The Development of
Drama Education with Reference to its Application in Self–Esteem
Summary
The lineage of Drama as an active learning method will be
traced from the beginning of this century.
This sets the context in which Drama in Education evolved. In this study I will review its use as a
form of interactive collaboration and the development of models of drama from
the personal to the social.
Connections to theories of socio-dramatic play will be
illustrated. Developments in the role of the teacher and views on interventionist
play will be described. Techniques and styles of drama will be examined, from
Psychodrama to Drama for free-expression and Drama for personal development.
More recent developments in Drama in Education will be reviewed, particularly
teacher-as-participant type drama, which changed the educational purpose and
dynamic into a heuristic social voyage in search of meaning.
Theoretical Origins of Drama in Education
Philosophy: Learning methods
The origin of Drama in Education owes much to two
educational disciplines: Educational
Philosophy and Psychology of learning.
While O’Neill would say “drama is a mode of learning,” I feel that Freire’s teacher-as-learner philosophy is equally important in the formation of a
theory of Drama in Education. The former presupposes an effect on the
latter. For whether, and importantly
how, one uses the method depends on one’s own educational philosophy and
personal experience of formal learning.
Both influence one’s own choice of learning method, and thus teaching
style.
Freire criticises the educational status quo or what he
calls the ‘banking system’ as morally unsustainable, and having a self-
interest in conservatism and resistance to change. This “banking system suffers from what he
calls what he calls ‘necrophily’, or a love of dead things, a cultural
inculcation based on the past, a glorious past which is safe and one which will
not cause too much questioning of any ruling social élite. Not only is the past
dead, but knowledge about it is transferred by necrophilic teachers, leading to
classroom lessons that are suffering from what he graphically calls ‘narrative
sickness’.
In contrast, at a Freirean school, the democratic teacher
would be interested in ‘biophily’ or
living things, including humans, using Drama in Education as ‘a method of
learning’ in pursuit of transformation
and ‘humanisation’. This philosophy can
change the question in Dorothy Heathcote’s words from a querulous “What happened then?” To a more curious and empowering “I wonder
what happens now?” The result would be an alliance of teacher /student and
student /teacher working in what
Heathcote calls “the crucible of learning” . Freire’s powerful and persuasive
philosophy of teacher a partner, O’Neill’s “drama as a mode of learning” and
learning for transformation are core values in Drama in Education.
Psychology: Play,
Intervention and Supported Learning
Play
Homo ludens is often
seen as the opposite of homo faber, but
a reading of the literature would suggest that there can be more faber in
ludens than one might first be inclined to think. The self as imaginative agent
is at the heart of children’s play. According to Moyles,
“Freud saw fantasy as a way to gain access to the psyche.
Emphasising the function of the child’s instincts in fantasy play he suggested
that through play, children will show their inner selves”.
He proposed that acting out roles would help them to
assimilate traumatic experiences.
Kitson recognises that very few children present such problems,
nevertheless, he sees the value for play in non-therapeutic settings like
schools. Kitson saw a need for adult
intervention in children’s play. He
found that children began to lose interest in their play activities after a
short time if there was no tension in the activity. This insertion of a tension then, is the
marked difference between child’s fantasy play of Freud and Drama in Education.
Success of the intervention, according to Neelands, depends on the way in which
tension is inserted by the teacher, with as he says “ a subtle tongue”.
Kitson also favours Bruner’s use of a interventionist
approach by the supportive adult which he calls ‘scaffolding’, that with this, the participating adult can
“keep the activity going by motivating the children to persist”, the pupil can “behave and function at a
cognitive level beyond their norm”. He further states that “the teacher can provide
a model and also bring a myriad of people, problems, challenges and so on, into
the play”. Moyles says “such adult
participation . . . allows for the structuring of learning areas for the
children through the selection of themes or stimulus area” , very much like the
drama facilitator. Bolton supports this saying that dramatic play is a metaphor
for children’s lives and Erikson stresses the importance of life and rehearsal
element of fantasy play. Moyles reviews
the contribution of socio-dramatic play in the self-confidence, self-esteem and
social development of children in her book.
Piaget’s views of education are clearly in the heuristic
area where the learner is at the centre of the activity.
“The principal goal of education is to create men who are
capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations
have done-men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.
The second goal of education is to form minds that can be
critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered…. We need
pupils who are active, who learn early to find out by themselves…”
Piaget also argued that “genuine active learning can lead to
a more solid and long lasting understanding”.
He warned however, “teachers can impose little knowledge” , and that teachers should provide their
students with the possibility of “guided discovery”. This negates the role of teacher as source of
all knowledge, suggesting instead an interventionist, facilitative role. He proposes that “another factor that leads
to knowledge is social experience, or interaction with other persons”. He calls for this in the light of students
having to justify their opinions, and that “as others may not be as tolerant as
they, it also serves to clarify a student’s thinking and makes him more
coherent and logical.” The social
aspect, involving others, necessitates an adaptation to, and assimilation of,
the other person. This assimilation is
achieved through the compromise of rule-based play.
Piaget documents the development from personal to social
based play in children. He postulates that fantasy play will, over time, change
into rule governed activities. While
Bruner and Vygotsky both agree that
fantasy play fades away as a child enters the formal school system and becomes
a rule based activity, the principles they espouse are common to the rule based
activity that is Drama in Education.
This supports notions of learning methods that have rules, are social,
interactive and playful and in which a significant adult acts as a motivating
guide.
Drama and Therapy
I will now review developments in Drama in formal education
and Drama in therapeutic settings, both of which had a formative influence on
Drama in Education.
Though not a teacher in the formal sense, J.L Moreno
(1889-1974) developed techniques out of Psychodrama and Socio-drama that were
to have benefits for the classroom teacher. He specialised in building
creativity through spontaneity. Moreno’s influence was in the area of
technique, the how of interactive learning.
Before immigrating to the US in 1925, he had developed
role-play techniques at the Steigreiftheater in Vienna. Often based on newspaper reports of the day,
his company would improvise and re-enact the events of the day on stage.
Role-reversal was a particular technique used.
His theatrical background profoundly influenced his contribution. In Psychodrama all the action happens on
stage. It is self-conscious. The other people in the group act out the
private dilemmas of one patient for him on a stage. His purpose then, was to provide
opportunities for people to play as many roles as possible, believing that if
one offers a typical role response in every situation, now that one becomes
petrified and cannot respond spontaneously to events and people. The self is realised in relation to other.
There are useful techniques developed by him and used in
Drama in Education every day:
• Statue
and sculpture work
• Restructuring
and re-ordering work
• Improvisation
and hot seating
• Soliloquy
• Spectator
as actor, later echoed by Freire and Boal in their philosophies and methods.
Moreno used Psychodrama to heal past hurts through
role-play. In classroom drama, on the
other hand, one’s intention is to rehearse for the future, playing out scenes
that the pupil may or may not encounter. As Kitson, quoted earlier, commented,
one does not often encounter trauma in the classroom. Moreno believed that Drama enabled spontaneous
activity, and that this in turn developed the creativity of the self.
Drama and Formal Education
Harriet Finlay-Johnson (1871 — 1956) was cross-curricular in
her approach and used drama as a method for teaching otherwise difficult
subjects. She falls into the
drama-as-a-mode-of-learning school when we hear her declare that drama “Arouses a keen desire to know”, also that
she advocated getting rid of the audience.
She prefigures Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development when she says,
“Children have a wonderful faculty for teaching other children and learning
from them” . She also prefigures Freire
in her desire that the teacher be seen as “companion” and “fellow worker”. Harriet Finlay-Johnson demanded that the play
must be the child’s own. Her methods
were furthered by Edmond Holmes, the progressive advocate. Through Holmes, she influenced the
Progressive movement, her contribution being that of using drama for learning,
for group teaching, for play and self-realisation.
Henry Caldwell Cook (1886 – 1937) was a visionary teacher
who developed a learning approach that he called ‘Playway’. He proposed that “boys and girls in the upper
school should have as much play as the infants in the kindergarten”. He believed that play was “a form of
practice, a preparation for adult life” in support of which he says
“It would not be wise to send a child innocent into the big
world. But it is possible to hold rehearsals, to try our strength in a
make-believe big world. And that is play.”
He eschewed realism, preferring a poetic approach saying
that the boys were not ready for it. He wanted his pupils to be freed from
representational accuracy in favour of abstract expression and he emphasised
collaborative work in the classroom.
The point of realistic representation was taken up by
Marjorie Hourd who, like Caldwell-Cook,
preferred the “paw under the door” approach rather than the “pocket torch of
observation”. Her use of Eliot’s words
indicates a preference for a post-positivist view of learning and drama, that
there are different ways to view reality.
She looked for resonance in the text.
She claims that the “early adolescent is more interested in himself
playing the part” than ‘the part’, and is less ready for performance than the
junior child. He plays himself while
believing he is portraying a character.
This use of nuance, ambiguity and allusion coupled with the
knowledge that a pupil loses himself in the part in order to find himself was a
useful step in Drama in Education. This
put Drama in Education in the poetic as opposed to the functional domain which
would later develop, in the life skills teaching of behaviourist
psychologists. Ms. Hourd’s methods
foreshadowed, in her use of role perspective, the personal development model of
Drama in Education.
Drama and Self-Expression
Play, creativity and spontaneity are central to the work of
Peter Slade (1910 —). In Slade’s case,
activity generated by the child himself in pursuit of doing and ‘struggling’
with life. Over the years Slade evolved
a developmental theory of drama.
According to him there were two main categories of Play:
• Personal
play: in which the whole person or self is used.
• Projected
play: where the whole mind is used but the body remains still. Strong mental
projection takes place.
This approach has been characterised by Bolton as
psychological. Slade removed from the teacher “such common supports as
immediate goals and objectives”. In
deliberately not seeking short-term results, Slade promoted an apparently
formless and aimless drama. He, like Harriet Finlay-Johnson, saw no merit in
having an audience. He feared that the
focus of the pupil would shift from sincerity to ‘showing off’. He often worried about ‘stilted, unnatural’
imposed styles of speech and movement frequently bred by formal Speech and
Drama or elocution training. A
successful Sladian session evoked spontaneous and sustained dramatic play,
requiring minimal teacher guidance.
This is close to Froebel’s approach of “the free expression of what is
in the child’s soul”.
Bolton points to an ironic dichotomy in Slade’s work. Whilst
the class is structured for self-expression, it is, in fact heavily dependent
on the structure of the teacher’s story.
It is in fact a mediated experience.
Though Bolton acknowledges the eclectic nature of Slade’s work and its
difference to child play, he notes also that sometimes the work can result in
real Child Theatre. Bolton celebrates
Slade’s sessions, “that they are probably the nearest any individual has
reached in giving a practical form to the Rousseauesque conception of
education”.
On the other hand, Bolton argues that drama is not about
self-expression, he further states that
drama is a social event and is always concerned with something outside oneself.
“It is one thing to claim that, by sharing in a dramatic
expression of a theme, I learn something about myself in the process and quite
another to suggest that drama is for me and about me. It is a group’s expression concerned with celebrating
what people share, what man has in common with man …”
This is taken up later by Heathcote and developed as an
experience that is culturally as opposed to socially bound. This is the opposite of Brian Way whom
Bolton would say had “psychologised the character building process”.
This tension between two forces, the psychology of the
individual and the clash of values of the social formed a major part of the
Drama in Education debate of the rest of the century. They also parallel the focus of this
research, social inclusion and self-esteem.
Drama and Personal Development
Brian Way (1923 —) broke from his mentor Peter Slade and
abandoned his idea of Child-drama-as-art in favour of a comprehensive theory of
personal development, an instrumental view of drama. He developed a system and divided the
personality into facets, which would be developed through drama. This led to a development functional approach
in his work Bolton criticises
“The idea of being able to structure a lesson without
actually doing any drama began to take hold in some quarters, a diversion also
paralleled by the Laban movement … could be entirely made up of effort
exercises”.
As a result of Way’s influence, it became an unwritten law
that drama classes had to have warm-ups including a relaxation session. Bolton castigates him not only for promoting
drama as exercise but also for denying drama’s characteristic as a social
art.
Improvisation for Way is a play with out a script and
without an audience for the development
of the self.
Drama as agent for personal change, with teacher as
non-participant director
During the 1950s and 1960s, drama as a functional system for
behavioural change was influencing teaching and training in the US. Role-play
was developed out of Moreno’s work and in the Harvard University Management
Training programme it was seen as useful for examining behavioural change in
work situations. Soon, it was developed
as life-skills training in schools. Drama
teachers were seen as ideal for this work, and they in turn welcomed it as a
manageable task. Management training appropriated the content, thus learning
methods used in the artform of drama were translated into a functional system
of self-development.
Way’s system of private practice of life skills, such as
sensitivity, was transformed into public scrutiny of contextualised functional
skills. Bolton argues that creativity
is limited in this approach, that acting is reduced to “reacting
mimetically”. Margaret Wooton goes
further than Bolton when she says of Way’s approach that “The link that Slade
bears constantly in mind, between what he calls “the personal play of children
… and drama, has somewhere been lost”.
Theory needs developmental models to support philosophies and ideas coherently.
Historically Drama in Education has sought a system that would make teaching
easier. A downside of this approach is that the system can become an
encumbrance not a liberating force.
This functionality became a defining characteristic of drama
for Way, adding fuel to the fire of defining what drama is: an art or a
tool? Slade’s emphasis on free
expression led him toward isolationist experience, whereas Way’s emphasis on
the private self and his use of exercise, to the exclusion of social
interaction, led him in the direction of functional and private personal tool
for development. If drama is an art, in fact it will defy any means to
systematise it. It feeds on originality as its core value. One way to kill any
desire to create a new experience is to create drama-by-numbers just as unscrupulous
commercial interests have done for visual art.
What both Slade and Way lacked was the teacher in role as
collaborator or facilitator. Dorothy
Heathcote introduced the step of teacher taking a role in the drama itself as
part of her ‘Living through Drama’. This
results in steering, probing and advising the pupils, creating together as
teacher/pupil and pupil/teacher as envisaged by Freire.
Drama for personal and social change with teacher as
participant and director
“Good drama ... is made up the thoughts, the words, and the
gestures that are wrung from human beings on their way to, or in, or emerging
from a state of desperation.”
Kenneth Tynan
For Dorothy Heathcote (1926 —), this definition was
significant. She based her ‘Man in a Mess’ dramas on this and held this view of
drama until the eighties. Bolton says
she sees
“drama as the means of rooting all the school curriculum
back into the human context from where
it sprang, so that knowledge is not an abstract, isolated subject based
discipline, but is based in human action, interaction, commitment and
responsibility.”
This would appear to indicate that she sees the drama
teacher as the upholder of human values against a mechanistic state machine.
Like Harriet Finlay-Johnson before her, she sees drama as a laboratory. This
view is supported by Coughlan who speaks of drama being a “scientific mode of
enquiry, each session being a laboratory for living”. Bolton speaks of it as drama being the
‘crucible’ for knowledge.
That this knowledge would be understood, after the event in
reflection, was a given. Reflection is a key factor in Heathcote’s work. Plot
is her least important play component.
Instead of a chronological “What happens next?” approach she looks for
the internal situation breeding or foreshadowing the next internal
situation. She uses theme, context and
particularity along with tension to produce ‘Living through Drama’. It is played at real time, in the
present. This tension is inserted by the
teacher in role.
Heathcote presents not in chronological order but in order
of priority, through distancing devices, like ‘Mantle of the Expert’ or
‘Teacher in Role’. The source of Dorothy
Heathcote’s interest in drama is man’s curiosity about the world. Without it there is no tension of enquiry,
no drama.
Development of her
philosophy led to changes in approach for Dorothy Heathcote. In the late
seventies, she began to move from her ‘Man in a Mess’ type of drama under the
influence of Edward T. Hall. Hall had
become interested in how the deepest values of a society or cultural group are
those acknowledged only when threatened.
This was moving away from the desperation of a person in desperate
circumstances to a group under threat.
In their changing circumstances the group would have to work out
• What was
important to them?
• What was
different about the group which was threatening them?
• How
would this make them see the situation and how would they act in this fictional
scenario?
She was interested in the implications of actions. She defines her approach to this kind of
drama as:
“being anything which involves persons in active role taking
situations which attitudes, not characters, are the chief concern, lived at
life rate (i.e. discovery at this moment, not memory based) and obeying the
natural laws of the medium. (I) maintain that problem solving is the basis of
learning and maturation”.
She also says that “the basic engagement is the building of
a culture rather than representing a role or an attitude”, i.e. the interpretation of actions and
motives, not a description of events. The benefits are that when its inner laws
are expressed (after being under threat) the pupils have “stumbled on
authenticity”.
A Paradox of Distance and Perspective
The distance provided by Brechtian techniques provides a
safety net for new ways of being and becoming, to coin a phrase.
Metaxis is defined as the ability to operate in two
perspectives at once, the real and the imaginary. It can allow a child to
believe that a broom, on which he gallops around the garden, is both a horse
and a broom at one and the same time. It also allows him to see himself acting
in a drama and to watch others’ reactions to him. As Hourd would put it, he sees himself playing the part and the part
at the same time. It is through this
metaxial quality that drama can be such a potent force for reflection and thus
transformation.
Heathcote spoke of drama filling the spaces between people.
Curiously, this is not achieved by confrontation, as in some drama therapies,
but by what Neelands calls the subtle tongue and by protection into
emotion. A paradox then, is to connect
by using a technique that is designed to create distance and thus, safety. It is in that space, however, that reflection
and transformation take place.
O’Neill highlights the distancing effect achieved by Dorothy
Heathcote’s various strategies, a
concept that Bolton describes as “key to understanding drama as
education”. In this regard her work in
Drama in Education has been aligned with that of Brecht in theatre. Of his theatrical structure, Brecht writes
“The individual episodes have to be knotted together in such
a way that the knots are easily noticed. The episodes must not succeed each
other indistinguishably but must give us a chance to interpose our judgement.”
Bolton says of Heathcote’s mode of work, that she wanted her
pupils to make these judgements continually.
It is in the space given by distance that reflection and wise judgement
takes place.
Influenced by Brecht, Dorothy Heathcote has three modes of
creating distance:
• Living
Through Drama, where Teacher in Role occurs, inserting tensions, probing as an
active participant in the drama
• Mantle
of the Expert, where pupils are given roles of responsibility in the drama
• Depiction,
where she uses still-image and thought –tracking to help pupils invest.
She is looking for the ‘self- spectator’ who protects the
participants into a level of emotion from which they may remain safely
detached, both engaged and detached. The self is both included in the group as
a member of the enterprise while discretely making judgements of a personal and
social nature.
Process Drama
Cecily O’ Neill ( 19 —), who archived much of Dorothy
Heathcote’s material, introduced the term ‘Process drama’.
In 1982, Cecily O’Neill stated clearly “Drama in Education
is a mode of learning”. Later, in 1995
she affirmed that ‘Process drama is almost synonymous with the term Drama in
Education “and that it is a theatre event”.
She has travelled from being a follower of Heathcote to seeing drama in
the classroom as a theatre event. In Process Drama (1995) pupils “are not
treated as learners but as active agents making theatre happen”. She is with the students a playwright, a dramaturge.
Improvisation is the core of O’Neill’s work, although she
uses scripts and depiction, according to Bolton. In the work of each of these Drama in
Education experts, the group and the individual are co-dependent, all working
in an inclusive creative tension.
It is O’Neill’s own definition of Process Drama, quoted
above, that is used in this research.
Social versus Individual
Whilst Bolton recognises that Drama in Education is a social
event, he also affirms the notion of self-spectatorship as central to Drama in
Education. The combination of these two
opposites, or tensions, is at the heart of the definition for the purposes of
this experiment.
• The
experiment will use drama as a personal and social voyage using the imagination
to examine, explore and investigate notions of belonging, inclusion and
self-esteem.
• The
rationale will be based on Freire’s philosophy as expressed in O’Neill’s
methodology of Process drama.
• Process
drama, as defined by O’Neill, will frame
the form of the experiment.
• In the
experiment, drama will have the focus on learning across the curriculum as used
by Harriet Finlay-Johnson and referred to extensively by Dorothy
Heathcote.
Elements of Self-esteem relevant to this experiment
Belonging is one part of the development of
self-esteem. The others according to
Reasoner are security, identity, purpose and competence. A person cannot have high self-esteem if they
do not feel that they belong. A group
that shows each member that they belong in some way, is a group that has, by
definition, high self-esteem. By
affirming an individual and inculcating the norms and values of the group in a
friendly way the individual sees benefit for them in joining the group. Thus the group and the individual are dealing
in enlightened self interest, to the mutual benefit of both.
Unlike role-play, which is short and focused on one event
only, with a strong line of intention on behalf of the teacher, Process Drama
as articulated by O’Neill has reflective moments built in to the event. This allows the participant to review the
many options he has without the fear and consequences of commitment. It is that reflection which is most
powerful. In it transformation occurs.
I believe that a transformation, in this case an increase in
self-esteem, can be achieved in the non-threatening arena of Process Drama.
