Drama Tuesday - A Primer For Arts Education

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 A quick Primer on teaching the Arts in schools

Sometimes it is useful to restate fundamental principles about teaching and learning the arts. You answer questions about:

1. Being clear about why you are teaching the arts

Teaching the Arts begins with a choice on your part: you choose to teach the arts so your students can know and understand the arts in their own lives and can use the arts to express their ideas and feelings and communicate them with others.

But your teaching always begins with a choice on your part.

While Curriculum Authorities can provide syllabuses and mandates, you need to ultimately see the purpose and value of your students following those curriculum mandates. You begin by answering a fundamental question: why am I including the arts in the priorities I make about what is important for my students to know, do, value and learn.

2. Being clear about what you are teaching your students to know, do and value in the arts

There are often misconceptions about what you teach in the arts.

Let’s start with the BIG IDEA.

You are teaching students to be artists and audiences for the arts in their own lives, cultures and societies. You are teaching students how they find their personal, social and cultural identities through making and responding to the arts.

To achieve that BIG IDEA:

  • You provide opportunities for students to experience the arts. They use their senses to see and hear and feel arts experiences. They experience a wide variety of arts immediately, directly and relate them to their own lives.

  • In that context, you provide students opportunities to make their own arts - to express and communicate ideas, feelings, experiences directly through the mediums of the art forms. 

What you teach in the arts is therefore something more than singing a song or improvising a dance or drama or making a colour wheel, or recording a video – it might involve those activities but not on their own or in isolation. What is being taught to students is how the arts provide ways of expressing and communicating and why that is an important life value. They are applying their learning about the arts from experiencing the arts, to making the arts. They are being taught to be artists and audiences.

Another way of thinking about what students are learning is that the chosen arts activity for a lesson, is a vehicle for the broader learning, rather than just an activity to complete. For example, how does the song being song in the lesson, add to or develop what students know about the elements of music and the role of music in people’s lives. This is, after all, the question we ask ourselves as teachers about any learning activity in any curriculum area: how does this chosen learning activity contribute to students’ learning? The activity must always be the vehicle for the learning.

3. Being clear about how students learn in the arts

  • Learning in the arts is experiential, hands-on and practical.

Students learn the arts by making the arts, by experiencing and responding to the arts, by applying their knowledge and skills – what they have learnt – to their own making and responding in the arts.

Learning the arts is experiential. It is through direct hands on experiences of the arts as audiences, and as makers and artists, that students learn.

That does not mean that there are not times when you are directly teaching students about the arts. It might be that you are demonstrating a specific skill or technique. It might be that you are sharing knowledge about the history and cultural, social and personal contexts of specific arts experiences tracing continuity and change over times, places and cultures. These are the times when you, as a knowledgeable other share your knowledge to provide “zones of proximal development” (Vygotsky) with your students.

  • Learning in the arts is also progressive. 

It is developmental, recognising that students learning needs are different according to their ages and their physical, social, emotional development. In choosing arts activities they need to be age and developmentally appropriate for your students.

It is organised and structured. Students learn in the arts through a widening spiral of experiences that provide increasing challenge. A spiral curriculum model that is not haphazard or random. Students have a clear understanding of how what they are learning today builds on what they have already learn – and which also is leading to further future learning.

4. Being clear about your role in  in your students’ learning in the arts

Your role in your students’ learning is clear. 

You guide. You inspire. You model. You share knowledge. You facilitate. These are overlapping not mutually exclusive roles.

You can sum up your role as the co-creator of learning. Your provide contexts, materials, knowledge as required, supportive and safe environments. You provide guidance. But, you are not the director of the show, the invisible hand wielding the brush, the composer of the music. You model your own creativity alongside your students as they create, but you given them voice and agency – while modelling your own. 

Drama Tuesday - DramaWest Conference 2022 (At Last)

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Planning drama activities that maximise student learning

The workshop by Danielle Miracle at the DramaWest Breath Conference provided a clear case for the need for drama teachers planning to link planning with stated student learning outcomes as set out in the mandated syllabus. The people around the table nodded wisely about the concepts of providing students with clearly articulated roadmaps for learning that made the connections with the syllabus. They seem in synch with the concepts of working from the “Big Picture”, using the “Scope and Sequence” providing a step by step “Layering of concepts progressively becoming more complex” (a “Spiral Curriculum”, though the term was not used) and ensuring that students were explicitly told the “Metalanguage” of the curriculum.

The workshop presenter then asked each group to work with a specific year group, specific  syllabus, and talk through planning a unit of work. In doing so, she outlined how in her teaching in the UK, this sort of planning was linked directly to the teacher’s KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – and that your employment depended on planning delivering results. Schemes of Work are not just paperwork but accountability documents. That’s a significant shift in thinking about assessment – assessment and planning  is usually considered as being about student achievement. On the other hand, this approach flips the focus to being on assessment of planning being about teacher performance. That clear sense of consequences is maybe something that is not built into local teaching in such clarity. 

The group at my table began well: they identified that they would work with Year 10 and the form Youth Theatre. They added that they wanted to work with Brecht (foreshadowing the Upper Secondary course). They also agreed that the end point of the teaching unit would be a focus on a performance for a specific audience. 

But the issue was: how to bridge the gap. 

What are the steps - the layering of activities to get from the start to the end point?. 

As I listened to the silence and the metaphoric shrugging of shoulders, it occurred to me that there was more fundamental issue: is there a lack of sufficient detailed knowledge about the form and the focus on Brecht. Teaching about Brecht has been simplified into a sort of shorthand: politics; a-Affect (because we don’t know how to say verfrumdungseffekt), don’t get emotional (not Stanislavsky), use posters/ captions/ placards, use song and dance, minimal sets, break the Fourth Wall. 

They are valid points. 

You can also do a quick scan of the Internet and find examples. 

But how do you build connected teachable moments that at the end of the unit, leave students with enduring understanding to be able to apply Brechtian principles to their own drama creations? 

Some ideas that might help with more detailed planning for this project 

Brecht wrote a series of Lehrstücke. They would serve as useful role models for students. Working with plays such as He who says Yes and He who says No juxtaposed  companion pieces side by side  enables students to see how ideas are set up in dialectical oppositions. By looking at these as examples, we take the concept of some of Brecht’s ideas from the abstract to the specific – and particularly link to the concepts of Youth Theatre*. 

Link the planned learning to the concepts articulated in the Syllabus. For example, it would be possible to build a layered exploration around the concepts of role, situation, tension, symbol, space, time (see the Elements of Drama identified in the syllabus). For example: 

How could you build on these ideas?

How could some “Backward Planning” help? 

State specifically what you want students to show in the Youth Theatre project as a result of your teaching in the unit. In other words, not a generalised objective but a specific one: in this Youth Theatre project students will show collaborative planning in generating ideas, applying specific principles of Brechtian practice including …

But it is important to also  step deeper than just this one unit of work. 

How do we respond to these questions?

  • How do we help drama teachers build more specific knowledge about the forms and styles named in the syllabus?

  • How do we help drama teachers build beyond generalised telegraphed and sometimes half-understood markers of form and style? (How do they know more than the headlines about Brecht, for example, to being able to deliver the sort of detail implied by the shorthand of curriculum documents?

  • How do we shift notions of accountability? 

  • Who is being accountable?

  • What is it that teachers are actually accountable for? And, why does this concept freak out some teachers?

Drama Tuesday - Australian Drama Educators in the world

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Great to report  that the latest edition of ADEM has been published including the image of the substantial number of Drama Australia participants. Encouraging to see in these COVID travel plagued times. 

Other Drama Australia news

John Nicholas Saunders has handed the reins of Drama Australia Presidency to DR Jo Raphael.

Huge thanks to John for leading Drama Australia (and NAAE). 

Welcome to Jo, a long time stalwart of Drama Australia. 

Drama Australia journeys on showing leadership and strength.

Also included in ADEM is a summary from the report I made about IDEA2022 and published on StagePage www.stagepage.com.au 

Drama Tuesday - The Qualities of Quality Arts Education

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2022 Taiwan International Symposium on Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic Education, 12 November 2022

This seminar is a practical outcome of Cross-Disciplinary Aesthetic Education, a country-wide educational project sponsored by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan. The project is designed 

“…to develop and incorporate Arts-centric interdisciplinary courses into the curriculum at all K-12 levels within Taiwan’s education system. The main approach undertaken by our program is to  design interdisciplinary courses—which have Arts at its core—for non-Arts subjects, in order to incorporate various elements of Arts within, thereby fostering and elevating students’ aesthetic literacy and creativity”

Today was the culmination of thinking and writing about the markers of quality arts education – a long term research focus I have developed.

We negotiated the challenges of recording the presentation, setting up the links on Google Meet (two screens including presentation and translation  screens on separate devices). But it has been a fruitful and happy collaboration.

What is notable about the program in Taiwan is the links being actively made between arts education and aesthetic education, between arts and wellbeing in the broadest sense of the word. There are important lessons from the arts in schools for the wellbeing and health of our whole society. This is a theme picked up by Larry O’Farrell in a paper at the IDEA 2022  Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he shared the work of the Canadian Network for Arts & Learning (CNAL) (https://www.eduarts.ca)  and the role of Arts Education for personal well-being, themes that I have written about with colleague Peter Wright (2014). Attention must be paid to the research on the links between arts education and health and wellbeing (see, for example, Fancourt and Finn 2019). This will resonate with the themes of the seminar and next phase planning for Arts and Aesthetic Education in  Taiwan.

The notion of the qualities of quality arts education draws on the concepts of a Project Zero publication of the same name (Seidel, Tishman et al. 2008).

A copy of the final paper can be found below:



Bibliography

Fancourt, D. and S. Finn (2019). What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being? A Scoping Review. Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report, No. 67. Copenhagen, World Health Organisation.

Seidel, S., S. Tishman, L. Hetland, E. Winner and P. Palmer. (2008). "The Qualities of Quality: Excellence in arts education and how to achieve it." from http://www.espartsed.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pz-qofq-executive-summary.pdf.

Wright, P. and R. Pascoe (2014). "Eudaimonia and creativity: the art of human flourishing." Cambridge Journal of Education.

Drama Tuesday - Actors, theatre and superstition

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Hooking drama students

Drama teachers often pepper their lessons with little gems plucked from theatre history. They can be fun and can sometimes be what are the take aways from the lesson for drama students. As an art form that conjures a kind of magic through make belief, it is not surprising that theatre has many intriguing superstitions and stories. Perhaps this accounts for some of the suspicion awarded to actors and theatre.

There are many other nuggets of information for drama teachers.

For example, St. Genesius, is known as the patron saint of actors. In the third century, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, he is said to have worked as an actor in a number of plays. In order to get the Emperor’s approval, he played a role in which he satirised a Christian who was going to be baptised. In the middle of his presentation, Genesius was struck by the reality of what he was saying and was converted to Christianity on the spot, right there on the spot.

When he refused, he was put to death almost quickly after. 

It’s always worth checking  your community and attitudes to these small gobbets of  theatre history.

Or as the saying goes: break a leg!

Drama Tuesday - It pays to check what you’re about to throw out

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 Building Characters from Scripted Drama Text

Aligning drama activities to Curriculum Documents

For the 2013 DramaWest Conference I developed a workshop designed to link a relevant and recognisable drama activity with Drama in the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (2014) At one level, the activity reaffirmed familiar practice – something that we have been doing often and successfully. 

In that workshop I had a slide that asked participants to identify: What changes and what stays the same?.

There was a clear subtext to the workshop: the curriculum reflects good practice. It may clarify some terms that we use but essentially, it is built on good drama teaching and learning, but draws connection between task and curriculum terminology.

The other theme is the importance of aligning what we do with a clear sense of progression in learning drama.

Rather than being a hit or miss collection of drama activities (or drama like activities), there is a need to connect what we do in classes day to day with a sense of students being on a learning journey with clearly stated destinations underpinned by having clear road markers at specific key points or stages. 

The sub-text to that concept was the need to provide students with drama activities and texts or material that are age and developmentally appropriate. And to challenge the dumbing down of drama opportunities offered to students (I am thinking about the endless offerings of Fractured Fairytale style scripts and improvisation starters that encourage “going for the gag”). We need to offer our drama students texts of challenge and substance.

This is the workshop handout that I shared. The details of the outline continue to be relevant (even though in the 2022 version of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts some of the organisational details and emphases may have changed.

Drama Tuesday - Knowledge and Learning (Part 2)

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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)

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 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.

Drama Tuesday - Boal and Forum Theatre

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 At one level Forum Theatre is easy to define – as a practice.

In Forum Theatre, actors perform a short scene based on an event involving oppression. Spectators are encouraged to suggest and enact solutions to the problem in the scene. Image Theatre and Forum Theatre require skilled facilitators, called Jokers, to mediate between the actors and the spectators. (https://www.britannica.com/art/Forum-Theatre) 

But it is important to see Forum Theatre in context.

Boal (1931-2009) was an activist with a commitment to political, economic and social change influenced by his own life circumstances and exile. He developed in a climate inspired by writers in Brazil and South America such as Paulo Fiere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The intent of Forum Theatre was political, social and personal change through directly addressing significant issue and pursuing change and revolution. 

In the drama context, Boal builds on the rhetoric and practice of Brecht. Forum Theatre sets out to actively disrupt what Boal saw as the status quo of power relationships in theatre, notably the passive and “oppressed” audience. He challenged the power positioning of the actor, the script, the director and therefore, the audience. 

  • The actor is supplanted by the spect-actor – an activist audience empowered to change the text and the outcomes of the dramatic action

  • The director becomes the Joker – disempowered as dictator and neutered as “objective though contradictorily could still be manipulator puppeteer

  • The text is changeable, reformable at the point of uttering, not just improvisationally but shaped shifted

In short, Boal’s purpose was revolutionary and radical.

Boal (and others) embed Forum Theatre as one of a series of innovations of form such as Image Theatre, Legislative Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Newspaper Theatre, Rainbow of Desire. They are all, in turn, build on a concept of freeing the body through games designed to engage and empower. 

Boal in Australia 

Boal was a keynote speaker at the IDEA 1995 Congress in Brisbane. He was a celebrity presence in that event and “played to packed houses” who all wanted to be part of the excitement. 

I have distinct memories of watching the session late in the afternoon from the choir stalls of QPAC. Boal had insisted that the curtain be dropped on the stage and that the whole session took place on the stage. The vast stage was packed with people and Boal worked with a team of actors who had been working with him during the week of the congress. The action was played out and the substitutions of spect-actors made. 

There was an enthusiastic buzz of excitement. Boal received the “rock star” treatment.


Thinking about Forum Theatre today

There are many enthusiasts. A simple Internet search reveals many examples both within the drama classroom and beyond in development contexts. It is useful to make the connections between Boal’s application and the ideas of Brecht (e.g. 1964). 

There are questions to be asked about the ways that strategies such as Forum Theatre are applied and can be applied. While the techniques can be superficially used, it could be a disservice to the vision Boal (and others) had and continue to have for an empowered and different audience. 

But there is fascinating potential for deep engagement through Forum Theatre and Boal’s other strategies.  It is important to engage with the underlying construction of identified oppression and move beyond shallow playing out of first world angst.



Bibliography

. Augusto Boal: theatre of the oppressed. (2001). In B. Burton (Ed.), Living drama (pp. 240-247). South Melbourne, Vic.: Pearson Education Australia.

Boal, A. (1993). Theatre of the Oppressed (C. A. McBride, Trans.). New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Boal, A. (1995). The Rainbow of Desire. The Boal method of Theatre and Therapy. New York: Routledge.

Boal, A. (1996). Politics, Education and Change. In Drama, culture and empowerment (pp. dk-dk). Brisbane: IDEA Publications.

Boal, A. (2011). Juegos para actores y no actores. Barcelona: Alba.

Brecht, B. (1964). A Short Organum for the Theatre. In J. Willet (Ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 1st ed. (pp. 233-246). New York: Hill and Wang.

Drama Tuesday - Samovila

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  Samovila in Bulgarian and Serbian legend are mythic creatures in the woodlands, mesmerising male passersby with their songs and dances. Some believe they are daughters of the Thracian goddess Bendis. They are are immortal keepers of nature with an affinity for fire. They have the power to bring about drought, burn a farmer's crops, or make cattle die of high fever. It is said that, when angered, a Samovila (sometimes called Samodiva) can change her appearance and turn into a monstrous bird, capable of throwing fire at her enemies.

From these traditional folk stories, Second Year actors at WAAPA with their director Bagryana Popov, weave a mystical retelling in the Roundhouse Theatre @ WAAPA ECU. 

I love this kind of theatrical storytelling. Evocative and imaginative use of lengths of fabric, voices, movement shaping a succession of characters and stories. Theatrical and satisfying. Strongly physical theatre incorporating folk dances – wonderful training for these young actors. An Eastern European sensibility realised through the diverse talents of this group of actors in their first public performances near the end of their second year of study. Simple use of props but mostly skilful use of bodies and voices. Strong sense of ensemble and committed, focused performances. Simple set, great use of the levels and entrances of the theatre with lighting to match the mood. Wonderful evocative singing. 

I would go to see it again for the richness and colour.