Drama Tuesday - World Teacher Day 2021

What makes a memorable Drama Teacher?

On World Teacher Day I pose a simple challenge: who are the inspirational, unforgettable, indelible, significant, impressive, illustrious, brilliant, timeless drama teachers in your lives?

And why are they so memorable?

The drama teachers who I remember –

• Know drama and theatre

• Know how to teach drama and theatre

• Always learning and reflecting

• Care about the learning of their students

• Know curriculum, progression in learning drama and assessment that matches drama to students’ ages and stages of development

• Model effective drama teaching and learning

• Advocate for drama

• Confidently understand their role and purpose

Or to share this graphically:

Of course there are academic words for all this.

Teach drama focuses on embodied learning in the arts (Bresler, 2004). Through practical, hands-on experiences in drama, we model the ways that students learn the arts and ways they are taught. This  engenders embodied teaching.

This approach is based on sound research about providing:

• Analogue experiences – these are experiences like the ones students in drama experience, providing teachers with similar learning experiences that they need to facilitate for their students (Borko & Putnam, 1995; Morocco & Solomon, 1999).

• Content focus – unambiguous content description (Desimone, Porter, Garet, Yoon, & Birman, 2002; S.Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & SukYoon, 2001; Shulman, 1986).

• Active learning – where teachers are engaged in the analysis of teaching and learning; learning from other teachers and from their own teaching; reviewing examples of effective teaching practice (Desimone et al., 2002; Franke, Fennema, & Carpenter, 1997; Morocco & Solomon, 1999; S.Garet et al., 2001).

• Dialogue amongst teachers – belonging to a community of drama teachers participating in discussion with practising teachers (T. R. Guskey, 1986, 2003; Virginia Richardson, October 1990).

• Long-term support and feedback – support beyond the immediate experiences in the workshop through enrolling in a community of drama teachers (Borko & Putnam, 1995; T.R. Guskey, 2002).

This is an articulated theoretical framework for drama teacher education course design that steps beyond pragmatic functionalism. It is a framework informed by Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner, Eisner, Greene and others. Learning to teach drama involves acts of purposeful meaning-making that draw together personal experiences and those of others (Dewey, 1938; Eisner, 2002). No one learns alone (Grumet, 2004; Vygotsky, 1978). Drama teachers learn cognitively, somatically and affectively – mind, body and spirit (Peters, 2004). They work with enactive, iconic and symbolic modes (Bruner, 1990). Learning to teach drama engages aesthetic imagination (Greene, 1995). Learning to teach drama involves proactive participation in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Learning to teach drama organises drama knowledge, categorises it and uses strategies of paradigmatic thinking and narrative building (Bruner, 1991).

Extract from chapter about drama teacher education in a forthcoming book 

But you can sum up all these ideas:

Memorable Drama Teachers know their stuff… They get their act together and take it on the road everyday…

Bibliography

Borko, H., & Putnam, R. T. (1995). Expanding a teacher’s knowledge base: A cognitive psychological perspective on professional development. In T. R. Guskey & M. Huberman (Eds.), Professional Development in Education. New York: New York: Teachers College Press.

Bresler, L. (2004). Knowing Bodies, Knowing Minds - Towards Embodied Teaching and Learning. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1-21. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343711

Desimone, L. M., Porter, A. C., Garet, M. S., Yoon, K. S., & Birman, B. F. (2002). Effects of Professional Development on Teachers' Instruction: Results from a Three-Year Longitudinal Study. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24(2 (Summer 2002)), 81-112. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594138

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi.

Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education? John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University. Retrieved from www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_or_education.htm . Last updated: April 17, 2005.

Franke, M., Fennema, E., & Carpenter, T. (1997). Teachers creating change: Examining evolving beliefs and classroom practice. In E. Fennema & B. Scott-Nelson (Eds.), Mathematics teachers in transition (pp. 255-282). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, The Arts and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Grumet, M. (2004). No one learns alone. In N. Rabkin & R. Redmond (Eds.), Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century, (pp. 49–80). Chicago, IL: Columbia College Chicago.

Guskey, T. R. (1986). Staff development and the process of teacher change. Educational Researcher, 15, 5-12. 

Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional development and teacher change. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 8, 381-391. 

Guskey, T. R. (2003). Scooping up meaningful evidence. Journal of Staff Development, 24(4), 27-30. 

Morocco, C. C., & Solomon, M. Z. (1999). Revitalising professional development. In M. Z. Solomon (Ed.), The diagnostic teacher: Constructing new approaches to professional development (pp. 247-267). New York: Teachers College Press.

Peters, M. (2004). Education and the Philosophy of the Body: Bodies of Knowledge and Knowledges of the Body. In L. Bresler (Ed.), Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds - Towards Embodied Teaching and Learning. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

S.Garet, M., Porter, A. C., Desimone, L., Birman, B. F., & SukYoon, K. (2001). What Makes Professional Development Effective? Results From a National Sample of Teachers. American Educational Research Journal. doi:https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312038004915

Shulman, L. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14. 

Virginia Richardson. (October 1990). Significant and Worthwhile Change in Teaching Practice. Educational Researcher, 19(7), 10-18. doi:10.2307/1176411

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Drama Tuesday - Belonging

What does it mean to belong to a community – a guild – of drama teachers? 

In setting up the drama teaching course at Murdoch University in 2002 I involved two metaphors

• building a reporter of resources to support teaching drama on Day 1

• enrolling students in a guild or association of drama educators.

It is useful to think about why I find the concept of belonging to a group of drama educators an important foundational concept. 

It is not simply because as a graduating teacher i had impressed on me the importance of belonging. Though that is part of it. I have in professional life always been a joiner. 

This post is reflecting on the role of belonging. 

Wikipedia

Teaching drama can be isolated. Unlike, say, teaching English, in many schools, as drama teacher you are on your own because there may be only one of you in a school. 

There are many ways of belonging to a community even if you are a one person band. 

• You can establish networks and use buddy systems.

• You can be a member of a community when you are not physically located together.

• You can belong to a virtual community.

• You can belong to a corresponding community exchanging emails and snail mail and telephone calls.

• You can belong to a community by reading what others say and write and do by reading professional journals.

• You can contribute to your professional community by writing of your experiences in professional journals yourself.

• You can take responsibility for the future of the community. You can be a leader and a worker for the field. You do that from inside your drama workshop but also beyond. What you say and do with colleagues in your school, in your profession is a necessary part of contributing to the future of drama as a part of the curriculum for all students.

Belonging means that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time

Drama Victoria Facebook

One of the difficulties for productive and creative teachers is that they often reinvent their  particular wheels. Rather than efficiently re-using and re-cycling their teaching notes and resources, they make new ones each year. 

So, isn’t the issue: how do we better organise our pool of resources so that we can effectively and efficiently access them when we need to? And adapt them as our thinking about teaching drama changes, develops and grows

Using available resources better

Similarly, there seems to be a rejection of commercially published materials and textbooks. While I have never been able to use one textbook and one textbook alone, I do draw from many sources in my own teaching. But the most useful resources are people - and that brings us back to why it is necessary to have a sense of belonging.

The challenge for all of us as arts educators

In Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (2019), there is a powerful reminder of the way that arts education is seen in popular culture (in the UK but shared by many similar Western societies like Australia). Charlie is somewhat reluctantly seduced into participating in a summer production of Romeo and Juliet being staged in his dull suburban community. Used to hanging out on the fringes of his blokey school crowd, Charlie is not a fan of the arts and like his boy mates, is quick to sardonically dismiss and deride drama (though he is secretly reading Dostoyevsky). Here is Charlie’s view about the arts in education.

If there was such a thing as a theatre bug, then I was immune. The problem wasn’t acting. I was happy to watch people pretending to be other people in films and TV that I sucked up indiscriminately. But all the elements that were supposed to make theatre unique and special – the proximity, the high emotion, the potential for disaster – made it seem mortifying to me. It was too much, too bare and artificial.

 Then there was the whiff of pretension, superiority and self-satisfaction that clung to all forms of ‘the arts’. To perform in a play or a band, to put your picture on display in the corridor, to publish your story or, God forbid, your poem in the school magazine, was to proclaim your uniqueness and self-belief and so to make yourself a target. Anything placed on a pedestal was likely to be knocked off, and it was simply common sense to stay quiet and keep any creative ambitions private.

Especially for a boy. The only acceptable talent was in sport, in which case it was fine to strut and boast, but my talents lay elsewhere, very possibly nowhere. The only thing that I was good at, drawing – doodling actually – was acceptable as long as it remained technical and free of self-expression. There was nothing of me in the still life of a peeled orange, the close-up of an eye with a window reflected in it, the planet-sized spaceship; no beauty, emotion or self-revelation, just draughtmanship. All other forms of expression – singing, dancing, writing, even reading or speaking a foreign language – were considered not just gay but also posh, and few things carried more stigma at Merton Grange than this combination. (p. 150-151)

It is useful to reflect on the explicit and underlying issues captured here. Peer pressure; deeply inculcated values of what is important; personal preference all play a part. But Charlie is no orphan in sharing these perceptions. 

Having spent a life time in drama and arts teacher education, I have often speculated about what holds back successful implementation of arts curriculum in schools.

Apart from the general levelling effect of the Tall Poppy Syndrome and the self-deprecating avoidance of ‘showing off’, we see in schools combinations of fear of failing, quests for perfectionism and misunderstandings about the purpose and nature of arts curriculum. Most telling are the misconceptions about arts education (only for talented and ’special’ people; ‘I don’t have a creative bone in my body’; not core curriculum; time filling; something for Friday afternoons after the real learning). I am reminded of our friend who asks again and again but what is there to learn about acting and singing? 

How do we change deeply-held perceptions and prejudices?

What are the misconceptions about The Arts in schools that you see?

The lack of understanding (ignorance even) from gaps in teachers’ own arts education, compound reluctance and reinforce resistance to implementing arts curriculum. What are the game changers that we need for arts education to be successfully taught and learnt by all young Australians? 

Nicholls, D. (2019). Sweet Sorrow. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

Music Monday - Back to school

As Australian teachers return to school after the long summer break, it is timely to talk about voice care.

Teachers are high energy voice users and music teachers in particular need to be mindful of caring for their voice.

Here are some tips I have learned over the years – from singing and voice colleagues as well as fellow teachers:

1. Try to incorporate a basic voice warm-up into your drive to school. Some gentle sirening on a lip trill, ‘ng’ phoneme or vowel sound will help. Start in the middle of your speaking pitch range and gradually explore higher and lower pitches.

2. Keep your larynx well hydrated with frequent sips of water throughout the teaching day.

3. Avoid shouting over your class – establish a signal for attention early in the year. My favourite is to clap a 4- beat pattern which the class echo back. If established at the start of the year it becomes a habit and a terrific way to refocus the students’ attention on what you need to say – as well as bringing them back to the task at hand.

4. Eliminate throat clearing! If you are a habitual throat clearer, make 2020 the year you break the habit. Try to swallow instead.

5. Don’t smoke. 

6. Avoid excessive talking / singing when you have a cold.

7. If you direct a school choir, sing only the parts which are appropriate for your singing range.

What are your favourite voice care tips? We would love you to share by commenting below.

Happy teaching!