Thinking on your feet: A model for teaching teachers to use process drama

Joanne O’Mara

Drama Education in Australia

I have been teaching Drama Education since 1987, and have been researching in the field of drama education for over twenty years. During this time I have become convinced of the power of what Dorothy Heathcote described as “drama as a learning medium”—as a vehicle for teaching other things (Wagner, 1976)—as well as the value in students learning the art form itself. I have seen many students grow as individuals through the work that they do in drama, developing confidence, creativity, self esteem and problem-solving skills. Drama also helps students to think about what it is to be someone else—by playing characters and thinking about the world from the perspective of that character, they can develop empathy and broaden their understanding of other people.

In Australia, Drama Education is part of the curriculum from the first years of schooling right through to senior secondary school. We are currently moving towards a national curriculum (we presently have state run curriculum), and the Drama Curriculum is published and awaiting final endorsement. The curriculum is available at http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/the.arts/drama/learning-in-drama (ACARA, 2014), represents what is currently happening across the country as well as shaping the future direction for Drama Education in Australia. Drama is an extremely popular arts subject at the senior level, with more and more students electing to do this subject as part of their final year of schooling. One of the challenges for drama educators in Australia is to encourage more teaching of drama in the early years of schooling. While it is an extremely popular subject at the senior levels, the amount of drama taught in the junior levels of schooling varies from school to school, typically with nowhere near the same take-up rates as we find in secondary schooling. In the new Australian curriculum drama begins from the Foundation years of schooling, so this will help to support teachers to incorporate it into their teaching. Nevertheless, despite it being in the curriculum, there are many challenges for teachers incorporating drama into the curriculum in primary schools. In this chapter, I will discuss some of these challenges, focusing in particular on a research project, Quality Learning through Process Drama, where I interviewed 25 drama teacher educators from across Australia.

Process Drama

Process drama as a teaching methodology has developed primarily from the work of Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin Bolton (Bolton, 1979, 1984, 1992; Bolton & Heathcote, 1999; Heathcote & Bolton, 1995) and through the work of other leading drama practitioners (Morgan & Saxton, 1989; Neelands, Booth, & Goode, 1991; O'Neill, 1991, 1995; O'Toole, 1990). It is a method of teaching and learning where both the students and teacher are working in and out of role. O’Neill (1995) describes process drama being used to explore a problem, situation, theme or series of related ideas or themes through the use of the artistic medium of unscripted drama. Process drama is a dynamic way of working that requires teachers to reflect-in-action (O'Mara, 2000), constantly dealing with unique situations that require novel approaches (Schön, 1983). There is a well-established methodology and approach to planning for process drama (Bowell & Heap, 2013). When they are working in process drama, the students and teachers work together to create an imaginary dramatic world. In this world they work together to explore problems and issues such as: “How do communities deal with change?”: or themes such as betrayal, truth and other ethical and moral issues. Sometimes the work may begin as light-hearted, but teachers may layer more complexity into the work, aiming for a pedagogical outcome. Students learn to think beyond their own point of view and consider multiple perspectives on a topic through playing different roles. For instance, if the issue being discussed is logging a forest, they may play the loggers, people who live in the forest community and environmentalists. Playing a range of positions encourages them to be able to recast themselves as the “other” and to consider life from that viewpoint, thereby creating complexity and enabling us to explore multiple dimensions of the topic. Process drama does what the character Atticus, in the famous American Civil Rights novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, (Lee, 1962) advocates, the ability to work for social justice comes from the ability to understand another perspective—to be able to try on someone else’s shoes and walk around in them for a while. Process drama allows us to “try on” other people’s shoes, to walk the paths they tread and to see how the world looks from the point of view of others.

Learning through Process Drama

In the research project, Quality Learning through Process Drama, I aimed to:

As we saw earlier, process drama can be used to add complexity to students’ understandings of an issue or question, with the art form itself encouraging the tolerance of ambiguity. It is a radical, transformative pedagogy that engages a broad range of students, including those whose learning styles do not match the dominant educational philosophies of most school environments. Although process drama has been documented, discussed and theorized, there has been little work done on how process drama teachers make choices about which strategy to use while they are thinking on their feet. Deciding which strategy to use at each point of the process drama is an important skill that is necessary to teach in this way.

In order to identify the uses experienced drama teachers make of drama teaching strategies in process drama, I interviewed 25 drama practitioners about the strategies they use in process drama, how they use each strategy, what outcomes they believe each strategy produces and how they make decisions in action about which strategy to use. I defined “experienced” as meaning drama teachers who are comfortable, competent and known for their work using process drama. Many of these teachers were university teachers engaged in training pre-service teachers. The interviews focused on the use of dramatic form in the classroom, how and why process drama practitioners selected particular dramatic strategies at different points in the drama. This chapter focuses on some unexpected findings about the way that the university teachers worked towards achieving a quality outcome for their students through their approach to the teaching of process drama to pre-service teachers in their university courses. A theme that has emerged is that many of these university drama teachers working in primary teacher education are often dealing with reduced time being given to their subject area. In this chapter, I present findings about how these tertiary teachers shape their work with their pre-service teachers in an attempt to ensure their students’ success.

Reductions in Time

An overwhelming finding of my interviews was that drama teaching in primary education courses in Australia is being squeezed for time. Many of the university teachers had their time allocations for teaching Drama reduced and they spoke of the time given to their program being shortened, and the stress that this created on their work. Some of the university drama education teachers that I interviewed in my research project found this reduction in time given to drama education to be the most stressful aspect of their jobs. This extract from an interview transcript captures neatly some of the issues surrounding the reduction in time.

Interviewee-Everybody says that they’d love to give more time to drama but there’s just not enough time for it.

Jo – Why do you think that’s the case?

Interviewee– The reality is that there probably isn’t enough time for it in an undergraduate course for anything to be dealt with in any depth. Why are the creative arts the first to be bumped off? Because I don’t think that we as a field, not just drama people, but all the creative arts field, I don’t think we have been good enough at disseminating the research that illustrates the importance of affective learning and the aesthetic qualities of the creative arts and how important that is for learning and I think we’ve got to get cleverer at it.

This university teacher has highlighted that drama education is seen as positive and valued by her colleagues, but there are so many areas that need to be covered in the undergraduate course, that there is little room for “anything to be dealt with in any depth”. She blames the arts community as a whole for not spreading the research that shows the value of the arts in education more broadly, and that it is the responsibility of the arts education research community to promote their work more broadly. This was another theme that many of the university teachers spoke about—the need for researchers in drama education to publish their work outside of the traditional drama education journals to spread their research findings to a much broader audience.This pressure in time is occurring across the curriculum more generally in Australia, and while the arts have been feeling it very strongly, it is also being felt in literacy, which, while it has not lost its time allocation, has had pressure to become more reductionist and forced to focus on basic skills due to high stakes testing. As these external pressures push onto curriculum, it is often the arts and creative practices more broadly which are reduced in the curriculum, as is the case in Australia at present(O'Mara, 2014).

Teaching drama to pre-service primary teachers

In Australia primary teachers trained as generalist teachers, are most often responsible for teaching all areas of the curriculum. Many of the university teachers that I interviewed noted that many of these students came to the drama courses with negative views of drama or were unaware of the educational value of drama education. Some students were distrustful of drama, having the impression that they will be required to perform in drama classes, and that they would be ridiculed or made to stand out from the other students. For some of them the only experience they had was to perform in the school play, so they imagine that drama is only about performance and about having their weaknesses or insecurities exposed. This is, of course, not the case for all students, as some students have positive preconceptions about drama and look forward to studying it as part of their studies.

While some students are excited by the prospect of studying drama, many students bring these deep fears with them that make them resistant to drama and are afraid of the subject. The Drama Teacher Educators working at universities are usually very passionate about their subject area and believe that Drama is a powerful pedagogy that can be capable of reaching students who are not necessarily reached by other forms of schooling, they work extremely hard to ensure that they reach and educate this broad group of students. From the interviews conducted with these drama teachers, some interesting findings emerged regarding general principles that these university teachers hold regarding the training of their pre-service drama teachers.

Four principles for quality pre-service drama teaching

Emerging from the interviews were four general principles that the university teachers were concerned with in the teaching of their pre-service primary education students. Most if not all of the university teachers discussed their work in ways that could be classified under these headings. These four principles can be described as:

I will now discuss each of the four principles, focusing on both what the university teachers said about each of the principles and how these principles are applied in their work.

Creating a Safe Space

All 25 interviewees were concerned with creating a safe space for their pre-service students. Trust and feeling safe in a drama class is very important. However, the need to create safety for the students quickly and efficiently given the short time available and the fact that not all students were open to the experience of what drama class had to offer them as future teachers, meant that there was a particular pressure and the university teachers often talked about methods for doing this at length. The teachers talked about ideas like “edging the students in” to the drama -leading them into the drama work “gently”, or about beginning with work that they would “be comfortable with”. Some of the university teachers began with games to relax students, but many began with theory work, deliberately shaping their classes like this so that the students would feel more comfortable as they expected to study theory in the university environment.

Some of the university teachers would help to create a safe space for their students by beginning with work that the students would be familiar with instead of beginning with things that would be more challenging. If they noticed groups that had more difficulties, they might work more closely with these groups, giving them ideas for their work so they felt more confident to present it. Since the amount of time given to drama was often as limited as 8 hours.24 hours in the entire degree, therefore the methods used had to be quicker. To begin classes with theory or a discussion of the aims of drama “as teachers” was a very successful way for some teachers to achieve safety while progressing with the curriculum.

Conversion: Revealing to the students the power of drama as a learning medium

I have labeled this theme “conversion” because the university teachers were passionate about drama and they were all intent upon reaching all of the pre-service teachers, so there is almost an evangelistic energy to the approach that the university teachers have with this aspect of their work. Some of them talked about their drive to include everyone in the work, and behind everyone’s approach was a desire to give the pre-service students such a good experience of drama that they would realise the value of drama education and subsequently use it as a teaching method in their own classes with students. Everyone I interviewed was very concerned with providing a positive experience for students. One university teacher described herself as “a very finely tuned instrument” who had a great sensitivity to the students’ engagement and she was concerned to make sure that every one of the student teachers was engaged and having a positive experience. All of the drama teachers I interviewed were constantly monitoring engagement of the class and modifying the activities to enhance this. The university teachers attributed great value to the limited time that they had with the class. Some of the university teachers began with drama that was immediately relevant to the pre-service teachers to give the students a feeling of the power of drama. Many of them talked about working towards meaningful experiences and deep learning using drama. For some university teachers, giving the students some powerful personal experiences with drama was all they could aim for, hoping that this would spark their interest and lead them to follow this up themselves when they began work as full-time teachers. Some university teachers provided them with theory to read, hoping that their conversion was successful enough for the students to pursue their own knowledge of drama.

Theory in Action: Metaxis in the drama work

In process drama work, students are often simultaneously participating in the drama, playing it as though it is real, while being ‘consciously involved in pretence’(Burton, 1991). Students are spectators to the drama as they observe what is happening around them and make decisions about how to continue their own involvement based on this. Augusto Boal termed this simultaneous involvement between the drama world and the real world metaxis. Burton (1991) argues that insight in drama, the deep learning, emerges through metaxis; …as a participant in the drama process, the individual is involved in, and committed to, an act of experience. The drama process, through the particular act of metaxis, provides precisely the conditions of perception and passionate involvement that Erikson identified in the learning experience he described as insight. (p.8)

A very interesting finding was the complex ways in which these practitioners were using metaxis in the drama work that they set up with their students. In process drama students operate both in the drama world (playing their character and believing in what they are creating) and the real world (observing what is happening around them and making decisions about their actions in the fiction based on this and knowing that it is fiction). There was another dimension to metaxis for the university teachers —they were constantly requiring the students to deconstruct the work as they progressed and think about what was happening as a teacher, or moving out of the drama and explaining to the students how this was working as a teacher. In this process they were trying to impart theoretical understandings to the pre-service teachers about what was happening in the work itself, whilst allowing them to have the experience of participation. The complexity of this can be seen from one of the university teachers’ discussion of how he sets up his drama classes.

We sit in a circle and usually set it up by talking about the kind of thing we are going to be doing, so they get a sense of my purpose, because everything I am doing is multiple in the sense that there are a couple of channels and I want them to be running on one of them, which is to be carefully monitoring what I do because I am modelling stuff. At the same time they are going to be working within the dramatic frame in whatever ways and they are looking at themselves from within and out. So it’s quite an interesting challenge to them to keep these channels running. I try to set that up because that way we are all reflecting in role all the time. Having got that set up, I will give them an introduction to the topic or theme on what we are going to be doing and I’ll launch into drama pretty quickly.

This university teacher describes metaxis as “running on a couple of channels”, which explains very well the idea of the students and the teacher flicking from channel to channel, as while watching television with a remote control. For these university teachers, they are constantly changing the channels for both themselves and the students, so that the students can understand as much as possible about the experience that they are having. The students still have control of their own “remote”, having the freedom to shift channels at will. Many of the teachers spoke about trying to expose the students to as many different techniques and drama conventions, to give them different possible ways of working with drama to try out in their classrooms. Tied to the theoretical unpacking that they are constantly doing with the work, is the desire to give the students maximum skills in the limited time.

Apprenticeship Many of the university teachers deliberately set up drama work after the initial classes where the students themselves could lead sections of it. Sometimes this is in a school setting, where the university teacher would take the class in a school and they would work together with the school children. Often these school-based classes would provide a way for the university teacher to demonstrate what the drama work was like for the pre-service teachers, while providing the pre-service teachers with the opportunity to practice parts of the drama work. This theme is related to the first theme of creating a safe space for the pre-service students to work in, as this situation gives them a chance to try out drama teaching with the university teacher being there, and taking the ultimate responsibility for the class itself. When the classes did not have the opportunity to work in school settings, the university teachers still provided some opportunities for students to lead sections of the drama, or to play the teacher-in-role, or to lead reflective sessions. Some of the university teachers felt that this type of apprenticeship model helped students to develop their skills fully, and to give them more confidence to try out the techniques that they had learnt in the drama classes while they were learners.

Reflection-in-Action and Process Drama Reflection-in-action is the thinking on your feet that drama teachers do all the time—it is the “process” part of process drama. Schön (1983) describes it as the “artistry” of practice that enables practitioners to “cope with the troublesome ‘divergent’ situations of practice” (p. 62). When reflecting in action, one will “experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he [sic] finds uncertain or unique” (p. 68). In my research, I found that all of the teachers I interviewed immediately acknowledged that they reflected in action as they were teaching. Here is an extract showing one response: Do you think drama teachers have to reflect-in-action/think on their feet in this way very often? All of the time—which is why it is very tiring to be a drama teacher! …There are actually two levels of this because you have to have the confidence in your planning before you get anywhere near the group of students so that you’ve got a workable structure—even though you can subvert the structure yourself—there is that level of thinking… But then there is also the adaptive behaviours that you are making as you go, things that you want to extend, things that you want to truncate…or you get something that you didn’t expect but you know is the right thing to follow, so you go, “Yes, I better latch on to that”, and even if it skews your original intention it doesn’t matter because you are still following a thread like the miner following the thread of gold. You just have to know where that thread is going to take you and have confidence to go there but also to know how to get back again, and that’s where having experience, but also having structure and having those sets of strategies, having all those sorts of things that you build out from and then you go – ok we’ll choose this bit, move on that bit – shorter, longer – but it is reflection in practice, that as you are moving you are reflecting. And here is another: I think I do that a lot. I do it all the time. One of the things that happened while I was working with one group of primary kids is that I had written a script and I was going into the grade 1 class walking in the door with this script and I took one look at the kids and thought ‘this is a stupid idea this is really wrong I’ve really made a really big mistake’ it only became clear to me as we walked into the drama room so I’m there with this plan to work off this script that I know is going to be a total disaster with this group of kids so here I am with a group of kids and no plan and it’s that thing about the reality of looking at the kids and thinking ‘I’ve totally miscalculated’. I went into a teacher-in-role to see where it went. I thought that since we were doing storytelling, would lend itself into some script building process so I thought I would tell a story from the point, I’ll use a story that they would be familiar with because this is that thing about trying to reach all the kids, and this is a group of kids I was really struggling to reach anyway because they didn’t have any particular level, they were another group of very disparate kids and I couldn’t get around it so I thought I would tell a story about that they’ll all know but I’ll turn it on its head so hopefully it will make them intrigued and I’ll present them with a problem so I used the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and I set them up in a circle and I went in and said that they needed to interview me to find out my problem and trying to put some responsibility on them because that was the other thing I was struggling with that group, trying to encourage them to have some sort of responsibility as you do with grade 1, and the problem I presented them with was that I came in as the wife of the giant and this kid from the village kept stealing all our things so I couldn’t feed our children. I thought, you’ll know this so there is a familiarity so you’ve got all that power because you know the story but actually this is the story. So there was this thing of let’s look at it from another angle and all I had to begin with was just that one strategy and that one idea. Both of these teachers show the importance and the power of reflection-in-action to process drama work. Understanding how to do it and being aware of how it works is at once difficult to teach, but vitally important to do, to ensure that the next generation of teachers have good skills in this teaching art form.

A model for teacher training Considering the importance of reflection-in-action in teacher training, I have developed a model to describe its relationship to other aspects of process drama in the hope that this will be of benefit to both pre-service teachers and teacher educators. The model shows the attention of the teacher working in the dramatic world and describes the relationships between the essential elements of process drama teaching. For pre-service teachers in a classroom, there is so much to consider that it can be difficult to know where to attend— what aspects of the teaching and learning process are the most important ones requiring attention. The two essential acts are the reflection-in-action the teacher does (and the decisions that she makes as a result of this) in the action of teaching and the planning that she does before she begins. The planning should consist of various possibilities for action, and consider a range of alternatives that students might present, or there might be ways of exploring the dramatic problem. It may be that the original plan is followed with only minor modifications, or that the process nature of the work is dominant and that the drama produced seems only vaguely related to the plan.

Insert Figure 1 The teacher also keeps in mind the teaching of dramatic form, the aesthetics of the work and other pedagogical intentions that she is working towards. I use the term “aesthetics” here to imply the purity and beauty of working in the dramatic medium to explore a problem or idea— the aesthetics of when things are all coming together perfectly. In my earlier work (O’Mara, 2000), I found that when the teacher was working towards an aesthetic outcome, the teaching was better. The teacher is constantly working with the students, as individuals as well as a group. This year I have been working with a group of experienced primary school teachers, developing their process drama skills. With these teachers, we have been focussing on the missing part of the diagram is the skills of manipulating the dramatic form and a sense of dramatic aesthetics, as we work together. Often the difficulties for pre-service teachers are the classroom management side of things-working with the students as a group. The pre-service teachers are often anxious about how to manage things, and so process drama, with its need to work to an extent in the moment, seems risky. It is very helpful to these students to understand how reflection-in-action works alongside tight planning to help create the finished work. Texts, such as (Bowell & Heap, 2001); (Miller & Saxton, 2004) and (O'Toole & Dunn, 2002) are particularly helpful with the planning aspects of preparation for process drama work. Conclusion Many primary pre-service courses in Australia have a very limited time for drama education, so it is difficult for tertiary drama teachers to impart all of the knowledge and skills needed to successfully run process drama. It is difficult for pre-service teachers to develop complete knowledge and skills that they need in a drama class. Using the Model of teacher attention when working in the dramatic world may be helpful for tertiary drama educators when working with pre-service teachers particularly in pointing out the flexibility needed for working in process drama, and the balance between planning, reflection-in-action and then attending to the aesthetics as well as the needs of the class. Drama educators are generally very passionate about the power of drama, so they work extremely hard to use the time as effectively as possible. Creating a climate of safety is important in every drama classroom, but particularly so when sometimes working with reticent adults. The time for training teachers in drama is not as much as was in the past and so to aim to spark the pre-service teachers’ interest and help them feel empowered to use drama in classroom can be a challenge. Some educators feel it is the responsibility of the drama education community to enhance the profile of drama in the broader educational community, and that if the value of drama as a learning medium was fully understood and extensively researched by the wider educational community, there would be more time allocated to the subject and they would not have to work under such duress.

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Jo, 2017-02-20