Drama Tuesday - Stirring the embers

Part Two - where have all the flowers gone?

One other observation from all this sifting through the embers of a teaching career is to think deeply about what we need in order to be ready to teach drama. One of the necessary conditions is to have a swag bag of resources – a repertoire of practice to draw from.

Resources for teaching drama is one key.

Now, I have too many books. I know. A lifetime of collecting and learning and teaching.  And it is  a pain at this point in my life trying to wrangle them into some sort of order.

I will have to discard some of them. I am reminded about the old Jewish invocation against burning books. I also feel bad about consigning them to landfill and dust. But there is something to value in this collection.

There’s a Peter, Paul and Mary song from my adolescence:

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing.

I am thinking about this as I write after spending a morning going through files that I have brought home from my office when I retired at Murdoch. I want to sing:

where have all the resources gone?

One of the unspoken pleasures of an inquisitive mind, is to stand at a bookshelf in a library or in a book store, and to just scan the titles available, looking for something new. It’s reassuring to reaffirm what you know is available, but also to discover new titles and writers. There is a physical pleasure of handling books. 

Maybe it tells something about me and my ways of engaging with knowledge. Knowing is a part of being (my epistemology is my ontology)

As I scanned former students’ annotated bibliographies I was reminded about how rich a vein of gold can be found in what has been written and published about teaching drama. Apart from dusty shelves like mine,  where are they all now? And how much impact have they had?

Part of me asks about all that history of drama teaching publishing: why isn’t there more evidence of impact in everyday schools? Part of me simply celebrates that there is knowledge shared. 

Anyone want to come and look at my bookshelves and share the knowledge there?