. Concentration in the early days upon the therapeutic benefits of drama for the participants diverted attention away from the idea of drama as communication to audiences. With the promotion of drama as a learning method in the 1970s the gap between school and theatre became more pronounced, and by the 1980s it had become customary in drama-in-education circles to speak of ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ as two quite distinct categories of activity.⁵

Perhaps some of the popular myths about the theatre are partly to blame for past reluctance to embrace its conventions in school. Maybe grisly experiences of amateur performances dissuaded some teachers from incorporating theatre practice into their drama lessons. Certainly the school play has not always been the best advertisement for curriculum drama — inaudible voices, sagging scenery and hard chairs do not always inspire confidence in drama as an educational force. Meanwhile, the tendency of the popular press to publicize theatre gossip and highlight the seamier aspects of backstage life has not helped the image of theatre in schools.

Of course, the truth is that there are excellent amateur productions where all participants work hard and modestly to produce work of high quality by anyone's standards. By the same token, I know teachers who can coax extraordinary levels of achievement from young performers and technicians in school shows which, for intelligence, presentation and sheer artistic bravado, leave many professional productions standing. Also, while the professional theatre itself may have more than its fair share of misfits, the vast majority of actors are disciplined artists who use the talent they have been given and the skills they have acquired in the conscientious pursuit of their craft.

We must therefore be careful not to assume Rousseau's somewhat stereotypical view of the theatre as a place where ‘in order to be temperate and prudent, we must begin by being intemperate and mad …’⁶ The days of the astrakhan coat and the cigarette holder, if they ever existed, are long gone. Many theatre workers are now employed by small companies which frequently share similar aims with teachers; some companies have active educational programmes. The links which might be made between schools — primary and secondary — and groups like these, as well as with companies which perform specifically for young people, are potentially very fruitful and will help to dispel the folklore.

If the dramatic curriculum is to reconcile drama in schools with its generic lineage by identifying fully with the theatre and its conventions, forms of practice and characterizing vocabulary, then changes will be inevitable. For one thing, the linguistic evasiveness of educational drama in matters theatrical will need to be displaced by a language more widely shared and understood. Like many disciplines fighting for recognition, drama-in-education has employed jargon to boost its esteem. Ever closer examination of the minutiae of the ‘drama process’ in journals and MA dissertations spawned a coded language to which few classroom teachers, I suspect, could honestly own access. The incorporation of this specialized language into an increasingly mystifying general discourse served to isolate drama-in-education not only from the rest of arts education, but also from the wider culture of the theatre. By contrast, in the new dramatic curriculum, student playwrights, directors, and stage-managers will tread the boards of the primary classroom as confidently as their professional counterparts do those of the local theatre; student actors will study their lines, rehearse their parts and perform, knowing that in doing so they join a tradition which stretches from ancient times to the dramas of their own experience.

It will have to be acknowledged that drama is a performing art. In the past, nervousness about the educational value of students performing has meant that drama-in-education's commitment to what might be assumed to be the most fundamental aspect of the subject — acting — has been sometimes less than whole-hearted. Nevertheless, from primary assemblies to examination practicals, students have continued to take on dramatic roles and act them out before audiences. For some students, their enthusiasm for drama will lead them to taking parts in the school play or in a youth theatre production. Drama teachers wary about the dramatic curriculum giving greater emphasis to this key element of dramatic art might seek reassurance from colleagues working in music or dance where the issue of performance has traditionally been less controversial.

Reservations about performing together with the domination of drama lessons by improvization and role-playing sometimes left only small spaces for the consideration of written texts, or playscripts. Although the 1980s saw the development of techniques for exploring scripts through drama, the emphasis here tended to be very much on the distillation of suitable themes and issues from published works. These then became the focus for more improvizations. That one might ‘teach Shakespeare through drama’ — an idea with much currency at the time — presupposed that classroom drama was best deployed in the unearthing of otherwise inaccessible aspects of the plays.⁷ For all Peter Brook's conviction that ‘the teaching is in the event not the message’,⁸ rarely was it suggested that it might also be appropriate to perform parts of a Shakespeare play in the classroom, despite the continuing popularity, in both primary and secondary schools, of ‘extra-curricular’ productions of Shakespeare.

This lack of attention to the written word meant that in many secondary schools with drama specialists, work on published plays happened mostly in the English department. This itself may well have reinforced in some students’ minds the idea that playscripts were literature to be read around the class. However, in the same way that in music students from an early age learn to write and read musical scores, so the dramatic curriculum must accept playscripts as an essential part of the study of drama. Debate about themes and issues, about plays as literature, may well be the legitimate province of the English department; such discussion in drama, however, should be seen as a way of understanding and shaping possible interpretations of the plays in performance. Unlike English, drama can provide opportunities for the realization of those interpretations, with students actively directing, designing and performing. To reflect more accurately the key place of the playwright in the theatre tradition, the dramatic curriculum will have to redress the balance between scripted and devised work. As well as having opportunities to improvize as they progress in drama, students should be increasingly confronted by published work of all kinds.

Drama in schools has also been marked by a reluctance to engage with the process of skills acquisition. A tacit commitment to the tenets of progressive education persuaded many drama teachers in the 1980s to be wary of teaching ‘theatre skills’ in their lessons. Thus, as examination boards struggled to find assessment criteria which matched the broadly humanistic and developmental aims of drama-in-education, students being initiated into the rites of ‘the drama process’ were all too frequently left to their own devices when it came to making themselves heard and not falling over the scenery.⁹ The result was that while those with some natural ability as performers would probably score quite highly, there was really no means of knowing how their less able peers were supposed to develop even quite basic drama skills. Other fundamental dramatic aptitudes were either only touched upon in passing or ignored altogether, and such commonplace features of theatrical life like set design, sound and lighting operation, administration, costume making and stage-management rarely made an appearance in drama lessons before A-level, let alone in the primary school. Yet skills like these are part of the very substance of drama at all levels. Taken together, they help to represent that body of knowledge, understanding and aptitudes which is dramatic art. Without their unabashed presence in schools, the dramatic curriculum will be seriously impoverished.

Other ghosts will also have to be exorcized. For example, for years drama-in-education at secondary level shrunk from the spectre of vocational training. To the student who might actually want to work in the theatre, the developmental vocabulary of ‘the drama process’ has little or nothing to say. Realistically, of course, few students achieve the status of professional actors. However, more might wish to pursue an interest awakened at school in an amateur capacity; for others, involvement in school drama may lead them into films or television, or into jobs as property makers, scene painters or theatre administrators. The extent of employment in arts-related industries in Britain is only just being acknowledged.¹⁰ This is a vast area of potential interest for young people which drama-in-education has traditionally ignored.

Finally, a dramatic curriculum which seeks to locate itself within the arts community must address the question of drama's relationship with the other arts. Again, this is a matter about which drama-in-education has been largely silent. Yet the theatre is the one place where the arts regularly celebrate their commonality, with musicians, writers, dancers and designers collaborating on productions which consistently challenge the barriers which have grown up between the arts in Western culture. Dance-theatre, music-theatre and performance-art are all categories which break down the compartmentalization of the arts and by doing so enrich and diversify our experience. Students of dramatic art will need to know what an important place the other arts have in the making of dramas and the dramatic curriculum should demonstrate as eclectic and imaginative a range of artistic experience as the theatre itself.

Drama, English and the National Curriculum

Uncertainty about the nature of drama as an arts subject in the 1980s was matched by increasing confidence in the aims and methodologies of drama as a learning medium. The subsequent confusion which arose between the outcomes of learning in drama and learning through drama characterized the debate about drama in schools in the years leading up to the 1988 Education Reform Act. While large numbers of drama lessons were designed to examine a range of worthwhile issues and often incorporated highly sophisticated teaching and learning strategies, far fewer attempted to identify, much less monitor, how students actually got better at drama itself. The failure to resolve this key question of disciplinary identity only helped to secure drama's absence from the foundation subjects of the national curriculum.¹¹

The promotion of dramatic learning methods involved drama making implicit claims on many areas of the school curriculum. Personal and social education, for example, was one field for which the processes of learning through drama seemed tailor-made. Students were able to play out a range of ‘problem’ situations in drama which offered up rich material for discussion. Some drama teachers came to believe that a principle aim of drama was to expose forms of social and historical oppression, such as racism and sexism, while generally there was a preoccupation with the exploration of topical issues of all kinds. Engagement in drama as an arts subject — sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘the mere study of theatre skills’ — was subsumed within a wider educational agenda of social skills and political and moral awareness.

On the whole, drama syllabuses in secondary schools reflected this reluctance to engage with the substance of dramatic art. Instead, profiling schemes frequently highlighted matters of socialization and control by drawing attention to students’ willingness to contribute to the lesson and work together in groups. Qualities like involvement and participation were given prominence and rated highly. Many of these non-subject-specific criteria were reflected in the new GCSE drama syllabuses which replaced the old CSE and O-level courses in 1986.¹²

While this emphasis on drama as a means to wider educational ends undoubtedly offered teachers across the curriculum a powerful new educational resource — one that has proved of particular value in the primary school — it distracted prominent practitioners and in-service education providers from the essential task of shoring up drama's eroding subject base. Over the years, in what seems to have been a systematic attempt to distance school drama from any identification with a subject-based theatre practice, ‘theatre’ words were discarded in favour of a self-contained methodological lang...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• The Routledge Falmer Library on Aesthetic Education
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1 Setting the Stage
• Chapter 2 Understanding Drama
• Chapter 3 Telling Tales: A Framework for Dramatic Art
• Chapter 4 The Dramatic Curriculum 1: Production
• Chapter 5 The Dramatic Curriculum 2: Reception
• Chapter 6 Progression and Achievement
• Afterpiece
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index