Drama Tuesday - Knowledge and Learning (Part 2)

How do you know what you know about drama?

From the 1970 Edition of the Pears Cyclopaedia, I was fascinated to read again, the Introduction to Contemporary Theatre. It presented a very English centric version “confined to plays produced before a live audience”. But I remember reading (and re-reading) page after page. 

It’s interesting to wonder how many of the ideas that shaped my own drama education practice find their roots in these particular words. I do still have a bias for “live theatre” even in a world where there are multiple versions at our fingertips on streaming services.  

The Cyclopaedia does present a limited vision. So much so, that it might explain my insistence upon Australian theatre and a focus on Australian theatre and playwrights that became important to the ways I developed. Why, for example, I took the first offering of Australian Literature at UWA when it became available in my last year of studies (very late in 1973 – unbelievable that it was this late in an Australian University).

As I noted, the limits of knowledge are often dependent on the sources of our knowledge. Whoever curated the section on theatre in the Pears Cyclopaedia presented one view. Obviously there are many others.

But this musing prompts to me wonder: 

• What are the sources of your knowledge about drama?

• What limits your knowledge? And what empowers it?

• What are your thoughts and responses to these extracts from the 1970 Introduction to Contemporary Theatre?

What significance can the modern audience be expected to find in such spectacles as squalid garrets and basement, characters most unrealistically bursting into song, old tramps changing hats, or a young man trying to teach a set of weighing machines to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. 

These are some of the questions that trouble the playgoer, and since they are not always easy to answer it may be helpful first to consider what is the 

Function of Dramatic Art.

It is not the function of art to make a statement but to induce an imaginative response. and the spectator receives not an answer to a question but an experience.

Drama., like the other arts, gives expression to that subtle and elusive life of feelIng that defies logical definition. By feeling ls to be understood the whole experience of what It feels like to be alive - physical sensations, emotions. and even what It feels like to think.

This flux of sensibility cannot be netted down in logical discourse. but can find expression In what Clive Bell, when discussing the visual arts, called " significant form.'' Susanne Longer in her book, Form and Feeling,  has developed Clive Bell's concept, arguing that al artistic form is an indirect expression of feeling. The artist, be he painter, poet. or dramatist, create an image a form that gives shape to his feeling and it Is for the sensitive recipient to interpret its significance.

The especial province of drama, as was pointed out by Aristotle, Is to create an image, an illusion of action, that action " which springs from the past but is directed towards the future and is always great with things to come." 

The Therapeutic Effect of Drama.

One of the achievements of serious drama is to create an image that will objectify and help to resolve deep human conflicts.
It is noteworthy also that drama. can be fully appreciated only in a public performance, a social event demanding the cooperation and understanding between author, players, and audiences.

The Constituents of Drama.

Drama Is a complex art in that It uses two very different kinds of Ingredient or material, one speech, the literary constituent. the other the gesture, movement, and confrontation of actors on an actual stage.

The Ritual Element

While speech and the confrontation of actors are essential to full drama, there is an element that has sometimes been neglected and that is ritual  perhaps the most primitive and evocative of all.

Drama Tuesday - Knowledge and Learning (Part 1)

 How do you know what you know?

I’ve been thinking this week about the nature of knowledge and its role in learning. 

This rather philosophical turn of mind has arisen, because I have been sorting through some very old books in preparation to send them off to the Save The Children Annual bookstall. 

In my family when I was growing up. My mother had a copy of the Pears Cyclopaedia, 60th Edition (1950) . This was an annual publication that brought together in 992 pages of very fine print some key ideas about the  world. There were sections about prominent people, history, a Gazetteer and a rather quaint 1940s Atlas of the World. English Dictionary, Synonyms and Antonyms, Classical Mythology, Health and Beauty, and sections on the new fangled Radio, Television and Radar. The publication was originally produced by the Pears soap company. 

As well as the original one, over the years, I gathered a number of other editions (including a birthday present from Phillip). Sadly annual publication ceased a few years ago before I throw them out,  I have taken the moment to fun through the rice paper thin pages and look at the nature of the way that we looked at knowledge then and now. Given that my mother in 1950 was living in isolated country Western Australia, this was obviously a treasured source of knowledge. Though, of course, the world of the Pears was narrower and coloured by British eyes. Even when I was growing up and buying my own copies of these publications, the world was narrower.

There was the time, and it’s in my life time at knowledge was contains mostly in books and, of course, word of mouth, person-to-person sharing of ideas. We relied heavily on libraries and these sorts of books. I still have fond memories of the chief librarian of University of Western Australia, and of course his team and the way they brought their version of knowledge to us but we always were presented with a curated knowledge  chosen for us by others. Similarly, with our views of the world through newspapers and media.

Even in these days of so-called instantaneous knowledge of our fingertips on the computer keyboard, recent events in the world of politics in the USA and elsewhere remind us that we are always presented with someone’s point of view. Or, to put it another way, we need to filter the world by considering multiple points of view. Access to billions of bits of knowledge, does not necessarily make us wiser.

Quaint. But of interest to our wood cartographer grandson, William. 

Hence my questions about the value of knowledge and the sorts of knowledge that matter. There has been a relatively virulent debate about “learning facts”. As a school student, we learnt all the Squares of numbers 1-39. We learnt lists of Masculine and Feminine nouns – Aviator and Aviatrix, for example (something that would shock our feminist friends). And there is an argument that we should not “burden” our minds with trivia that are good only for Pub Quiz nights.

But there is a counter argument that with our some knowledge, we are limiting our responses to the world as it rises up to meet us. Or rather, we need to reconsider learning in terms of applying knowledge, or “useful knowledge”

What is your construct of knowledge and knowing and its role in learning?

Read more in Part 2.

A different Drama Tuesday

Why I am a teacher. Why am I teacher?

During my first year in teacher education I found myself sitting across from a troubled young student. Anxiety was written in his sweaty body language, the tightly drawn breaths and the lacing of his fingertips as he dodged around the reason for his visit: he was struggling to write the first assignment in EDN101 Intro to Teaching. The task was a gentle recount of something from his own schooling that had left an indelible mark on his own decision to become a teacher. This topic was something that I could relate to as it was a question I had asked myself often.

“I can’t think of anything to write…” he muttered before trailing off into indefinite silence. 

I wanted to help so I offered some suggestions but his answers were desultory and noncommittal.

Tell me about where you went to school. In the country

What were your teachers like? They were OK, I guess.

Were you a good student? Guess so, about average. I always did what i was told. My mum made sure of that.

Why do you want to become a teacher? Mum thought it would be a good idea. Dad told me that it was a good job, steady. Lots of holidays. Good pay.

So you want to be a teacher? Nup. 

Impasse. I searched in my backpack of conversation topics to see if we could move on.

Tell me a bit more about school. Was there something you were good at in school? Sport. 

OK, tell me about that. I thought that being a PE teacher would be good. Always out on the oval, moving about. Couldn’t sit long in a desk. Hated doing head stuff and reading. But I could see myself doing that. I was pretty good at running and OK at footy and the health stuff was OK, bit sexy scary but it was interesting…

Something seemed to have switched on for him. Words flowed.

There was this one time, we had a lightning carnival. Our little District High went to the Senior High in the next big town and I was in the relay team. It was a blustery down south sort of day but OK and we won the relay which was right at the end of the competition. In fact, it was the very last event and the PE teacher made us get on the bus as soon as the race was finished and the cup was handed over. I was so happy. But it had been a busy day and after lunch i was too nervous to go to the toilet and had run the race with a full bladder, thinking I could go before I got on the bus. But that didn’t happen, did it (he added with a discomforting shiver of his spine).

She made us get on the bus, quick. Grab your things and get on there. I was still holding the trophy, a big silver cup and plonked it down on the seat beside me. The back of the bus had the usual gaggle of girls laughing and making jokes. The rest of the boys were sat at the fort of the bus because the teacher wanted to keep an eye on them because they caused trouble. So I was sitting halfway down the bus. It was OK at first, as we chugged out of the town and onto the highway. It was even OK when the other PE teacher driving the bus, ground through the gears and bunny hopped into cruising speed. But i knew I was in trouble.

I was desperate to pee. It really hurt. I asked the teacher and she said, Tie a knot in it, buddy! I pretended to look out the window at the green but couldn’t think of a helpless sense of agony. I tried looking out the window at the flicking by of the Tuarts and trying to ignore the rowdy shouting and the noisy joking in the bus that was starting to fog up the windows. I squirmed one way, then another. I crossed my legs. I tried thinking of other things – winning the race – but that only made it feel worse.

I scrabbled around in my bag in case there was an empty drink container. It would be desperate I know but I simply had to go. I looked at the plastic bag that mum had sent my lunch in, but it was too flimsy. I thought about opening the window of the bus, but those girls behind me would see. There was only one thing for it. The silver trophy was on the seat beside me. Trying to look casual, I slid it towards me and quietly, checking to see no one was looking … 

The relief was immediate.

I would have gotten away with it, but at that moment the bus slid into a turn and there was a clanking of silver cup against the back of the next seat. The PE teacher who was standing near the boys at the front of the bus, looked up quickly and was catapulted a couple of steps down the busy towards me. Her face said it all. She noticed the slopping yellow liquid, and my startled face looking up at her wide eyes. You dirty little bugger! And then everyone else on the bus was looking with questioning eyes. That’s disgusting, you little animal!, she said. Can’t you control your animal instincts! Her eyes had that look of disgust.

His narrative stopped now. He looked away and down, ashamed. Then he whispered mostly to himself. Bitch. She didn’t need to have called me that. I hate her. She can stuff her PE teaching.

I let the moment settle, waiting.

Why don’t you write about that? Mum would kill me, if I did that. 

Do you think so? I know so. I can tell, even now. She had to go up to the school to get me after the bus got back. They rang her from the bus. 

I still think you should write about it for your assignment. Not gonna happen. 

He left my study with a shrugged shoulders at an offer to help him write it. Soon after, he left the teaching course. It might be something that happened a long time ago but I still remember it powerfully. 

Was it a good decision for him to leave teaching? Impossible to know. Could I have done more to help him at this moment in his teacher education journey? There are no second guesses in teaching. When you think about it, his telling of the story and his sense of outrage of his own teachers might have given him the necessary empathy to be a great teacher. Or, may be it was the right decision for him to leave his course.

I am happy to share with you that I came into teaching determined that I would make teaching better than my own schooling. The casual brutalism of the daily plying of power and status of my own teachers resonated with this student’s experiences. I know it was judgmental and naive of me to be so dismissive of the parade of tired middle aged men who taught me. Their sarcasm that passed for wit ran hand in hand with their occasionally physical violence. And it is easy to say that was then and now we do things differently. But do we? As teachers are we kinder than those teachers from my past? i hope so. I hope that we are, but when I hear stories like this one, I see the old soft shoe shuffle of power and status holds the spotlight. 

One thing I have come to recognise is that we all somehow live out the unfulfilled ambitions of our parents. My mother, who lived through the Great Depression and a World War, wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t do so.  Therefore it is not surprising that she gently pushed me in that direction. But there was something more than that wish fulfilment to my decision to go into teaching. I was angry about my own education: the narrowness and aridity; the power plays between teachers and amongst students; the dullness. There had to be something more. I trained my eye to observe and notice. To be aware of the undertow of people and relationships and how that shaped learning. I teach because it is about being human, being alive, being wide-awake to the world (thank you Maxine Greene). As that young man in my study taught me: every moment is a learning occasion. 

Learning lies at the heart of teaching.