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

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191 pages

English

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Description

This collection of essays from many of the world’s preeminent drama education practitioners captures the challenges and struggles of teaching with honesty, humor, openness, and integrity. Collectively the authors possess some two hundred years of shared experience in the field, and each essay investigates the mistakes of best-intentions, the lack of awareness, and the omissions that pock all of our careers. The authors ask, and answer quite honestly, a series of difficult and reflexive questions: What obscured our understanding of our students’ needs in a particular moment? What drove our professional expectations? And how has our practice changed as a result of those experiences? Modeled on reflective practice, this book will be an essential, everyday guide to the challenges of drama education.

Foreword

Introduction

Part One: Hoops of My Making

Chapter 1: “Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near”: A Letter of Apology – Brian S. Heap

Chapter 2: The Vicious Circle: A Study in Stupidity – Peter Duffy

Chapter 3: Teaching in Role: Just Another Name is Never Enough – Pamela Bowell

Chapter 4: Storying the Dramas of Teaching Drama – Christine Hatton

Chapter 5: Giant Mistakes – Patrice Baldwin

Chapter 6: “A Lord of the Flies Moment”: The Consequences of Wrong Gaming Directions – Johnny Saldaña

Chapter 7: Teaching by Terror: Ordeal, Ego and Education – John O’Toole

Part Two: Assumptions and Expectations: Failing Better

Chapter 8: Kindling Fires and Facing Giants: Learning About Drama from Children with Special Needs – Robert Colby

Chapter 9: An Alaskan Education: From Service to Sustainability – Kathryn Dawson

Chapter 10: What Was I Thinking: Why Am I Thinking As I Do? – Gustave J. Weltsek

Chapter 11: Encountering the Unexpected and Extending the Horizons of Expectation: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Developing Teaching Practice – Michael Anderson

Chapter 12: Democracy Over-Ruled, Or How to Deny Young Children’s Agency and Voice Through Drama! – Julie Dunn

Chapter 13: What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You – Christina Marín

Chapter 14: “Texting” in the Drama Classroom: Pedagogical Adjustments to Unfamiliar Cultures from a Guest Artist Perspective – Allison Manville Metz

Chapter 15: The Day that Shrek Was Almost Rescued: Doing Process Drama with Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder – Carmel O’Sullivan

Chapter 16: Failing Better – Juliana Saxton

Afterword: Looking Back to See Ahead – David Booth

Sujets

Teaching

Performing Arts

EDUCATION

Performance art

General officer

General

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 juin 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783204748
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in paperback in the UK in 2015 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in paperback in the USA in 2015 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Theatre in Education Series ISSN: 2049-3878 Cover designer: Kevin Bush Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Jessica Mitchell Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-473-1 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-475-5 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-474-8
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
To the late Dorothy Heathcote whose inspiration can be found on every page of this book.
To Patti Walker. Your loving influence surrounds everything good in my life. Thank you for your help, support, humour, intelligence and partnership. To Evelyn and Nolan, thank you for putting up with my (mis)adventures in parenting. I love you all beyond words.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part One: Hoops of My Making
Chapter 1: “Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near”: A Letter of Apology Brian S. Heap
Chapter 2: The Vicious Circle: A Study in Stupidity Peter Duffy
Chapter 3: Teaching in Role: Just Another Name is Never Enough Pamela Bowell
Chapter 4: Storying the Dramas of Teaching Drama Christine Hatton
Chapter 5: Giant Mistakes Patrice Baldwin
Chapter 6: “A Lord of the Flies Moment”: The Consequences of Wrong Gaming Directions Johnny Saldaña
Chapter 7: Teaching by Terror: Ordeal, Ego and Education John O’Toole
Part Two: Assumptions and Expectations: Failing Better
Chapter 8: Kindling Fires and Facing Giants: Learning About Drama from Children with Special Needs Robert Colby
Chapter 9: An Alaskan Education: From Service to Sustainability Kathryn Dawson
Chapter 10: What Was I Thinking: Why Am I Thinking As I Do? Gustave J. Weltsek
Chapter 11: Encountering the Unexpected and Extending the Horizons of Expectation: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Developing Teaching Practice Michael Anderson
Chapter 12: Democracy Over-Ruled, Or How to Deny Young Children’s Agency and Voice Through Drama! Julie Dunn
Chapter 13: What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You Christina Marín
Chapter 14: “Texting” in the Drama Classroom: Pedagogical Adjustments to Unfamiliar Cultures from a Guest Artist Perspective Allison Manville Metz
Chapter 15: The Day that Shrek Was Almost Rescued: Doing Process Drama with Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder Carmel O’Sullivan
Chapter 16: Failing Better Juliana Saxton
Afterword: Looking Back to See Ahead David Booth
Contributor Biographies
Foreword
Cecily O’Neill
Teachers are made during encounters with their students and sometimes these encounters can be bruising. This is particularly true in the complex classroom interactions and confrontations of the drama lesson. In this important collection we learn of the encounters that have been significant in the evolution of these writers into master teachers. From their current perspective as respected leaders in their profession, they recall, with honesty and humility, their youthful eagerness and arrogance, their confidence and inexperience. These experiences alone have not produced growth and learning; it is the strength that these teachers have found to face their failures unblinkingly and reflect on their implications that has changed them.
All the teachers represented here are committed and passionate about their vocation. We encounter them as they work in both familiar and exotic locations, in various cultures, and in a variety of student populations. But whether they are “Drama Ladies” flying into remote Alaskan villages, or working with special populations in urban schools, what is immediately apparent is their courage, enthusiasm and belief in the power of drama as a force for change and learning.
As these teachers re-visit key moments in their own development, the theories that underpin their practice emerge naturally from their analyses of their lessons. A great deal of good advice is implicit as they consider how they might have functioned otherwise. They speak to us as equal workers in this challenging field. The tone in which their many mistakes and misjudgements are recounted is direct and personal. We get a feeling for their personalities and the values that support them in the classroom. A sense of humour is clearly important.
Brian Heap gives a hilarious account of working with a multi-grade class in rural Jamaica. After a chaotic start to the lesson, he begins to feel secure, as the children, standing on chairs, imagine themselves on flying carpets. Suddenly the students start to parachute off the chairs until the room begins to look “like a training camp for an Airborne Infantry Division during World War II.” But the key point about his painfully honest description of a chaotic session is the reflection and analysis it provokes. He recalls too late the lessons he had learnt from his mentor, Dorothy Heathcote, about sharing power with the students. She was wise enough to recognize that we need to forgive ourselves, and that students can also forgive us if we don’t manage to get things right every time.
What comes across in every vivid account of mistakes made and lessons learnt is the fact that engagement in drama, or indeed in any of the arts, always has to be voluntary. As John O’Toole reminds us, drama works through the willing suspension of disbelief, and that vital word “willing” is often forgotten. We may be convinced that the session we have so painstakingly prepared is exactly what our students need, but unless the students become really engaged in the material, or we are prepared to adapt our plans to accommodate student responses, there is likely to be little sense of the collaboration or transformation that is at the heart of our endeavours. This is made abundantly clear in Julie Dunn’s extremely useful discussion of a sequence of lessons, meticulously prepared in the context of a small-scale research project. As she reflects on the decisions she made about the direction of the drama and recognizes that she effectively silenced the children’s voices, she identifies and makes explicit her new understandings regarding the balance of power in the classroom and student agency.
Many misjudgements arise from a failure to recognize that involvement in the art process itself is most likely to bring success. Some are caused by a failure to connect theory with practice, by assumptions of engagement or understanding on the part of the students, by misreading the atmosphere in the room or through an insufficient knowledge of the cultural setting. By reflecting on their errors, many of the teachers come to recognize that it is the drama process itself, rather than games or warm-ups, that will help to establish a healthy group dynamic and allow the work to develop in a positive manner.
John O’Toole recalls that there was a complete absence of ego in the work of his mentors, Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin Bolton. Instead, ego was replaced by an intense attentiveness and a shrewd reading of what was going on for every participant in the drama. Like those pioneers, these teachers have laid aside their egos in order to re-visit their mistakes and learn from them. They have tried to avoid the temptation that we all suffer from at one time or another—that of blaming our students for our own misjudgements. As Pamela Bowell points out, if we rationalize our errors, or fail to reflect on them with honesty and humility, the result is a creeping mediocrity of practice that produces second-rate, impoverished drama experiences.
Although this book will be enormously useful for beginning drama teachers, it is also likely to provoke critical and uncomfortable reflection from those of us who have been teaching for years. These reflections brought many of my own mistakes to mind. Often these miscalculations arose from a failure to recognize and acknowledge the individual comment or idea that might have led to a truly transformative experience, or, what is more painful to remember, a recognition of the value of an idea, but an inability to accommodate it successfully into the drama process. I was comforted by Julie Dunn’s reminder that mistakes can be described as “portals of discovery.”
Whether these accomplished and experienced teachers are operating in far-flung and exotic locations or in more familiar classroom settings, the same principles of effective drama teaching hold good: respect for their students; understanding of the context in which they are working; careful planning; an ability to negotiate the power relationship in the classroom; and trust in the drama process itself. These master teachers are truly reflective practitioners, seamlessly integrating theory and practice as they recount these pivotal moments in their own practice. They honour their mentors and their students who have helped them to learn and grow, and as Patrice Baldwin puts it, these mentors and students live vividly in their hearts and memories, as they do in the pages of this book.
Introduction
Peter Duffy
B ooks 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 enthus