The Drama of Schooling: The Schooling of Drama

Robert J. Starratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136669262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Starratt's highly original book offers fresh insights into the nature of teaching, learning, schooling as a multi-cultural, social enterprise, and the importance of vision for that leadership—by using the analogy of drama. Schooling is a preparation to participate in the social drama, both as an individual and as a community. Beyond participation, schooling can enable youngsters to maintain and restore the human purposes of the social drama. This unique book accommodates present critics of schools from both the left and the right, but goes beyond them to offer a script for restoring the schools to their human and social purposes.

Chapter 1

A Fresh Look at Schooling

Something funny is going on. Paradigm shifts used to take a century or more to evolve and crowd their competitors off the stage. Now it appears that in various spheres of human activity, such as natural science, political science, management science and organizational theory, major shifts are occurring at such a rapid rate that the ascendancy of a paradigm in one area such as education is out of phase with the ascendancy of new paradigms in other areas such as political science and organization theory. So, for example, within the last few years we read about the inadequacy of traditional management theory to explain or to guide organizational actions at the same time that we find categories from this traditional management theory embedded in the policies for school reform.

Schools are being guided by policies urging efficiency and effectiveness, accountability, close measurement of tightly defined competencies, cost effectiveness, clear articulation of goals, achievement standards, the quantifying of results, etc. At the same time, scholars in the management sciences are debunking the absolute claims and the practical usefulness of this very management science. We hear much more about bounded rationality,¹ wilfulness and non-natural order in organizations,² organizational chaos,³ loosely-coupled systems,⁴ management as snake handling,⁵ managing turbulence.⁶

These changes in management theory reflect shifts throughout the social sciences away from an exclusive epistemology dominated by logical positivism and empiricism.⁷ Many social scientists now acknowledge what natural scientists had recognized a generation earlier, namely that observation is theory laden, that scientific language is inherently metaphorical, that scientific discovery requires imagination as well as rigorous logic.⁸ However, the rigidly positivistic and empiricist research procedures and the language they employ remain firmly institutionalized in funding structures, legislative and administrative guidelines, professional reward systems and in professional graduate school curricula, even though the epistemologies that support them are no longer considered adequate.⁹

The language and perspectives by which schools are studied and governed belong much more to behavioristic, positivistic, empiricist epistemologies. Those perspectives are out of joint with emerging perspectives in the social sciences and policy sciences. Those perspectives, therefore, suffer from the restrictions, distortions and ideological biases of such epistemologies. Those perspectives need to be replaced, or at least balanced by perspectives that honor the anthropology which informs the emerging paradigms. This book is an effort to develop one such perspective, a perspective which employs the analogy of drama. Before proceeding to the argument, however, some additional commentary on the shortcomings of current language and perspectives on schooling may be in order, especially when spoken from within the schooling enterprise itself.

Shortcomings of Current Perspectives on Schooling

The conceptual frameworks and images of organization and management theory were most often developed through studies of either business corporations or of government bureaucracies.¹⁰ The literature clearly delineates the differences between government bureaucracies and the more entrepreneurial industries, the former being more concerned with providing services and executing government policies, the latter being more concerned with productivity, profit, market share. Both types of organizations share tendencies toward bureaucratic formalities such as hierarchical lines of authority and privilege, specialization and subdivision of work, measurement of output, etc. Voluntary organizations such as churches and charitable agencies, while differing in many ways from business and government organizations, frequently manifest similar bureaucratic tendencies.¹¹ School systems, especially the larger ones, reflect many organizational features found in other government organizations, and therefore can be studied and understood and governed by means of the more traditional categories and images found in organizational and management literature.

The categories and images of the literature of organizational and management theory are of but limited use, however, when applied to individual schools. There are three realities about individual schools that are not easily captured by standard managerial or organizational categories. First their size, for the most part, is too small to suit the powerful abstractions employed in managerial or organizational talk. Such talk is similarly inappropriate, for example, for a family unit. One does not talk of the chief executive officer of a family; neither does one worry about problems of span of control, or indeed of productivity. Such terminology sounds pretentious in a familial setting. Schools are much closer to families than to large corporations, not only in size, but in affect and in focus.

The language of management or organizations fails to accommodate a second reality of schools. Schools deal with children and youth in an environment that is intentionally developmental. Hence children and youth are not expected to fit into neatly packaged identities or roles. Neither are they expected to have the single-minded attention to one task or to a cluster of tasks which other organizations assume. Their world outside of school, of course, has many dimensions (friends, hobbies, family activities, neighborhood networks, recreational activities, etc). Even in school where their involvements are more circumscribed, youngsters’ lives are multidimensional: their studies vary and hence require of them many different responses; they are usually involved in one or two extracurricular activities; they are constantly circulating among either close or casual friends; they are constantly negotiating relationships with adults as authority figures, as teachers, coaches and simply as human beings. They engage in all these activities in an expected, trial and error, developmental fashion.¹²

Schools differ from large organizations in yet a third dimension. The business of schools is education, learning, intellectual mastery of bodies of knowledge. The process of education is an entirely different process than a manufacturing process in the auto industry, or the judgmental process used by a government zoning commission. The essential tasks and the way the work gets done do not conform to categories derived from business or government. Learning to use a language, learning to argue logically, learning relationships between concepts and systems, learning to evaluate points of view, is a slow and painstaking process that requires endless exercises and activities. Gilbert Highet quotes approvingly a Jesuit educator who counseled that ‘the mind of a schoolboy is like a narrow-necked bottle. It takes in plenty of learning in little drops, but any large quantity you try to pour in spills over and is wasted’.¹³

Cognitive psychologists have mapped developmental stages of youngsters’ ability to use abstract concepts and to think logically. They tell us that movement from one stage to the other is slow and incomplete. Those who are able to reason abstractly, do not always do so; regression to earlier forms of concrete thinking is commonplace.¹⁴ Although schooling for handicapped youngsters illustrates the point emphatically, all children learn at their own pace and according to their own readiness. State legislatures to the contrary notwithstanding, schools cannot coerce, or command learning to take place. The ‘productivity’ of a school depends on the autonomous learner more than it does on the talent and skill of the staff. Students cannot be fired for not learning; neither can they be sent to prison for failing an exam.

School Reforms Employ the Wrong Categories

The language of efficiency and effectiveness cannot be thought to encompass the essence of schooling. That language has its uses. When dealing with state or large urban school systems, those categories may be useful when considering economies of scale and when setting fiscal policies. To mount a national or state wide school reform effort exclusively around those terms, however, and intentionally to link that terminology to simplistic economic outcomes of schooling is to superimpose on schools a conceptual framework that neither fits, nor is in fact workable.¹⁵ That language suits large systems of education in which unit costs can be tabulated and related to numbers of students graduating and pursuing advanced education. Similarly, one might use the language of efficiency and effectiveness when evaluating a constellation of state services to families. That language is not appropriate to a single family, however, because the size and nature of the family simply will not tolerate being reduced to those impersonal abstractions. In an analogous sense the size, the nature of its essential tasks, and the developmental nature of its constituency makes such language of limited use for the purposes of governing, managing or understanding a school.

The perspectives on schooling derived from organization and management theory need to be seen against a broader and deeper landscape. Such a fresh perspective of schooling emerges when we conceive of schooling as drama. The argument of the book unfolds the human drama inherent in schooling, a drama not only of the individual person attempting to fashion an identity, but a drama of a community in the process of defining itself. The schooling process can be described as drama, not only because of the stakes involved for the players, but also because of the stakes for society. Schooling is a formal attempt to coach youngsters in the playing of the social drama, and to critique their performance while there is still an atmosphere of rehearsal (using the more traditional understanding of schooling). Once young people leave school, the playing of the social drama takes place on the stage of history where there is little chance to replay and cancel out a bad performance.

Organizational Culture and the Drama of Schooling

Within the literature on organizational theory, there has emerged the perspective of ‘organizational culture’. Using concepts such as symbolism, ritual, heroes, emblems and coat of arms, these analyses have enriched the more functionalist images derived from industrial and governmental organizations. Ethnographic studies of schools and classrooms have further enriched our understanding of schools as cultures.¹⁶ Commentaries on the organizational culture of schools, however, have tended to view the usefulness of the cultural perspective in predominantly functional terms. That is, organizational culture is spoken of as a means to an end, as a constellation of organizational elements which, when properly orchestrated, will lead to increased ‘productivity’ or to reform of schools. This utilitarian attitude misses the point of cultures as expressions of human meaning and purpose which transcend considerations of productivity.¹⁷ On the other hand, the perspective of drama sheds a fresh light on organizational cultures in schools, indicating how cultural elements make up the dramatic costuming, staging, lighting and other dramatic effects used in playing out the social drama.

Teaching as Performance

Recently Pajak has called attention to the use of language and metaphor from the theater as offering fresh perspectives on teaching, superv...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A Fresh Look At Schooling
• 2. The Central Theme: Drama
• 3. The Drama of Schooling/The Schooling of Drama
• 4. Schooling as Organizational Drama
• 5. The Drama of Schooling: The Formation of A Character
• 6. The Drama of Schooling: The Formation of A People
• 7. Reflective Practice as Dramatic Consciousness
• 8. Leadership, Vision and Dramatic Consciousness
• 9. Players, Coaches, Directors, Critics
• 10. Grounding the Analogy in Classroom Observation
• 11. Schooling as Drama: Concluding Reflections
• Index