Shakespeare’s Birthday (Again!)

As The Shakespeare’s Globe team in London remind us: Happy (459th) Birthday Shakespeare! (https://www.shakespearesglobe.com). Links suggested by John Foreman. 

 At one level we are reminded of the Shakespeare industry. There are many many editions of Shakespeare’s plays and the accompanying academic industry. Conservative curriculum in England still mandates Shakespeare as essential to the schooling of young minds. 

Stepping beyond those caveats, the richness and imaginative power of Shakespeare continues to weave a powerful web generation after generation.

What are your favourite quotations from the Bard?

Why do we continue to see new productions of his plays in new mediums? 

(The latest Macbeth directed by Joel Coen for ApplyTV, for example. Or, Romeo and Juliet filmed in an empty theatre, over seventeen days, during a global pandemic in 2021 and recently on ABC TV ins Australia.)

What is the relevance of Shakespeare to Australian students in 2022?

In1961 Jan Kott published Shakespeare Our Contemporary “finding in his analogies between Shakespearean situations and those in modern life and drama the seeds of vital new stage-conceptions”.

That’s a long time ago in another century, but is Shakespeare still resonating with Generation X/Y/Z? And why?

How will you celebrate Shakespeare?

Drama Tuesday - Performing Arts Perspectives 2023

For the 27th time, outstanding performances of students completing Year 12 courses in Dance, Drama and Music were showcased to a packed Perth Concert Hall.  

It is always interesting to reflect on the topics that emerge in the drama performances.

In the Original Solo Performance Good Old Trip by Gia Mairata, a delightful elderly grandmother living alone with her parrot is given a gift of brownies made by her grand daughter  special brownies laced with certain substances. Played for laughs with gusto. A crowd pleaser with the youthful audience. 

Estella Glencross created The 20th of July Plot, focusing on the moral dilemma facing the plotters of an assassination attempt on Hitler. An interesting concept explored though I felt the physicality of the role was under explored. 

Elijah Kanganas gave a spirited realisation of William breaking free from convention in Free Will.

The Tiger Mum by Madeline Kelly explored the dark world of dance mums with strongly recognised humour entertaining the audience. 

Once again we saw trends towards 1) strong physicalisation  fully realised use of space and time and flexibility in movement; 2) clever use of sound (though thankfully not every performance was bathed in sound); and, 3) use of humour (which can be a double edged sword unless well managed).

The three scripted monologues showed range.

Words of Advice for Young People by Ioanna Anderson performed by Charlotte Moody

Kailee Young performed med Richard III by  William Shakespeare with paper cutouts for the murdered princes. 

Actor by Steven Berkof was performed with amazing vocalised sound effects and physicality by Jack Hadlow (underpinning once again the power of voice used well).

As always, a Concert Hall venue is not necessarily the most suitable for actors and the use of miking and amplification, while better this year, produced reverberant tone. 

Each year is a window into the drama mind of young students. And a tribute to those who created and sustained this annual event. 

Drama Tuesday - Do you remember your first drama lesson?

Critical Incident Methodologies for Future Practice

Robin Pascoe, 

Honorary Fellow, School of Health and Education, Murdoch University. Immediate Past President IDEA

I don’t pose that question as an exercise in nostalgia. This is a serious question designed to stimulate reflective practice. Our first experience is drama teachers often shape us and leave indelible marks. Before you read on, take time to reflect on your first drama teaching experiences. What do you remember? What was positive? What do you back on perhaps with a smile or a cringe about your “mistakes”?

For me, my first drama teaching was in a different century, and we all know that the past is a different  country, and they do things differently there.

Things were different then

The Department of Education in Western Australia, called for volunteers to work with young people from remote in regional Western Australian schools. The camp was run overlooking the sea in wartime wooden shacks. I was an apprentice to an experienced though chaotic drama teacher, then one of the few in schools. He had a wild looking mane of hair and wore the mandatory tie-dye T-shirt and jeans. But then it was what are sometimes referred to as the hippy 70s. I was a student teacher partway through a degree in English literature with a passion for drama and film. But I had not yet started on any drama pedagogy. I was full of  enthusiasm that was only matched by my ignorance.

The camp ran for five days, and each day there were drama activities interspersed with sporting and social activities and visits to factories. The camp participants were of mixed ages. Some were aboriginal students, what we now call First Nations Australians, but mostly they were kids in remote areas of a state that has a Million Square Miles of distance. None of them had been into the city before. None had done drama before.  

We began each drama lesson with a warmup. Lots of closing eyes lying on the floor. Giggles and restlessness. A huge reliance on words like trust, focus and concentration. 

Sitting in a mandatory circle, two students would be blindfolded and armed with long lances made of rolled up newspaper or a pillow from the dormitory and set to stalking each other guided by voiced signals from the other students. Repeated endlessly. Each time one of the stalking pair would erupt in a frenzy of furiously swiping air swishing (a long way from trust building) and cheers and whoops from the circle of onlookers. 

Looking back, it’s a fair question to ask : What was the point  of the activity? What was the drama learning? Participants seemed to be having fun, but what roles were being explored (beyond being aggressor)?

There was another activity of having students stand on the edge of the classroom desk and fall backwards into the cushioning arms of the other students. That truly was a trust exercise. Again, it’s fair to ask about the purpose of the activity in terms of drama learning.  

There were improvisation games. Spontaneous scenes set up randomly with occasional glimpses of the life experiences of the camp participants. Imagine you are in the city for the first time and you have lost your money and you need to ask for help. The participants stumbled through these situations in ham fisted ways with a mix of shyness and tongue tied skill. 

The other spectacular activity revolved around a huge parachute or sail. It was enormous, at least fifty metres wide. Outside on the shore in the dusk all camp participants ringed the parachute with instructions about how to hold the fabric  (thumbs under, not over, to avoid any dislocations). In the stiff afternoon onshore breezes, there would a collective sighing heaving shouting and then  the parachute lifting and lifting as everyone ran. The aim was for the parachute to fly and lift some students off the ground. 

There were heaving breaths and wind blown red faces. Lots of laughing. The stated purpose was the sense of collaboration and cooperation implicit in all  drama. There was certainly a sense of fun and participation. But what was the drama learning purpose?

I didn’t teach any specific drama lessons. But I did carry from the experience the need for committing everyone to a shared experience. I learnt the need to provide structure. It would be a time before I learned more about the purposes of warmups but I did sense their importance in providing focus and concentration (noted in all the drama teaching textbooks). There was a sense of “breaking the fourth wall” between teacher and students. In the sweaty closeness of the drama classroom there is a different dynamic from the desk bound world of teaching English Lit. But above all, I did have a sense of wanting to commit to this drama teaching world. 

There is a serious purpose to the questions posed beyond an exercise in nostalgia. 

Things were different then. I was different then.

Drama teaching was not something I knew from my own schooling. There was none. Studying Shakespeare in school was reading Hamlet around the room desk bound. That activity was accompanied by the elderly teacher reading the Harley Granville-Barker Introduction to Shakespeare. It was mind numbingly deadly. At least I knew from my English teaching pedagogy that we would be focusing on understanding drama through practical exploration using voice and movement not simply cognitive note taking and regurgitation. So I was aware that drama teaching was committed to schooling that was significantly changed from my own schooling. It was a world of opportunity and possibility. 

I was driven by what still drives me now all these years later: in drama we express and communicate ideas physically in time and space for others to share. 

My drama teaching experiences on that camp were intense and memorable and thin on theory. There wasn’t much passing on of specific knowledge about the Elements of Drama. There wasn’t that much drama learning. But it was strong on enthusiasm, on the value of participating and risk taking. I don’t mean the risk taking of falling backward off tables into the hoped for arms of others. I am talking about stepping into an unknown, unscripted teaching space. I am talking about the riskiness of facing uncertainty, ambiguity, unknown unknowns. Drama teaching is not about following the prescriptions of those who have gone before us; there are no prewritten scripts, we are always improvising, stepping into the improvised space of making choices and facing consequences. 

I didn’t recognise it at the time, but working on this drama camp was a springboard for a career. 

It was also about making mistakes and living with the consequences of them. As the song goes, “mistakes, I’ve made a few”. In fact in my own teaching I wore as a badge of honour saying to students and teachers, one of the reasons I can talk about learning to teach is because if there’s a mistake to be made, I’ve probably made it. I remember, hearing or reading about Teacher-in-Role and being foolish enough to think I could try it. After all, I had done a bit of acting; it couldn’t be different could it? We might be humbled by our mistakes, but they only have meaning if we learn from them. 

What is the best drama teacher education? Reflection and Reflexivity in action

How do we learn to become drama teachers? How do we become better drama teachers?

Drama teacher education is best modelled on our understanding of how we learn drama. We learn drama through practical, hands on and guided experience. With Vygotsky in mind, we learn reaching into our Zones of Proximal Development hand in hand with the Knowledgable Other. 

In whatever form of learning to teach drama – university or community based, we keep several principles in mind. We belong to Guilds of Drama Educators. We serve apprenticeships. We are mentored. We make mistakes. We learn. 

In my current work (semi-retired from the university but hanging about teaching one capstone unit) I teach about using Critical Incident Methodologies (Tripp 1993/2012). Critical Incidents in our professional practice are when, as the result of deep reflection on our theory and practice, we learn and we change our practice. Critical Incidents are not just any thing that happens in our day to day practice. They are not sensational, tabloid headlines or crises. Critical Incidents are created by our own minds seeing a problem that impacts on our professional practice.

Angelides (2001, Page 436 Table 1)provides a number of key questions to help us frame our perceptions/understanding of a Critical Incident.

• Whose interests are served or denied by the actions of these critical incidents?

• What conditions sustain and preserve these actions?

• What power relationships between the headteacher, teachers, pupils, and parents are expressed in them?

• What structural, organisational, and cultural factors are likely to prevent teachers and pupils from engaging in alternative ways?

In describing the drama workshop I have already posed some of those questions about the purpose and curriculum relevance of the activities. But it is also worth, probing deeper. Sometimes, looking back on drama teaching practice, it is possible to see signs of the drama teacher as hero. In the bland world of education, the colour and pizzazz of the charismatic drama teacher created mythologies. This prompts questions about who was the most powerful in the classroom. On the one hand, there was a focus on honouring student-centred ideas and experiences. Hand in hand there was the driving personality of the drama teacher. Drama teacher as cult leader or mystic or guru is a lingering question. 

It is also possible to reflect about the valuing of drama by the school system. Drama was then seen as the sort of activity that was included on a school camp, but not in the mainstream curriculum offered to students. It was seen as “enrichment” for “disadvantaged” country kids. Drama had novelty not intrinsic valuing. It would take the length of my professional career in education to see the breaking down of these structural and cultural factors. 

In other words, we need a more socially critical lens through which to reflect on the Critical Incident. “Only by attending to the values that are exposed by the incident that it is possible to achieve a sufficiently deep diagnosis to move beyond the practical problematic and into other kinds of professional judgement.” (Tripp 1993/2012, p. 112).

Professional growth requires both reflection and reflexivity. It is underpinned by the realisation that the creation of a Critical Incident from something that happened in my life, in turn creates something new in my life. It is change. It is transformational.

Bartlett (1990, in Joshi, 2018) presents some questions to be addressed while reflecting on personal critical incidents in a teaching career (adapted here to a drama education context): 

• Why did I become a drama teacher?

• Do these reasons still exist for me now? 

• How has my background shaped the way I teach?

• What is my philosophy of drama teaching?

• Where did this philosophy come from?

• How was this philosophy shaped?

• What are my beliefs about drama learning?

• What critical incidents in my training to be a teacher shaped me as a teacher?

• Do I teach in reaction to these critical incidents?

These processes of standing back, looking at our practicer with aesthetic distance, serves to strengthen our drama teaching practice. Critical Incident approaches remind us of the need for what that Lincoln (1985) refers to perspectival shifts, for multiple views of the same phenomenon that may reveal multiple realities that are constructed by the participants in the same situation.  There’s a need for going deeper into the taken-for-granted norms, to look behind the immediate, to interpret and make meaning. 

It is important to note, that Critical Incident methodologies are not merely about describing something that happened. They rely on us identifying that there is an important, professionally significant problematic in the incident that stimulates reflection and reflexivity. In other words, the processes of analysis cause change of practice, rather than simple identification of an issue.  

A practical example

Creating and analysing Critical Incident is a useful discipline for professional growth.

In 2013 I ran a workshop for DramaWest, the association for drama educators in Western Australia. It was based on the observations reported by my drama teacher education students that there was an indiscriminate and excessive use of Space Jump, one drama game. They reported whole class lessons being given over to this one game. Students loved it and demanded it as a way of avoiding other planned activities.. 

The principle of Space Jump is simple. A student inside a circle initiates an improvised drama action. The teacher, usually, calls “Space Jump”. The student freezes. Another student enters the scene and based on the frozen student’s image, initiates a different dramatic action that the first student must follow. In other words, the action is spontaneously jumped. 

It is important to note that there is nothing intrinsically “wrong” with the Space Jump activity. It is the sometimes thoughtless and empty use of the activity that needs to be questioned. In the workshop that I  ran, we explored ways of connecting the Space Jump activity to the Elements of Drama and the curriculum. By specifying which Element of Drama is focused on or by using the Space Jump to explore, say, specific forms and styles, it is possible to both engage with students’ enthusiasm for the activity and meet the need for specific learning outcomes.

Using Critical Incident approaches allowed for a questioning of practice and bringing about change. 

I said at the beginning, sharing the question posed by this article, is more than an exercise in nostalgia. Celebrate our past with an eye to the future. There is always a little of that past me in my drama teaching today. All experience is still that “ arch wherethro’/ Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades. For ever and forever when I move” (Tennyson, 1842, Ulysses). The arc of time, as drama teaches us, is not measured in moments on the clock. Our practice, like art, is long.

All images by Robin Pascoe, 1976.

Drama Tuesday - Cyrano

Cyrano

Black Swan State Theatre Company presenting the Melbourne Theatre Company production for The Perth Festival. 

So many things to say about this version of Cyrano by Virginia Gay with a free hand on the original by Edmond Rostand. It is a stunning production. Successful on so many levels and loved by the Saturday afternoon audience.

Broken proscenium within proscenium 

The most immediate impression is the setting that we saw as we entered the theatre. Inside the wooden proscenium of the Heath Ledger, sits a seedy  theatre stage with traditional exposed brick back wall, scatter of props, a ghost light glowing. But one edge of the proscenium is broken, a literal breaking of the fourth wall. We see both the stage, with shell foot lights but at the same time, it is as if we are seeing the inner workings of theatre. 

This is a wonderful physical metaphor for what is described as a “love letter to theatre”. What is the “act” on stage? What is “real life”? And holding it all together is a dazzling array of words. This is very much a reminder that we are seeing  the play within the play.

Rostand’s play is, above all a river of words, of witty dialogue spoken at a scintillating pace. In “updating” or “adapting” the play for contemporary times, Gay has maintained the flow and force of words. There is true wit in the use of language. Cleverness. 

There’s a wonderful 3D visualisation at the MTC web site: https://www.mtc.com.au/discover-more/mtc-now/cyrano-set-design-virtual-tour/

 Role reversal

The heart of this interpretation is that Cyrano is a woman and her passionate love interest is Roxanne. As in the original, Cyrano provides the honeyed words for Roxanne’s suitor (here called Yan and played with swagger by Joel Jackson – a Pilbara God), and, as  in the original, her words sway Roxanne. But, in a step away from the original, Cyrano wins the heart of Roxanne. In the original, it is only years after, that Roxanne recognises that Cyrano was the true love.

In these more gender fluid times, there are different points being made about the nature of love denied. The portrayal of the vainglorious Yan is cutting. 

Not a prosthetic nose in sight 

So often, the preoccupation of audiences is the quality and effect of the prosthetic nose adopted for the production. It is after all, the defining feature of how others see Cyrano. 

So it is interesting that there is no attempt – beyond words – to endow Virginia Gay’s Cyrano with a physical prosthetic nose. 

We are invited to believe that her nose is legendary. Again, we are reminded that theatre is about the “willing suspension of disbelief” rather than the physical actuality. We are again reminded how distorting can be an obsession with “realism” (ironic when so much of realism in film and television is CGI).

What sets Cyrano apart is not the physical but the emotional and imagined impact of self and identity.

There are also enough theatrical surprises – steam bursts, light streaming through opening windows high on the stage wall, bursting explosions of streamers cascading on audiences.

Why do we keep telling the old stories

There is a poignant moment when Cyrano asks this question. It is also one that seems to be the through line question of this version. 

Why do we keep telling these old stories? What are the “new” stories? 

The chorus – 1/2/3

The blend of theatre types to flesh out the cast – the theatrical flourish ham/the wide eyed ingenue/the clichéd ennui – provides a clever backdrop to the action played out by the three main roles. 

In all there is a neat efficiency to the way the writing unfolds the action. 

Virtuoso Performance 

Cyrano is that peak of lead roles. Virginia Gay gives a stellar performance. Importantly though, the strong ensemble carries and supports the star. 

A most malleable and forgiving text

I found myself thinking through with this performance of Cyrano echoes of the original text. Open to interpretation and reinterpretation, the text is rich in language and ideas. 

This version jumped about in the sequence and played with us as audience. I did wonder a couple of times if you had to know the original (or versions of the original) to keep up with the dance being played in this version. 

There have certainly been plenty of other versions. I could hear the resonances.

Cyrano in Context

In a different century with students from Armadale SHS John Foreman Liz and I crafted  our own version of this malleable material. Cast as a 60s teen drama with appropriated pop songs, the material worked for 80s kids. Our Cyrano had a rougher texture. We liberally played with text but also stayed faithful to the shape. Particularly satisfying was the use of the Don McLean song “America Pie” to bridge to the final scene when Roxanne realised Cyrano’s role in her wooing. The poignant themes of the day the music died worked well for us and our actors and audiences. 

I still see value in working with this text and young people. The romantic conceits resonate with adolescence and there are opportunities to play with language and theatricality. I would love to see this latest version published and made available for study in schools. It is accessible and fun. 

Drama Tuesday - The fibs we tell about arts education

 In my childhood, a fib with the little lie. It’s not an out and out dishonesty, not a deliberate untruth. It was a minor, bending of truth, sometimes to protect someone’s feelings, avoid embarrassment, or plaster over difficult situations.

In teacher education, we are often fibbing to  our students that we provide sufficient arts teacher education. We perpetrate this mistruth with the best of intentions: we are making the best of a bad situation with the time we have available, we say. Or, we blame someone else – the managerialist system, the usual Neo-liberal, whipping boys! But deep down, we know that we are glossing over the truth.

There is the temptation to throw up our hands in exasperation, and to just give up.

But maybe we need some truth and reconciliation!

No one likes truth tellers. We as a society have a bad habit of punishing them. Or dismissing them as dissidents. But if we truly care about Arts education and its place in the education of all students, we have to call out the fibbers, the masters of misdirection, the sleight of mind, the liars and cheats.

---

There is a deeper issue: a deeper state of denial. If there are fibbers that are also these deniers. And deniers (such as climate change deniers!) are maybe worse. They cling to their articles of faith blindly. With bombast there’s a rather senior education department principals who maintains the faith and claims to me without even a twitch of irony that “the state of Arts education in schools is healthy”, adding for emphasis, “Teachers are well prepared for teaching the arts in their classrooms”. Later, ironically, over dinner, he’s outlined that his drama training consisted of a lecturer dictating drama games to write down.

If you are in a state of denial of course all in the garden is roses and there’s no manure. 

The reality of arts education, and contemporary teacher education is that it is not healthy. Think about the courses where the arts are included in units about integrating curriculum. Without any sense of shame there are units that cover HASS/HPE/The Arts in one semester. There are teacher education courses that have 20 contact hours early in a four year degree course. This sort of practice reinforces the current pragmatics of schools that argues that all students need is integrated curriculum which is the panacea for time-poor teachers   Or there is a focus on “doing things” in the name of arts learning ignoring the underlying purpose of arts curriculum. 

At one level, fibs are inevitable. If we face too much truth telling, we might go mad. But maybe it’s time to stop shrugging our  shoulders. Time to face up to a reality check. 

What do you think!

Drama Tuesday - Like Captured Fireflies

Like Captured Fireflies

In her classroom our speculations ranged the world.

She aroused us to book waving discussions.

Every morning we came to her carrying new truths, new facts, new ideas,

Cupped and sheltered in our hands

like captured fireflies.

When she went away a sadness came over us,

But the light did not go out.

She left her signature upon us,

The literature of the teacher

who writes on children’s minds.

I’ve had many teachers who taught us

soon forgotten things,

But only a few like her who created in me a new thing a new attitude, a new hunger.

I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that teacher.

What deathless power lies

in the hands of such a person.

John Steinbeck

---

...Like Captured Fireflies By John Steinbeck

My eleven-year-old son came to me recently and in a tone of patient suffering, asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?” “About fifteen years,” I said. “Oh! Lord,” he said despondently. “Do I have to?”
“I ’m afraid so. It’s terrible and I ’m not going to try to tell you it isn’t. But I can tell you this-if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher and that is a wonderful thing.”

“Did you find one?”

It is customary for adults to for- get how hard and dull and long school is. The learning by memory all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’ t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it. School is not easy, and it is not for the most part very fun, but then if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and math teacher in high school, my second a professor of creative writing at Stanford and my third was my friend and partner Ed Ricketts.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

My three had these things in common-They all loved what they were doing. They did not tell-they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away, and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.

I shall speak only of my first teacher because in addition to the other things, she brought discovery.

She aroused us to shouting, book waving discussions. She had the noisiest class in school, and she didn’t even seem to know it. We could never stick to the subject, geometry or the chanted recitation of the memorized phyla. Our speculation ranged the world. She breathed curiosity into us so that we brought in facts or truths shielded in our hands like captured fireflies.

She was fired and perhaps rightly so, for failing to teach the fundamentals. Such things must be learned. But she left a passion in us for the pure knowable world and me she inflamed with a curiosity which has never left me. I could not do simple arithmetic but through her I sensed that abstract mathematics was very like music. When she was removed, a sadness came over us, but the light did not go out. She left her signature on us, the literature of the teacher who writes on minds. I have had many teachers who told me soon-forgotten facts but only three who created in me a new thing, a new attitude and a new hunger. I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hands of such a person.

I can tell my son who looks forward with horror to fifteen years of drudgery that some- where in the dusty dark a magic may happen that will light up the years...if he is very lucky.

---

Drama Tuesday - A Primer For Arts Education

 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)

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

www.dramaaustralia.org.au 

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

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.

(https://www.sunburntfilms.com/) 

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.