Drama Tuesday - Making a difference for Arts Education – book by book
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From time to time I am asked to review arts education texts. I do so with a keen interest in arts education particularly arts teacher education. We are always searching for the Holy Grail of arts education textbooks (and have an interest in writing that “perfect” text one day!). Therefore, I look at these reviews as a way of honing my thoughts about what will help. I ask myself, would this help a student teacher who does not have embodied experience of these arts concepts, to teach dance/drama/media arts/music/visual arts in her/his own classroom?
In the terms of the research literature (e.g. Darling-Hammond, Hammerness, Grossman, Rust, & Shulman, 2005), what content knowledge and what pedagogic content knowledge do you need to teach the Arts in schools?
What arts specific information does a teacher need – by that I mean what knowledge of the discipline of an art form do they need? How much “arts knowledge” do you need?
What arts teaching information do you need as a teacher about the specific pedagogies of teaching Dance/Drama/Media Arts/Music/Visual arts?
Looking at the texts available across Australia, what do we see?
There’s focus on:
Addressing gaps in student’s own arts knowledge
Interpreting the various curriculum mandates – including the labyrinth of how the Australian Curriculum: The Arts [ACARA] has been “adopted and adapted”
Providing context
Advice on teaching
Each of these are noble aims and each of the texts addresses them.
Do any of these texts address the reasons why the implementation of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts is inconsistent? Do they address the resistance of many teachers and school administrators to the expectation of teaching the Arts for all students? Or of student teacher’s own resistance to engaging with this area of the curriculum? Or do they address the prevalent misconceptions about the place, value and necessity of arts education in a comprehensive curriculum?
Maybe, maybe not. It is a huge task for any text to address the gaps in knowledge and experience of Initial Teacher Education students, let alone the prevailing points of view of school administrators, teachers and the wider Australian community.
It is 15 years since the two national reviews relevant to arts education – Music (2005) and Visual Arts (2008) – and even longer since the Senate Inquiry into Arts Education in 1995 which summarised the issue as Arts Teaching – the Cycle of Neglect.
The latest salutary warning comes from Robyn Ewing (2020) where she cogently argues:
There is unequivocal research evidence that quality arts processes and experiences engender a distinctive and critical set of understandings and skills that all young people need to navigate twenty-first century living. Yet the potential for the Arts and arts education to transform the curriculum coupled with the ongoing paucity of Australia’s arts storylines threaten the actualisation of The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. (p. 75)
All the textbooks in the world have not fixed the one obvious glaring and central problem: implementation of the endorsed Arts curriculum.
Designing the next text for Arts Education
Firstly, a new text needs to set out the context for Arts Education as curriculum and as reality.
With that in mind, there are three focus points:
What to teach in the Arts – the disciplinary knowledges of each of the arts included in the curriculum
How to teach the Arts – the distinctive pedagogies of each of the Arts
Why teach the Arts – beyond the requirements of compliance
Disciplinary knowledge needs to move beyond listing or defining. For example, fundamental to drama are the Elements of Drama: Role, character and relationships, situation, voice and movement, tension, focus, etc. It is one thing to list them and provide definitions for them (something that is not easily accessed in curriculum documents). But lists of information provided in a linear fashion proceeding from point to point in a logical fashion ultimately reads as a list. There needs to be a sense of a concept being used in the classroom setting. For example, role, character and relationships are fundamental to drama but look differently in a year 1 class or in a year 6 class. There is a progression from role (a focus on typical and generalised features) to character (distinctive and individualised focus).
Teaching drama is three dimensional (teaching each of the arts subjects is three dimensional). There needs to be rich evocation of how a teacher manipulates and manages the elements of drama and the principles of story and making and responding praxis in the dimensions of time/place/resources and on the spot decision making in response to what students offer and do (and the other classroom circumstances). A list of elements of Drama doesn't actually give a sense of how they work - and what the teacher does to make them work.
Recognising that there is a need for examples of where the arts are integrated with the wider curriculum, examples of teaching programs must do more than provide tokenistic arts experiences for students and teachers. For example a unit on contrast would provide. Contrast is evident across the arts and also a term used in other learning areas. It is possible to teach students about the use of contrast in role, situation, voice, movement and symbol. It is possible to teach about how contrast is used in the Principles of Story. It is possible to link this to the Principles of Design in Visual Arts and the use of juxtapostioning in Media Arts. There are links to Music and Dance. But what needs to be remembered is that the activity is always only the vehicle for the underlying learning – where is the knowledge, understanding and use of the elements of the arts subjects is so that students learn to make and respond with them.
A further point is that this text must connect students in training with their professional context. We need to help teachers strengthen their communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Not only is this implicit in the AITSL Standard (https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards) for Professional Engagement, it underlines the need engage in ongoing professional learning and engaging professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community. The text must link students with professional associations, sources of inspiration and going information and growth.
A text is not nor cannot be a substitute for experience. (And we are even more aware of that in these Coronavirus COVID-19 times). But it must work harder (and adopt different formats to fit the times) to address the underlying issues of learning to teach the Arts.
Bibliography
Darling-Hammond, L., Hammerness, K., Grossman, P., Rust, F., & Shulman, L. (2005). The Design of Teacher Education Programs. In L. Darling-Hammond & J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing Teachers for a Changing World What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do: Jossey-Bass/Wiley.
Diana Davis, & Australia Council for the Arts. (2008). First We See: The National Review of Visual Education. Retrieved from http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/education_and_the_arts/reports_and_publications/first_we_see_the_national_review_of_visual_education
Ewing, R. (2020). The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. A critical opportunity. Curriculum Perspectives, 40, 75-81. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-019-00098-w
Pascoe, R., Leong, S., MacCallum, J., MacKinley, E., Marsh, K., Smith, B., . . . Winterton, A. (2005). Augmenting the Diminished: National Review of School Music Education. Retrieved from Canberra:
Senate Environment Communications Information Technology and the Arts Committee. (1995). Arts Education. Retrieved from http://www.aph.gov.au/SEnate/committee/ecita_ctte/completed_inquiries/pre1996/arts/report/contents.htm
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
