Drama Tuesday - Are We There Yet?

 Research is a journey and it is useful to reflect on our journey’s into drama education research. Like the restless child in the back seat of the car on the road trip, we ask again and again the question: Are we there yet!

I came to academic research as a classroom-based researcher. The confluence of the stars meant that I began teaching at a time that gave attention to research in place. The mantra of the times was that every teacher was necessarily a researcher in their own classroom. I initiated action research projects in the spirit of But My Biro Won’t Work (Coggan and Foster undated)  that supported school-based curriculum. When I moved to curriculum leadership positions within the Department of Education, this approach led the development of progression maps in Drama and Arts (1998) that drew on the lived experiences of drama teachers in their classrooms. I reported this work in progress at the 1997 International Drama in Education Institute, IDEIRI, conference convened by Juliana Saxton and Carole Miller at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. 

Yet, even amongst a sympathetic clan I always had the feeling that I was not seen as a “real researcher”.

This was annoyingly and frustratingly confirmed when in 2002 I started working at Murdoch University. The sniffs of “academic dismissal” might be disguised until certain rites of passage took place, but this “blooding” only strengthened a commitment to valuing portraits of authentic experience qualitatively told. Built into the assessment design of my drama teacher education courses was a focus on reflective and reflexive practice. Building on models such as those provided by Norris, McCammon and Miller (2000), I asked students to build and share case stories of their drama teaching learning. Every teacher must be a researcher about their own practice.

This is not to downplay the case for academic rigour in research nor undervalue the quest for trustworthiness. Nor should we ignore necessary training in the protocols and rituals of apprenticeships in research. We need to reassure the wider community – and ourselves – that we have a legitimate place in the research arc. But we also have to find the courage to affirm our own research confidence. I hasten to assure you that I did serve my time and built an academic research profile (for example, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robin-Pascoe). But I have to add that I learn so much from working with research students as their research lives unfolded and this reinforces the idea that research is a journey .

You ask two questions:

1. What is ONE important development in Drama/Theatre and Education research in the last 30 years?

2. What is IDEA's role in furthering Drama/Theatre and Education research in the future?

In answer:

1. One important development in Drama/Theatre and Education research has been a recognition of seeing ourselves as teacher researchers.

2. IDEA’s role is to create communities where we empower and share the voices of teachers as researchers.

There is a third question:

Are we there yet?

Of course, we are not there yet. 

It’s the journey that matters.

---

Taking a moment to reflect on IDEA and Research as a quest

The role of IDEA in supporting research since its founding in 1992 has been significant. Not only is this a reflection of the role of drama educators in the Academy, it is an endorsement of the founding principles of IDEA. As noted in Article 3 of the IDEA Constitution, the aims of IDEA are: 

• to provide an international forum for communicating about, promoting and advocating for drama/theatre and education in schools, communities and all fields of endeavour;

• to support development of drama/theatre practice and theory as part of a full human education.

Research lies at the heart of the IDEA mission. 

As a community, IDEA must recognise and celebrate the role of Research in its ongoing story.

It is interesting to read overviews of drama education research (see, for example, Jones 2021, reviewing Drama research methods: provocations of practice: edited by Peter Duffy, Christine Hatton and Richard Sallis, all IDEA figures). In acknowledging the rich inheritances of research in the field, it is important to recognise that participants in IDEA have been drawn together into a shared international space. Belonging to community has contributed to and fired debates and differences, resonances and refractions. IDEA is not about creating an homogenised view about research in drama/theatre and education. It is about creating a space for sharing. 

Research is ultimately about questioning practice and IDEA’s role is to help us ask better questions. Morgan and Saxton (1994) reminded us there is a compelling role for questions in creating powerful learning environments. Active learners ask and answer questions. In a different religious context, George Herbert, poet coined the phrase repining restlessness, to describe a state of always, ever striving forward. Research should always leave us asking the next question, not merely giving us a warm afterglow of satisfaction. 

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot, Little Gidding.

---

Bibliography

Coggan, J. and V. Foster (undated). "But My Biro Won't Work" Literacy and learning in the secondary classroom - an action research study. Camden Park, South Australia, Australian Association for the Teaching of English AATE: 96.

Curriculum Council of Western Australia (1998). Curriculum Framework, Curriculum Council of Western Australia.

Eliot, T. S. (1969). Complete poems and plays of T.S. Eliot. London, Faber and Faber.

Jones, J. P. (2021). "Drama research methods: provocations of practice." Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 26(2): 379-384.

Morgan, N. and J. Saxton (1994). Asking Better Questions Models, techniques and classroom activities for engaging students in learning. Markham, Ontario, Pembroke Publishers Limited.

Norris, J., L. A. McCammon and C. S. Miller (2000). Learning To Teach Drama: A Case Narrative Approach. Portsmouth, Heinemann Drama.

Drama Tuesday - Making a difference for Arts Education – book by book

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. 

You might also like to look at the StagePage offerings in development. A work in progress.

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.