A Reflective Practitioner’s Guide to (Mis)Adventures in Drama Education - or - What Was I Thinking?

Introduction

Peter Duffy

Books about teaching and learning through drama intimidated me as a young educator. I, like most practitioners, looked to books to ground and improve my practice. Giants in the field wrote about craft and excellence, and, while essential texts, I rarely found my own emerging skills reflected in them. As a young practitioner, my work in drama and education resembled a child on a bicycle—more wobble than finesse. I scoured page after page trying to find the key to unlock my teaching. What I found in books and articles were well-managed classrooms and enthusiastic students. It sounded to me like if I could just care enough, plan well enough, think deeply enough, practice intentionally enough, then I should be able to share the joy of learning through drama with students. I read about cultures of caring, critical pedagogy, learner-centred practice, student engagement, reaching the whole child and on and on. I read Planning Process Drama, The Process of Drama, Development through Drama and Drama Worlds. I read and I read with an eye towards cultivating my practice. I improved significantly through the distant tutelage of the authors, yet I remember asking myself, why can’t I teach like that more consistently?

In the wake of every successful lesson bobbed missed opportunities, teacher-centred instruction, silencing of student agency and poor facilitation. Even if I precisely replicated a lesson plan from a book, something still eluded me. The problem was not that I lacked the know-how to write a lesson plan or utilize the tried and true drama education strategies. I had the procedural knowledge. What I lacked, however, was artistic insight.

John Dewey, the noted American philosopher and educational reformer, was one of the first writers to discuss teaching within the context of artistic practice. He discussed it in terms of the difference between procedure and craft. He delineated the distinction between mechanical knowledge and the artistic vision of a musician, painter or artist.

Each one of these artists needs a technique which is more or less mechanical, but in the degree to which he [sic] loses his personal vision to become subordinate to the formal rules of the technique he [sic] falls below the level and grade of the artist. He [sic] becomes reduced again to the level of the artisan who follows the blue prints, drawings, and plans that are made by other people.

(1983: 15)

I could barely deliver the blue prints, drawings and plans of others, let alone think about my own personal vision for teaching and learning through drama. I understood the techniques and had the procedural knowledge. What I lacked was the insight and experience of the artist. An artist discerns, discovers, chooses and crafts. I merely executed. An artist sees multiple possibilities and outcomes; I steered lessons towards only one goal—regardless of what was unfolding before me within the drama. I saw the possibility of artistic practice within the work, but approached it like a technician. What I discovered was that I needed much more than simply more experience. This book interrogates that space between mechanical and artistic performance and between lesson execution and artistic vision. When one truly probes that space between craft and function, one arrives at what Schön (1983: 42) described as the swampy lowlands of professional practice.

In drama education, reflective practice is more than an analysis of which strategies embedded within one’s lesson plan were efficacious. It is more than saying, the next time I am in that classroom, I’ll be sure to separate those two children. If, like Atkins and Murphy (1993) suggest, reflective practice is to lead to a change in perspective, then one must be open to the challenging and sometimes painful realization that what we brought to our practice on any given day might not have been enough. We have to come to terms with the notion that there was a need in the room that was greater than our capacity to recognize it.

WHAT IS REFLECTIVE PRACTICE?

If reflective practice is more than an activity that critiques lesson plans or classroom management (as if that’s what facilitating learning should really be called), then what is it? Jay and Johnson (2002) cite Zeichner and Liston (1996) to help answer this question.

According to Dewey, reflection does not consist of a series of steps or procedures to be used by teachers. Rather, it is a holistic way of meeting and responding to problems, a way of being as a teacher. Reflective action is also a process that involves more than logical and rational problem-solving processes. Reflection involves intuition, emotion, and passion and is not something that can be neatly packaged as a set of techniques for teachers to use.

(9)

Zeichner and Liston (1996) remind practitioners of reflective practice’s complexity and three-dimensionality (it is as deep as it is broad). It is not a method one adopts. It is not a series of steps one follows. It is a disposition, a means through which teachers thinkingly act (van Manen 1995: 36). As a means to encourage new teachers to broach the complexity of reflective practice, Jay and Johnston (2002: 77) developed an RP typology that contains three stages: descriptive reflection, comparative reflection and critical reflection.

Descriptive reflection includes questions such as What is happening? and Is this working? Questions for comparative reflection include: How do other people who are directly or indirectly involved describe and explain what’s happening? What does the research contribute to an understanding of this matter?

Questions for critical reflection include: What is the deeper meaning of what is happening, in terms of public democratic purposes of schooling? What does this matter reveal about the moral and political dimension of schooling? How does this reflective process inform and renew my perspective?

This typology nurtures mindfulness. That mindfulness is an essential ingredient to how a teacher thinkingly acts. This book attempts to highlight how some of the world’s most renowned drama practitioners exercise mindfulness and situate their work within the imprecise and unending pursuit of reflective practice(s). The contributing authors story the gap between artistic vision and what they, at the time, thought to do. Throughout these pages, we meet conflicted teachers who share their difficult and practice-changing moments so that the reader may interrogate their own work. The reader learns alongside the authors as they reveal moments of instructional rupture, pedagogical and personal challenge, and, their subsequent practice-changing insights.

This book is not a celebration of failures. It is, rather, an honest accounting of the development that follows when one sets one’s ego aside in order to pursue a more truthful, vulnerable and student-centred practice. Maxine Greene was fond of saying, I am [...] not yet. That is the spirit of this book. Yes, things fell apart in sometimes spectacular and other times minor ways, but at each essay’s core is the humanizing acknowledgement of each practitioner’s not-yet-ness. Embedded within this book is the idea that mistakes are not taboo happenings to be avoided; rather they are dynamic and necessary parts of learning about ourselves as practitioners and our practice. This book is not simply a collection of you’re-never-going-to-believe-the-stupid-thing-I-did stories. It is a critical examination of how our practice changed due to the misbegotten instructional decisions we made. Each essay vulnerably shares the conditions that were present, the pressures we felt, the assumptions we made and the resulting consequences of our decisions. It is the authors’ hope that if we are honest, it might raise the bar of initial teaching practice for others. Through the lens of reflective practice, the authors reveal not just that their practice changed, but how and why.

The vision for this book is that it will be digested in small doses, not devoured cover-to-cover. Time and reflection will bolster a reader’s stance on the issues, agreements and contradictions contained within this volume. Though the essays could be organized in any number of ways, they are set down in two sections here. Part One, Hoops of My Making, examines how procedural choices stymied drama work in classrooms. Part Two, Assumptions and Expectations: Failing Better, considers how practitioner expectations and personal needs influenced choices and outcomes.

PART ONE: HOOPS OF MY MAKING

Brian Heap opens the volume with an entertaining and yet personally exposed piece in which he shares the challenges of negotiating student offerings within a dramatic context. He writes how he missed the opportunity to build the dynamic of an unfolding drama, with me as the teacher/facilitator reflecting on and refining the theoretical aspects of the art form in practice. With humour and self-deprecation, Brian shares one of the major challenges at the heart of process drama.

In The Vicious Circle: A Study in Stupidity, Peter Duffy confesses to insisting that the students with whom he worked form a circle, and when they grew reluctant to do so, he dedicated the rest of the lesson to ensuring that they would come together in a circle. That event shattered his previously held beliefs about the student/teacher dynamic. The echoes of his decisions that day still inform his present practice. The essay interrogates the role and importance of positionality and discourse within the classroom.

Pamela Bowell’s essay, Teaching in Role: Just Another Name is Never Enough, considers how the truthfulness that a teacher brings to a role impacts the aesthetic, and therefore, intellectual dimensions in a classroom. She reconstructs a lacklustre lesson and reveals her culpability for leaving the artistry out of her work. This was a challenging realization in light of the success she was having as a young drama advisory teacher.

Christine Hatton considers how a teacher’s lack of awareness of the micro worlds present in our classrooms ruptures the creation of community. She challenges theatre educators to work towards building classroom domains that embrace the difficult and critical stories of the students in our room. She urges teachers to use the fictional stories of drama to examine the forces at play on our students’ lives.

Patrice Baldwin’s chapter, Giant Mistakes, considers how an ill-fated lesson helped her to understand the critical value of knowing the students with whom you work. It is not enough to show up to do drama with children. That leads, as she states, to insufficient preparation and no training, knowledge or experience of teaching children with various and significant, special educational needs and abilities. What matters is intentional, supportive engagement. Patrice shares a vision for such a practice.

Johnny Saldaña’s essay, "A Lord of the Flies Moment: The Consequences of Wrong Gaming Directions, examines how even imprecise theatre game instructions can be an opportunity for students to sabotage the building of community within a classroom. Through the facilitation of one game, Johnny reveals how the classroom is a site of struggle where the oppressed and the oppressors share joint custody." That realization came to Johnny through the disintegration of a theatre of the oppressed exercise he facilitated.

In Teaching by Terror: Ordeal, Ego and Education, John O’Toole recounts two events (one in northeast England, and another in South Africa) that helped shape his understanding of power and dialogue. He critiques his implementation of invisible theatre (a form of theatre theorized and written about by Augusto Boal) and asks important questions about aesthetic distance. John powerfully states, The audience is trapped in somebody else’s deceptive universe, and as they don’t even know that, they have no agency, no means of acting on that universe, not even the power to say yea or nay to being in it. Through two critical incidents, he examines how one can come to encounter reality with great depth when one trusts the intentional guise of fiction.

PART TWO: ASSUMPTIONS AND EXPECTATIONS: FAILING BETTER

In Kindling Fires and Facing Giants: Learning About Drama from Children with Special Needs, Robert Colby shares an experience he had while working with Dorothy Heathcote at a school for children with special needs. He admits that, I had no confidence that I could rely on what I knew about theatre or teaching at that point. Through working with two students, Robert’s understanding of the potential of drama and his own practice was limited only by how he engaged it. This moving story demonstrates how those experiences disrupted his expectations and informed all future practice.

An Alaskan Education: From Service to Sustainability is Kathryn Dawson’s explanation of the importance of intentionality and ethical participation in drama. She shares how she confronted the edges of her own pedagogy while working with Native Alaskan youth 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Through making assumptions about what the students would want to do, she and her teaching partners sent shock waves through the community. By deconstructing the choices that were made and their impact on the community, Dawson reminds practitioners of the importance of key issues in community-based drama work.

In What Was I Thinking: Why Am I Thinking As I Do? Gustave J. Weltsek unpacks two separate events that contributed to his learning one valuable principle. Gus problematizes the notion of theatre with youth in relation to his own identity constructed around that work and around the preposition with. Similarly, he critiques his teaching of a course on student literacy where he instilled a particular drama emphasis. It was these issues of identity that arose which led Gus to re-examine his identities of practitioner and pedagogue.

Michael Anderson poses a vital question in his essay, Encountering the Unexpected and Extending the Horizons of Expectation: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Developing Teaching Practice. He asks, To what extent do teachers give students access to the tools of creation in drama? Michael traces his journey to that question through a foundational experience he had with a student. He shares how his perception of a rugby player did not include the identity of artist. It was when this lovable rogue showed up for his drama examination that Michael had to re-examine how and with whom he shared the tools of drama and why.

Julie Dunn’s essay, Democracy Over-Ruled, Or How to Deny Young Children’s Agency and Voice Through Drama! shares a critical insight from a more recent moment in her practice. It is a story that will have great relevance to seasoned and novice practitioners alike as these events are present at times in our own practice still. She examines an unintentional denying of student voice and how that impacted student participation and agency within a drama lesson. Through a fascinating and courageous model of shared inquiry with fellow practitioner Madonna Stinson, Julie shows how she came to understand the students’ lack of play within the drama was not necessarily a result of their inability to metacommunicate, that is, to negotiate the play from within the play, but rather, perhaps due to the structure of the drama.

In "What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You," Christina Marín describes a day when, in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, she travelled to a minimum security prison in New York State as part of a cadre of Latino professionals to discuss life and career choices with residents. Being a drama practitioner, she decided to employ drama as part of her sessions. In two of the three sessions she led that day, Christina learned practice-changing lessons about grasping a site’s ethos before one facilitates there and secondly about how, even as an experienced practitioner, the complexities of facilitation can catch all of us off-guard. Christina movingly unpacks how and why those events changed her awareness and future practice.

Allison Manville Metz demonstrates the importance of teachers following one of the theatre’s oldest rules, know thy audience, in her essay, Texting in the Drama Classroom: Pedagogical Adjustments to Unfamiliar Cultures from a Guest Artist Perspective. It is imperative that teachers are able to read their students and know when to adjust and when to hold onto the lesson plan. She shares how assumptions she made about her students cast her in role as a certain kind of teacher to these certain kind of students. She concludes with a provocative passage about the implications for professor confessionals within teacher education.

There are several chapters in this volume that address the impact of drama on students with special needs. These pieces will become essential reading for those interested in this work specifically and drama in education generally. Carmel O’Sullivan’s piece, The Day that Shrek Was Almost Rescued is no exception. Carmel grounds this essay both theoretically and practically. She tells of how, every Saturday morning, she facilitates sessions for participants who are on the Autism spectrum. One day, things did not go as planned and a student caused a bit of an uproar. Through reflecting on the experience with her students, she reveals insights into what might have caused the dust-up. Due to a recursive process she implements with her graduate students, Carmel is able to unearth many contributing factors to that day’s difficulties and to find ways to discourage them from happening in the future.

Juliana Saxton poignantly shares how a moment of Brian Way’s generosity demonstrated what lies at the heart of teaching. Through this vulnerable piece, Saxton describes insights from Kinsella and Pitman’s 2012 volume, Phronesis as Professional Knowledge: Practical Wisdom in the Professions. She points to Phronesis, which is action informed by reflection, as an apt lens for the work of drama in education. Through this critical idea, Saxton reveals her own growth and struggle to teach from a space that is informed by relationship, craft knowledge and reflection. This lovely piece leaves the reader with important, hopeful and practice-changing insights.

The authors wrote from raw places and shared private moments publically. They were committed to writing an anti-success narrative in hopes of creating a solidarity of practice that solves a problem, instigates a new approach, affirms a deeply held belief or challenges what we always thought we knew. With any luck, an essay or two will provoke a dialogical process of disclosure, reflection, alteration and implementation that will strengthen our collective work. This book does not intend to provide answers, only sincere and challenging questions. Each essay is a starting point for a dialogical encounter. We look forward to engaging in that with you.

Finally, many authors concluded their essays with a dedication or epilogue. The idea was to map the author’s epistemological lineage. In showing where we’ve come from, we have a better sense of where we are as a field. It is clearly an incomplete cartography, but it is a start. Secondarily, it was an attempt to pay homage to those who have created this deeply complex, exciting, vibrant and necessary field.

REFERENCES

Atkins, S. and Murphy, K. (1993), Reflection: A review of the literature, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 18, pp. 1188–1192.

Bowell, P. and Heap, B. (2013), Planning Process Drama: Enriching Teaching and Learning, New York: Routledge.

Dewey J. (1983), The classroom teacher, in J.A. Boydston (ed.), John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924: Vol. 15 1923–1924 (pp. 180–189), Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Jay, J.K. and Johnson, K.L. (2002), Capturing complexity: A typology of reflective practice for teacher education, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, pp. 73–85.

Manen, M. van (1995), On the epistemology of reflective practice, Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 1: 1, pp. 33–50.

O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

O’Toole, J. (1992), The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning, New York: Routledge.

Schön, D. (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, New York: Basic Books.

Way, B. (1967), Development through Drama, London: Longman.

Zeichner, K.M. and Liston, D.P. (1996), Reflective Teaching: An Introduction, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Part One

Hoops of My Making

Chapter 1

Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near: A Letter of Apology

Brian S. Heap

Dear Erstwhile Students,

This epistle is addressed to you by way of an apology that is long overdue. How time flies! I was given a stark reminder of this recently when I was approached in one of the parking-lots at my university by a very polite and helpful security guard who addressed me by name and asked whether I remembered coming to his school to conduct a drama class. It is always a little embarrassing when, at my stage in life, adults who bear little resemblance to the children they once were approach you and still appear hopeful that you will remember them. However, I do seem to have the uncanny ability to maintain a 100 per cent recall of the many dramas in which I have participated over time and once the security guard had prompted me with a brief description of the content of the drama in question, I realized it had taken place over 30 years before! Clearly such experiences remain vividly in the memories of many people, as does a particular one in mine, although for very different reasons, I fear, and for which I now feel the urgent need to atone.

You students who were with me on that fateful day must also be all quite grown up by now, and you may even have had the good fortune to develop into fine, well-adjusted individuals. If you have, and I hope that you have, it can be no thanks to me and my misguided attempts to enrich your lives through the experience of drama. It’s my own fault entirely, and I take full responsibility for my lack of competence. I really should have listened much more carefully to the briefing that I was offered ahead of time by your school administration. If I had done so then perhaps I would not have agreed to conduct that excruciating drama session in the first place. But then again, in my arrogance I considered myself to be both eminently well-qualified and up to the task. As far as I was concerned, you were simply a regular group of Jamaican primary school children, and, after all, I had already been working in the Jamaican primary school system for many years, so by then I had already worked with thousands of children just like you. I had also, by the time we met, been training teachers and supervising teaching practice in some very challenging situations across Jamaica. I had frequently travelled to schools in a variety of rural settings. Indeed, I had come to know the Jamaican parish of St. Mary like the back of my hand, with its schools in districts, villages and towns with names like Castleton, Devon Pen, Broadgate, Scott’s Hall, Annotto Bay, Port Maria and Galina. Your school, I felt, must be just like these were, albeit in the more urban setting of Jamaica’s capital city of Kingston, and with its own particular set of challenges.

I considered myself then, and still to this day, to be a committed teacher, and one who tries very hard never to stop learning. I had even taken off for a year to trek to the northern English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to study with that consummate teacher and educational philosopher Dorothy Heathcote. That experience in itself had been a baptism of fire, for it was there that I first became aware of just how inadequate I was as a teacher. Many years later I am, of course, still processing most of the things that happened during that year of study, but by the time of my encounter with you students, I had already begun dabbling about with my own personal interpretations of Dorothy’s concepts of teacher in role (TIR) and mantle of the expert with what I judged then to be a reasonable amount of success. So I really was not in the least bit fazed when the request arrived asking me to come and work with you.

As I recall, I had been invited by your school administration to conduct a drama session as part of a Summer Reading Programme that you were attending. In a follow-up session, one of your parents made the startling revelation that might have been very helpful to know in advance. The parent told me that so many of you student participants really associated reading with punishment. In my mind’s eye, I began to conjure up a somewhat fanciful vision of a Tenth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, where the unfortunate Damned would be condemned to suffer for Eternity sitting quietly reading their books!

You may have noticed the heading at the beginning of this missive. The first part consists of a Jamaican proverb that illustrates something of the economy of expression Jamaicans have in communicating deep traditional wisdom. Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near speaks to the fact that whenever, as humans, we become just the slightest bit complacent, something is very likely to happen to pull the rug from under our feet. And really, I should have known better. Alarm bells should have gone off when I heard the term multi-grade used to describe you as a group. Multi-grade schools still exist in many parts of rural Jamaica, particularly in districts where the population is too small to support a complement of full-grade classrooms. In the Jamaican multi-grade school, typically one teacher works with a combination of first and second grade students, another with grades three and four, and yet another with grades five and six. Often the teachers will be working together in one large space with their individual classes separated by free-standing partitions or chalkboards, so that the sounds of a music lesson may, on occasion, freely intermingle with the doleful chanting of the times tables, in a cacophony of pedagogic industry.

In my careless state of complacency, I did not pay sufficient heed to my briefing, and so had not fully prepared myself to meet a group of children ranging in age from 6-years old to 11, reflecting the entire spread from grades one to six. But even that was not the most troubling aspect of my negligence. I should have realized from the very outset that you were bound to have had younger or older brothers and sisters within the group. But the deep-seated resentment of the sibling rivalry that lurked unseen within the dark recesses of your hearts remained, as yet, masked by your beguiling, cherubic faces. All that, of course, remained to be unleashed in due course.

The encounter with drama that I had planned for you was, in my own personal estimation of my abilities at that time, absolutely wonderful. Needless to say, I had a very high opinion of both myself and my abilities as a teacher. I envisaged coming into your school to transform your lives permanently through imagined experience. Together we would create a wonderful story, and I would use TIR in order to open up all kinds of meaningful insights for you that would enrich your existence forever! At the time of our encounter I had not yet discovered the work of David Booth, but somehow intuitively, I felt that drama could lead you all towards an appreciation of story, and from there to storybooks and, Hey, presto!, to reading and universal literacy! Unfortunately, my perfectly conceived drama lesson continued to only ever really exist as a figment of my imagination and remained inside my head. In actuality, it was destined never to see the light of day, as you were all to discover to your own cost, since, not surprisingly, my thinking turned out to be characterized by a deeply flawed logic.

As you all shuffled into the room, my heart turned over when I suddenly realized the extent of my miscalculation. You were about as disparate a group of children as I was ever likely to encounter. You were all different ages, shapes and sizes, and the look in your eyes challenged me to engage you for the next two-and-a-half hours. Your attention was all totally focussed on me, this stranger, and once we had gone through the self-conscious preliminaries of introducing ourselves to each other, and you all just continued to stand there and stare at me. I felt I needed to deflect that attention somewhere else. And so I set off with Dorothy Heathcote’s distant voice ringing in my ears, Find something to focus their attention on! She would always talk to her own students about needing to have something that functioned in the classroom as the other, something that would divert attention away from the teacher and towards a dilemma to be resolved or task to be completed. We would spend hours with Dorothy preparing all kinds of signs to take with us into the classroom. I remember making ornate, ruffled, paper collars like the ones worn by people in portraits by Velasquez to be used in a class about the Golden Age of Spanish Drama. Once we wrote epitaphs on paper gravestones for children to puzzle over in a lesson about the Legend of the Holly and the Ivy. But in your case I had arrived woefully unprepared. I didn’t really have anything with me but my story and for some reason the surprisingly heterogeneous nature of the group shook my confidence to such an extent that I no longer trusted the story as something that would hold us together. I just felt that it was much too early in the game to take that kind of risk, and I would first of all have to try a different approach. I see now that one flicker of self-doubt led to a decision being made that set us off completely down the wrong path.

My on-the-spot decision to engage you all in a game felt like an absolutely brilliant solution to my quandary at the time. I decided then and there to draw on my tried and trusted pre-Dorothy approach! The justification to my-self was that lots of nice games and activities would warm us all up and get us in the right frame of mind to work together as a group. But how on earth could I have made the sweeping assumption that at your different levels of development you would already understand that most games have a structure and rules, and that once they were explained to you, you would abide by them? Now, safely distanced by time and experience from the scene of my mortification on that day, I am able to understand something of your response and have finally begun to appreciate why you all did what you did.

Drop a Letter is a straightforward enough game in and of itself. Players sit in a circle facing inwards, while one player with a small bean bag walks around the external perimeter of the circle. Once the bag is dropped behind one of the seated players, the