Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education

Head, Hands and Heart

Johanna Smith

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350012929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Winner of a Nancy Staub Award for Excellence in Publications on the Art of Puppetry Connecting the art of puppetry with deeper learning for children, this workbook offers a comprehensive guide on how to bring puppetry into the classroom. It places puppet design, construction and manipulation at the heart of arts education and as a key contributor to 'manual intelligence' in young people. Packed with practical, illustrated exercises using materials and technology readily available to teachers, Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education shows you how the craft can enliven and enrich any classroom environment, and offers helpful links between puppetry, the curriculum and other aspects of education.
Informed by developments in assessments and cognitive research, this book features approachable puppetry activities, educational strategies and lesson plans for teachers that expand any syllabus and unlock new methods of learning, including: - Making puppets from basic materials and everyday objects
- Puppetizing children's literature
- Puppetizing science
- Film-making with puppets Puppetry in Theatre and Arts Education is a core text for arts education courses as well as an essential addition to any teacher's arsenal of teaching strategies.

1 Introduction

Why write this book?

There are lots of wonderful books available about puppets and puppet making within educational settings. You can find many of them by contacting puppetry organizations such as UNIMA (the International Association of Puppetry, which is a wonderful group), Puppeteers of America, or your local puppetry guild. It took many years of working with children before I had something to add to the conversation about puppetry education, which has been rich and thorough for a long time. Most puppetry books are craft oriented and describe how to make a variety of puppets. They provide patterns, scripts, and fun activities. Some share ways to use the art of puppetry to explore global traditions and cultures. The best texts include developmental information for educators and strategies for varied populations. All of these books are great resources and I encourage you to find and use them.

However, public school education has radically changed since the publication of most educational puppetry texts. It’s time to reintroduce puppetry to a new generation of educators (and artists) so that it becomes accessible to a new generation of children. Several reasons teachers repeatedly provide for not using puppets in an educational setting are that they feel they are not “crafty” or “artistic” enough to make puppets; there is not enough time to make puppets in the school day; it’s not “educational enough” for administrators; or they are intimidated by how beautiful professional puppets look and feel their work will never compare. What educators need to understand is that the educational power of puppetry lies in its process, not the products. You don’t need a lot of fancy, expensive materials or a formal puppet show performance. In fact, sometimes the less “fancy stuff” you use and the less pressure there is to perform, the more powerful the discoveries tend to be.

How can this be? It’s all how you look at things! In education, thanks to the work of Wiggins and McTighe in Understanding by Design (2005), we’ve learned to ask complex questions that encourage children to experiment, fail, try again, discover, debate, critique, revise, and (hopefully) deeply understand something. Wiggins and McTighe’s “backwards design” method is a perfect tool for developing young minds and is the inspiration for my process in this book. So, instead of spending a lot of time on what puppets are and how to make them (which has been done so well for so long), let’s take a step back and really look at why we use puppets in education. What’s so special about them? What makes them different from any other art form? Why are children so fascinated by them? How can we use their inherent power to draw students in? What else can puppets teach? How can students discover these things for themselves? How can we inspire passion for learning more about something wonderful?

To sum up, this text is intended to provide teachers, puppeteers, and theatre professionals with a step-by-step approach to teaching the essential concepts inherent in puppetry to all types of students. This is not a prescriptive series that must be followed exactly and in order, rather, it is a set of concepts that, if explored, will enhance any visual or performing arts lesson or puppet performance you want to create. You’ll find that some of the deep learning that takes place will enrich students’ lives holistically; often in unpredictable ways. Embrace a little chaos and join in yourself! Please modify these ideas to suit your interests and the populations you teach.

Why should innovative educators use puppetry in the classroom?

Puppetry is the art form that combines all the others. Puppeteers must master visual art, dance/movement, music, and all the jobs in theatre (director, designer, actor, lighting and sound design, writer, and now filmmaker). Puppetry can be used with all ages and populations, and has been found to be particularly effective with students with special needs. In a world where funding for arts education is a precious and tenuous thing, puppetry can be used to address many arts with all students with fewer resources. Puppetry may be especially useful for educators who must address all of the fine arts in standards-based practice, yet are limited in time.

However, there’s a fundamental element of puppetry that can address a great need in today’s classrooms. It seems that the dominant forces are pushing for students to have skills in the virtual world of computers and technology. It’s becoming clear that we can’t neglect the importance of developing skills for the actual world. Let’s explore and celebrate the “tinkering” of our ancestors and the craft traditions that have been a source of pride for all human cultures. Let’s join the wave of “Makers” who are embracing both technology and old-fashioned crafts in their work. We need to encourage the acquisition of tactile skills and familiarity with materials and their properties. I like to think of this as an aspect of “manual intelligence,” or “hand smarts,” as coined by Frank R. Wilson in The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture (1999). As Wilson says, “How does, or should, the education system accommodate the fact that the hand is not merely a metaphor or an icon for humanness, but often the real-life focal point—the lever or the launching pad—of a successful and genuinely fulfilling life?” (1999, 14).

Flexible, creative thinkers and makers will create the innovations we need in a world of scarce resources. I want my students to be the ones who see creative potential where most people see waste. I want my students to see the potential in every object and every person. If students develop advanced practical skills, research is beginning to show they will be happier. Why not place a premium on fostering joy and fun in our classrooms? We need to teach young people to love discovery and learning, and puppetry is a great way to do it.

How do I advocate for and explain this unusual approach to pedagogy to my administrators?

I have found that the best arguments for using puppetry-based teaching methods are almost exactly like the arguments used for using the arts in the classroom, particularly theatre. Advocacy organizations for arts education will be able to direct you to a number of excellent resources that use current research to explain why drama works so well. Thanks to new technologies we are now able to analyze exactly how the human mind learns (although there is still quite a lot to discover). We can share the tools of advocacy from all other art forms, but it is also important to define how puppetry has particular strengths that are not found in any other discipline. We can find connections with puppetry in all four fine arts: dance, theatre, music, and visual arts.

The core of dance education is developing movement literacy, body awareness, and interpreting concepts by applying the elements of dance in choreography. Theatre uses movement to activate characters and abstract ideas. Movement skills are deeply tied to cognitive development. In other words, we can’t separate the physical body from the mind when considering the learning process:

There is a growing commitment to the idea that the mind must be understood in the context of its relationship to a physical body that interacts with the world … Hence human cognition, rather than being centralized, abstract, and sharply distinct from peripheral input and output modules may instead have deep roots in sensorimotor processing. (Wilson 2002, 625)

Puppetry is defined by movement as well. A puppet that doesn’t move is just a statue or doll. Like dance, when moving puppets we activate the body as a fundamental part of learning.

Drama explores the creation of entire worlds. Students take on roles and use their imaginations to view the world “as if” they are another person. They modify their voices to create characters and express emotions. The core of drama education is developing empathy in students. Like dance, drama engages more of the senses and becomes a more concrete experience for learners:

Education through drama removes a traditional learning block of academic routine structure and brings learning into a physical realm that can be acted out to be made real to the students. More senses are activated compared to the absorption of knowledge in a classroom. The belief here is that when new knowledge is generated from within an authentic milieu, learning is viewed as more genuine, dynamic, and meaningful. (Hough and Hough 2012, 456)

Like drama, puppetry is often about creating characters. Students engage in incredibly complex cognitive processes, for example, when performing improvisations between puppet characters.

What distinguishes puppetry from dance and drama is the addition of the transformed, active object (and I’m including the transformed body as object, for example, if you draw eyes on your hand it’s then a puppet object). Movement and character are invoked through the transformation of one thing into another “creature,” with its own view of the world. In addition, the puppet is often an object that must be constructed or created. Its maker must solve the problem of how its construction influences its movement. This process can be discovered organically, or the builder has to engineer a solution. Both are cognitively rich learning experiences.

Visual arts (and theatre design) and music specifically connect the use of the hand to learning, or as Wilson states, “The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand” (1999, 59). The creation and mastery of musical instruments and artistic tools for intricate use by the hand might have even developed human brains:

There is growing evidence that H. sapiens acquired in its new hand not simply the mechanical capacity for refined manipulative and tool-using skills, but, as time passed and events unfolded, an impetus to the redesign, or reallocation, of the brain’s circuitry. (Wilson 1999, 59)

By building and manipulating puppets, students use tools and create real objects that are manipulated by the hands. Mastery is difficult and takes practice, much like learning to play a violin:

We are now at a point where we can more fully sense the convergence of the neurologic, linguistic, developmental, and anthropologic perspectives in our search for an understanding of the role of the hand in human life. This merged perspective prepares us to examine more closely the role of the hand within contemporary social and cultural contexts. More particularly, it prepares us to consider how we do, or how we might, develop our own unseen, dormant, knowing, praxic, inventive hand and put it to our own personal and expressive use—to make it speak, and ourselves more articulate. (Wilson 1999, 209)

Finally, by sharing aspects of all the other art forms, puppetry integrates the arts. This can be powerful (and, quite frankly, time and cost effective). Educators are moving toward the interconnection of disciplines as a powerful methodology. “Transdisciplinarity” and “Arts Integration” are important topics to explore in relation to puppetry:

With new standards and initiatives, general education has shifted its priorities from rote learning of academic content to understanding overarching concepts and building thinking skills that underlie all disciplines … This change in focus toward conceptual and procedural skills should prompt general educators to entertain alternative pedagogies that foster these abilities … Indeed, this may be an opportunity to rethink education as a whole, to shape a new paradigm of education built on a more dynamic, creative, organic, and realistic vision of how the world works, how young people learn, and how the mind understands its experience and the world. …

While knowledge in an academic discipline is important, the focus for art integrators is on how that knowledge is acquired and how deeply it is understood … Similarly, in art integration, learners explore knowledge and perspectives of the academic disciplines while using artistic and integrated methods that disrupt conventional discipline-specific habits of mind. For instance, learners in an art-integrated classroom often play with and visualize ideas in novel and aesthetic ways that are foreign to academic practices. (Marshall 2014, 105, 107)

So, in short, if someone asks you why you use puppets in your classroom, you can tell them you are engaging sensorimotor processing to develop human cognition, generating knowledge from within an authentic milieu, developing empathy in your students, fostering brain development through the use of the hand, and integrating the arts in a transdisciplinary curriculum.

ABOUT MY LESSON PLAN STRUCTURE

How are these lesson plans put together?

The basic structure of my lesson plans is based on a tried-and-true structure from the field of creative drama. I first learned the lesson plan appproach of pique, plan, play, and evaluate from the American founder of creative drama, Winifred Ward, and grew to rely on the very similar motivation, presentation, construction, playing, and assessment puppetry lesson plan structure that I learned from my mentor Johnny Saldaña. I’ve taken that basic structure and added some ideas from Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe. There’s quite a bit of similarity between their lesson planning approach and drama education. For example, their concept of starting with a “hook” to draw students into the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Johanna’s Newspaper Challenge: Or The Puppetry Test
• 3. What is a Puppet? The Plastic Bags Lesson
• 4. Head, Hands, and Heart
• 5. Everyday Object Puppets
• 6. The Power of Design: Puppet Metaphors
• 7. Chakabesh Traps the Sun: Shadow Puppets and Storytelling
• 8. Puppetizing Children’s Literature
• 9. Puppetizing Science: A Cross-Disciplinary Plan for Younger Children
• 10. Puppet Filmmaking in the Classroom
• 11. Giant Puppets and Community Celebrations
• 12. Quick and Easy Ideas for Making Puppets
• 13. Finding Material for Puppetizing Lessons
• 14. A Plan for Devising a New Puppet Play
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint