Drama

as
 Abstract
 Educational Drama: a discipline for all in the
regular curriculum
 Drama is education: language teaching can be
enhanced by good educational practice
 English language: the big E of EDUCATION
through communication rather than the small e
of just teaching a language as a system
 Educational drama: a means to developing true
communication using role play and improvisation
as the nearest form of real-life human interaction
 Drama as the SPICE of ELT
Questions for Today

What is a teacher?

What is education?

What is drama?

What is theatre?
 Education
The moment whereby all the
understanding you had before is
sharpened into a new
juxtaposition.
 Teacher
One who creates learning
situations for others. A person
whose energies and skills are
at the service, during the
professional situation, of the
pupils.
Objectives
 Theatre
The work of writing,
producing and acting in
plays where specialist actors
rehearse a script for a given
period of time, following the
director’s instructions with
the aim of pleasing and
entertaining or educating an
 Drama as the SPICE of
ELT

S: Social Development
P: Physical Development
I: Intellectual Development
C: Creative Development
E: Emotional Development
 Quotes from Dorothy
Heathcote
“So we need to train our teachers to structure
for a learning situation to happen rather
than a sharing of information in a ‘final’ way
to take place. We have to train them to
withhold their expertise to give their
students opportunity for struggling with
problems, before they come to the teacher’s
knowledge, and to reach an answer
because of the work they do rather than
the listening they have done”
“We have mistaken casualness for the
ability to get on with people.
Casualness gets you nowhere in
teaching….unselective casualness is
death to the teacher”

“I really think it’s a shame that we’ve

set up our schools so that children
don’t feel they can take power”
“One of the most rejuvenating things is
to give everyone a fresh start each
morning. The ability to do this is part
of the condition of innocence. I think
innocence has a chance of bringing
with it enormous gaiety and trust, so
that you walk into the classroom
clean every morning, however mucky
you are at the end of the day.”
“The child laws passed to save children
from exploitation in mines, sweat shops
and up chimneys, have reaped a
whirlwind which any adolescent
recognizes at least by instinct if not by
cognition, that we have successfully also
‘protected’ our young from influencing
society in any way which seems to
matter. We have made them toys of
society when small, and exploited them
shamelessly as consumers when large.”
 Performative
Activity

The Speaking Body

in the
Empty Space
Creative Practice in Teaching
Requisites:
• The drive to want to do it
• The feedback to satisfy the having done it
• The content of the doing of it
• Signals to communicate the doing
• The rituals of going about it
Considerations:
• Social Learning
• Factual Learning
• Reflective Learning
• Curriculum Pressures
 THEATRE VERSUS DRAMA
THEATRE
Centred on the script
Words of the playwright
Directed by the teacher
Repeated rehearsals
Chosen by the teacher
Related to art
Emphasizes the product
Externally directed
Inactive except for the performers
External meaning
Teacher as interpreter
Competitive
Fixed parameters
Fixed timetable
DRAMA
Centred on the student
Student’s own language
Directed by the group
Spontaneous/improvised
Negotiated by the group
Related to life itself
Emphasizes the process
Internally directed
Active for all
Internal meaning
Active construction from knowledge
Egalitarian
Based on experience/experimentation
Natural timetable/rhythm
Questions I consider
1. The skill
2. My voice
3. My knowledge
4. Authenticity
5. Brotherhoods
6. Symbols
7. Group Talk
8. Back Seat Teaching
 Types of Drama

Games:
where the rules lead and control the play
 Roles:
where a person (or people) and their attitudes are
the challenge. This also includes simulation of
real life events.
 Mime and Dance forms:
where emphasis on non-verbal signals,
experiences, and explanations are the means
of discovery.
 Mantle of the expert:
where the class is set upon a task in such a way
that they function as experts
 Analogy:
where one problem, a real one, is revealed by an
exact parallel to it
 Storydrama:
Where a story is re-enacted through
process drama
 Text:
where interpretation of someone else’s work is
the means of learning. This includes Readers’
Theatre
Quality Education
 Life Skills
Key: “… … …” means “drama is education because”

1) People have to work out the lives they are pretending to live
in a together way.

So……… drama depends on co-operation.

2) People have to employ what they already know, about the life
they are trying to live

So……… drama puts life experience to use.

So……… drama makes factual experiences (information)
come into active employment.
3) People have to be able to live in two worlds at once and not
get them mixed up

So……… drama uses fiction and fantasy but makes

people more aware of reality.

4) People have to agree to sustain a common understanding of

what they are making together no matter how separately they
may appear to be thinking. Footballers have to do this too –
they don’t end up all playing different games either!

So……… drama stresses agreeing to all trying to sustain

mutual support for each other while allowing people a
chance to work differently – to bring personal ideas to a
whole.
5) People have to express thinking, feeling, actions to each
other. If they don’t then no one in the group knows what is
going on.

So……… drama makes people find precision in

communication

6) Drama uses objects but often in a symbolic way. Chairs have

to become thrones, but also these ‘thrones’ become the symbol
of the king when he is absent.

So ……… drama stresses the use of reflection. Symbols

become ordinary, but the ordinary also is seen to be
symbolic.
7) People have to interpret the actions of others but often
in unfamiliar circumstances. You don’t meet dragons
everyday; you don’t have to be skilled goldsmiths; you
don’t have to battle with kings – or hospital matrons!
You don’t have to argue with warlocks; you don’t have
to face the rigours of great journeys nor cope with
enemies who seek to take your life.

So ……… drama introduces you to living out crisis in a

testing kind of way. It tests your attitudes and your
present capacities.
 What is the ‘new’ trunk of the
Tree of Knowledge?
1. A personal monitoring system.

2. The ability to see there are many faces to ‘truth’.

3. The understanding of the difference between the

outer form and inner form of things so we are not
fooled.
4. The understanding of the 4 faces of time
i. Clock time which rules us in a community
ii. The great time that is our feeling of time
iii. How the world is speeding up time
iv. Body time

5. The skill of observation – to look, to read, to

understand what you see

6. Perceptual skill – how you learn

7. Responsibility

8. Energy and understanding of your own energy

rhythm
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 WISDOM
The high quality culture at the
top of this tree contains what
we know illuminated from
below by what we are

5. how I observe and use what is

1. what kind of worker am I?
kindled by observation
2. the many faces of truth
THE 6. perception and imagination
3. outer romantic form and inner
SUPPORT 7. attitudes to responsibility
classic form
SYSTEM 8. energy to carry through things
4. the four faces of time
(THE begun
TRUNK)
*how we accept
*attitudes from and are accepted
culture and family by others
*trying and failing *skills of reading, *the way we look at
*how we care *quality of
and succeeding numbering already people and things,
about what we do already established started, well or ill our perceptions what we do

THE ROOT SYSTEM

Creative Practice in Teaching
Requisites:
• The drive to want to do it
• The feedback to satisfy the having done it
• The content of the doing of it
• Signals to communicate the doing
• The rituals of going about it
Considerations:
• Social Learning
• Factual Learning
• Reflective Learning
• Curriculum Pressures
 I Pledge Myself to:
1. Avoid withholding information in order to ‘spin out’
my knowledge.
2. Allow students to take decisions and to test them in
action.
3. Allow students to prove to themselves that they
understand the nature of their own functioning as
teachers, thus starting a lifelong process.
4. Allow the students to prove to me and themselves that
they will still be, however experienced, students of
teaching.
5. Constantly review my own priorities in teaching.
6. Prove that my ideas are open to review by the students.
7. Give evidence of my ability and readiness to listen.
8. Give evidence of having patience, positive and unfailing,
so long as students give evidence of working.
9. Be honest at all levels of praising and criticizing work – my
own and others.
10.Be a ‘restless spirit’, understanding when to move forward,
press for more effort, or be content with present
achievement, yet give each moment of achievement its due.
11.Be interesting.
12.To be professional always. By this I mean to remember why
I am doing the job; to be task-oriented, not coming between
the student and the task in false self-interested ways.
13.Never to permit myself to be bored.
14.Ensure that the students understand that I am concerned
with training to teach in school – with realistic knowledge
of the problems of teaching in ordinary school
circumstances.

D. Heathcote, “Training Needs for the future”, 1972

Drama is
Life
Life is
Drama