The teaching of drama occurs amidst conflict. All involved in the drama have a relationship to that conflict. And while conflict – within and between individuals and the circumstances in which they live – may appear to be ever present, it is also situated, systemic and subject to seemingly individual, unrelated and unexpected events. For these reasons conflict throws up opportunities for reflection, be they upon the process or the product of that conflict: drama. Frequently patterns of conflict can be seen – or found – and those patterns can also be seen to change over time in response to circumstance. Perceptions of this kind can be constructed as the basis of deeper ways of knowing and for this reason it is arguable that conflict is intimately related to learning and consciousness.

And while conflict can be identified and talked about, the naming of it always remains an interpretation: a phenomenon subject to language or ‘languaging’: the way we encounter the world through language (Maturana & Varela 1992). This interpretative element is even more evident when addressed through imagination, a principal reference in any artistic or creative endeavour (Courtney 1974) and embodiment (Wright 1998), the meaning made from sensed or felt experience. This complex encounter includes but extends beyond improvisation (Hodgson & Richards 1977; Spolin 1983; Johnstone 1989), to place emphasis upon the reflective consciousness through which provisional and long-standing meaning is made. The drama experience therefore offers opportunities for depth and variety in human experience. It is in this depth and through this variety that the most insightful kinds of learning can arise.

Drama can be discussed therefore as a situated inquiry into conflict which gives rise to reflections which can challenge the assumptions upon which learning is based: a methodology that enables individual insight into social consciousness and the social construction of consciousness (Norris 2009). Necessarily, this needs to be tempered by acknowledgement that it is not drama per se that constructs these qualities but the effective facilitation or exploration of the repertoire of skills available in drama. Herein lies the responsibility of the drama educator: to ponder what he or she is attempting to do with the drama and why, and how and why the drama can be used to realise those goals. Drama, as much as and more than many discipline areas, requires the educator to have a sense of purpose beyond the provision of disciplinary knowledge and skills. Difficulties in articulating this have contributed to the vulnerability of the field. The capacity to facilitate drama as a method of knowing more than a method of showing is integral to its future.

In this chapter I use a series of very different stories to give a sense of ways in which ‘ecological understanding’ provides perspective upon learning. Equally, I look at the role of creative work in this process. Each story is one of relationships – be they personal, social, environmental and ideational – that give character to learning. The aim is to illuminate some of the complexities that can contribute to learning and the depth of understanding contained in an ecological perspective. Integral to each story is dramatic experience. Both drama skills and the skill of finding the drama in experience are relevant, as are settings within and outside of formal schooling. The focus is therefore on learning processes that lead to informed ways of living in a complex world. Hill, Wilson and Watson (2004) refer to this as ‘learning ecology’:

Drama, conflict and ecology

Because conflict is subject to ways in which it is known, it needs to be approached holistically: as something created by the interweaving of a multiplicity of elements. Some drama education theorists (e.g. Haseman & O’Toole 1989; O’Toole 1992) systematise this into the ‘elements of drama’ but my focus here is the whole rather than its constituent parts. The holistic is, in the words of Miller (1996), ‘interrelated and dynamic’. This interrelationship becomes meaningful through, what Bateson calls, the ‘pattern which connects’ (Bateson 1988, 8). A variety of terms, as well as holistic, have been used to describe this form of pattern knowledge. Each suggests a particular orientation. They include ‘integral’ (Wilber 2007), ‘systemic’ (Ison 2010; Ramage & Shipp 2009) and ‘ecological’ (Bateson 1972, 1988; Capra 1996; Orr 1992). The focus in these orientations is both the integrated system and how the system is seen to be constructed: both ecology and ecological understanding. Equally, it is both the drama and the meaning that is made from the drama: the consciousness arrived at within and through the drama process. Clearly, drama cannot be encountered or interpreted apart from the systems of knowing and the environments within which the drama occurs. Patterns can be discerned and change arising from conflict is often central to these patterns: transition, transformation, construction, re-construction, emergence, revolution and revelation among them. All identify ways in which experience and understanding comingle in language and consciousness. Some patterns of change have been central to the history of drama (theatre and performance studies), principally personal or familial conflict. Other patterns of change appear to have only recently come to the fore (despite their longstanding presence). Conflict within and between humans and their environment have been with us for a long time but conflict arising from observations of environmental change over time – loss of biodiversity, global warming, rapid population growth, increased urbanisation and other issues arising from humankind’s ‘mastery’ of its environment (Flannery 2010) – are a more recent phenomena. These changes are part of our life, they cannot be denied nor are they someone else’s problem. Recognising this we must include ourselves, ecologically. As integral elements within this ecology we, the people, are integral to that change. We are embedded in the conflict and the opportunities for learning that arise as a result. Ecological change is our change. Questions about how we live within this conflict – how we learn in and through our relationship to challenges that are new to human experience – are key issues for educators of current and future generations. They cross all disciplines.

In this respect, ecological change is considerably more than a phenomenon of nature. It is many things to us. It is at the same time a consequence of scientific research, an opportunity for the affirmation of a social vision, a shadow over humanity’s future, a symbol of our collective limitations, an avenue to seek out and affirm conspiracy, a means whereby a yearning for a mythical state can be called up and much more. It is a provocative challenge to the way we imagine and identify our futures. It initiates both perspective and phenomena, and both perspective and phenomena can be dreamed into and debated, hence their power. Such change has metaphoric significance, it is political and it is available dramatically (Lakoff & Johnston 1980; Lakoff 2002; Kershaw 2007). It is a story that can be told, re-told and re-told again, but effective storytelling requires learning. Such learning needs to tap into more than scientific research. It is led by the social learning that is at the heart of the conflict we encounter around unfolding circumstance. Joy, fear, frustration and the imagination of the community that lives within this are fundamental to its drama (Macy 1991). It is arguable therefore that issues of ecological imagination (Judson 2010), ecological literacy (Orr 1992; Capra 1996), ecological understanding (Bateson 1972, 1988; Harries-Jones 1995) and ecological intelligence (Bowers 2011) are integral to the design of education systems for a future encumbered by questions of ecological significance. Such issues require, Judson argues, ‘a flexibility of mind oriented to interdependence and pattern, to the diversity and complexity that characterise natural and human-world relationships’. This type of process is ‘inspired by one’s emotional connection to the natural world. It can support our understanding of society, culture, reality and self in terms of relationship’ (Bowers 2011, 5). It is arguable therefore that the skills and understandings contained in creative processes like drama can be of great benefit in these sorts of activities.

The four very different stories that follow tell of dramatic practices that share a breadth of ambition. That ambition includes a desire to inculcate relationship. This is impossible to appreciate without some consideration of the extent to which the relationships we live in and through define our worldview. As these stories suggest, the laboratory of dramatic practice – be it a classroom, theatre, the world beyond or the imagination – is a formidable site for the study of the unfolding development of world views and the conflict such developments can give rise to.

First story: Korowal School

At 9.25 each morning Kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2 students at Korowal School, a small independent non-systemic school in Sydney’s Blue Mountains, gather with their teachers and those parents who have lingered after the morning drop-off and join in an elegantly designed example of ecological pedagogy, facilitated through an appreciation of the elements of drama.

Standing in a circle students, staff and parents perform a series of songs and poems that, in turn, acknowledge the new day, evoke respect for all students, situate the learning in a physical environment comprising animals and plants and other humans, and look forward to a rewarding day of interactive learning. This opening constructs a shared experience. Situated at the beginning of the day, it builds a platform for the future. It uses rhythm and emotion; it uses movement and group action. It seeks to connect directly with the values that motivate students in their relationships with the world around them. It is ritual learning that anticipates and supports the learning that is to follow. It begins with a short song.

This is followed by a rhythmic poem, recited by all, that extends these sentiments. It begins . . .

The third element, a circle-song performed with movement and often in rounds, celebrates those present. It begins . . .

This is followed by another brief poem, a minute of quiet and, a third poem beginning . . .

The final element is a ritual ‘Good morning’ sung in turn by each staff member to the students and a ritual ‘Good bye’ sung to all parents still present.

Parents then shuffle from the room waving goodbye and blowing kisses. The staff takes command and the day moves forward.

This simple ritual can be seen as an example of the sort of education Bateson bemoaned the lack of, in his discussion of ‘the pattern which connects’.

It is through an appreciation of patterns in relationships that students are able to experience themselves in relation to learning subject matter. It is here that a depth of learning resides and it is here, within the construction and communication of relationships, that creative drama has the potential to excel. Without relationship, drama cannot exist.

The commencing ritual at Korowal School is a brief few minutes in an extended school day. From the point of view of an outsider who has observed this ritual, it introduces values and attitudes to the young children present. It requires teachers to model those values and attitudes. It is not an attempt to instill behaviours or provide answers. It indicates and communicates an approach to learning, developed over time, which contributes to the identity and orientation of the school. It is an attempt to draw children into connection with each other and the world beyond, and construct a sense of belonging. The design of an ecological education goes beyond acknowledging the complexity of interconnected life. It demands reflection upon the assumptions that inform daily existence.

Second story: at the University of Western Sydney – Drama Method class

Several years ago I introduced my Drama Method students to an exercise drawn from Heathcote’s ‘mantle of the expert’ repertoire. This exercise imagines life in the shadow of a medieval monastery (Heathcote & Bolton 1995) as a means of interrogating social power. After discussing this model with my students it soon became apparent that none of my young Australian students lived in a village overlooked by a monastery. Very few Australians do. So we talked about that which did oversee our homes. One student, who lives in the nearby Blue Mountains – a vast undulating, forested world heritage area to the west of Sydney, separating the coastal fringe from the Western Plains – told us her home was overshadowed, especially each summer, by the strong possibility of bushfire. This became our subject matter and our drama playbuilding focused on our collective relationship to fire: its destructive power accompanied by its power to build community through adversity and its capacity to lay the ground for subsequent regeneration, regrowth and new life.

During an intense three-hour class we gathered tales of powerful visceral encounters with fire. These told of the fear of fire, the shock of its proximity, the piercing noise of warning sirens, the domination of the media by safety warnings, the red fire–smoke clouds that become the sky, the charred fragrance of burning eucalyptus followed some time later, after the danger has receded, by the return of bird life, the recovery of reptiles and the heartening sight and smell of new leaves sprouting fresh from charcoaled bark. These became the basis of our drama. The students who took part in the class encountered a deep, communal learning about fire, but more than this, their learning included an enhanced understanding of how their peers meet powerful existential challenge. It became an exercise in the building of community through vulnerability, trust and communication. Drama was the medium of the learning and fire the immediate subject matter but inter-relationship – intricate regional social and physical ecologies – were the substance of our class. ‘I learned about fire as a collective experience,’ said Denise. All in the class knew enough of bushfire to fear it as well as respect it enormously. All taught each other about their means of coping.

Third story: the deaf poet and sound

Aaron Williamson is a performance poet. He is also profoundly deaf, in a society that assumes hearing. The forms of knowledge constructed by Williamson’s deafness are his principal poetic influence. For Williamson, his deafness is inescapable. It defines him ecologically. He lives within it and it is integral in the relationships that extend beyond. Consequently, he has chosen to invest the energy of his imagination into hearing. He knows that sound is something that he cannot know as hearing people do. Equally, he knows sound is something hearing people cannot know as he does – and by knowing in this way Williamson finds sound, for himself. It becomes essential to his learning. He writes of ‘the sounds of words, trapped in the torso (that) continue with speaking. Silently.’ And of being ‘possessed by sounds . . . they have me . . . I feel them . . . I catch them before they reach out’ and, ‘The sickness itself, a language’ (Williamson 1993, 24–25).

For Williamson sound rises up from the ground, into his legs, his pelvis then resonates between his diaphragm and his stomach. This is a sensation he has learned to ‘hear’. It resonates alongside his own voice, which ‘is something I experience primarily physically, through the jaw, in the chest etc. rather than in the site of the inner ear’ (personal communication, 11 January 1995). Through the combination of his intelligence and his imagination this experience attains such clarity that the purpose of his writing and performance becomes, in part, his communication of that experience of sound. This can be confronting. Dyer describes his performance as a response to profound deafness mediated ‘not by the use of conventional body language, but by a new and affective language of the body’ (Dyer 1992, 113). Hutzulak (1994) describes it as work of ‘feral intensity’. Almost inevitably, Williamson’s dramatic pursuit of ways of representing and communicating a form of knowledge derived from isolation, self-absorption and ‘otherness’ can cause discomfort within his audience.

Necessarily, any attempt to represent Williamson’s performance in words runs counter to his intent. Williamson not only seeks to, he needs to move beyond the verbal to imagine and give form to a means of communication that he becomes ‘able-bodied’ through. Williamson knows this systemically and ecologically.

The relationships through which Williamson arrives at language enable him to appreciate both creative expression and the limits of abstract reason. His frustration is accessible to all of us who have sought to understand something beyond our grasp. Herein lies the metaphor. Williamson’s imagined relationship to sound connects me to my imagination of things I will never fully know. In truth, this is much of life. This illuminates a way of learning: of living with an aspiration to know. It is an essential ingredient of learning and it is the base from which all knowledge systems grow, along with the communities that live through them. It is implicit in the dramatic moment. In the embodied learning of Williamson the systemic base of social knowledge is made visible, to those able to encounter it. His dramatic relationship to it propels him to a form of understanding he might otherwise not obtain.

As Bateson reminds us, ‘Ecology, in the widest sense . . . (is) the interaction and survival of ideas and programs, (i.e. differences, complexes of differences etc.) in circuits’ (Bateson 1972, 49). Literacy in this regard is, according to Orr, a ‘quality of mind that seeks out connections’ and is the opposite of the ‘specialisation and narrowness characteristic of most education’ (Orr 1992, 92).

Fourth story: encountering ‘country’

The second Australian colloquium on ‘sense of place’ occurred at Hamilton Downs, a disused cattle station turned youth camp, 70 kms north-west of Alice Springs. This event was a dramatic encounter with a physical environment. Drama and performance are integral to knowledge of this place, and many places like it in parts of the continent not easily or usually accessed by non-Indigenous people. In a co-constructed piece of writing, co-ordinators of the colloquium, John Cameron and Craig San Roque sought to capture their thoughts on the event. In so doing they provided an introduction to their thinking on structuring learning in a non-traditional setting rich in interpretive and creative non-traditional learning methodologies.

The ecology that contains the drama San Roque refers to is inescapable.

When I arrived at Hamilton Downs my initial response to the environment was surprise at its extraordinary diversity: the richness and variety of plant, insect and bird life, the array of colours and the unflinching power of the MacDonnell Ranges that dominate the view to the immediate south. This experience was enriched by the stories, told by ethno-botanist Peter Latz, of the watercourse that runs beneath the sandy riverbed that traverses the property and feeds the underground forest that peeks its branches above the red-brown earth. This and additional stories told by Latz and others, including Aboriginal custodian Bobby Stuart, gave more life to this seemingly harsh scrubland.

The majority of these stories were told in the opening sessions of the colloquium. A period described by Cameron as a ‘day and a half of explanation of the depth of layering of Aboriginal stories of place, and why it isn’t culturally appropriate or realistic to tell more than the outer layer to visiting white folk at the outset’ (78). San Roque observed: ‘Some of the group were powerfully moved by the end of [this day and a half], and understood they were in a different country in which different forces were at work on them’. He added, ‘there are techniques and protocols for becoming accustomed to Aboriginal country and there are techniques [emerging] for recognising and decoding the communication from country’ (79). Learning is driven by specific frames of reference when it is located in relationships of this complexity.

One of the methods used to decode learning was a ‘morning dream circle’. San Roque said this ‘was to enhance the participants’ capacity to remain open and vulnerable to pre-conscious perceptions, to allow dream imagery to help in binding human consciousness to the place’. He situated this in traditional Aboriginal practice.

Another of the methods used was gendered retreats and performances. For one day male and females separated and, under the guidance of locals, gathered to talk, sing, make music, dance and learn more about the region through ritual. This sought to acknowledge, among other things, the depth of difference in traditional male and female relationships to place, something traditionally marked in Aboriginal communities. This separation, over one day of walking, storytelling and ritual preparation, culminated in performances by the men for the women and by the women for the men: performances that contained and resulted in further stories – some of which are still told – within this locale.

In reflecting on the ‘design’ for the learning contained in the colloquium Cameron and San Roque wrote of the adaptive nature of the process. While Cameron argues the difficulties in containing the potentially deranging influence of country, San Roque argues the need to recognise the limits of human influence. ‘Fortunately’ he says, ‘it [the design] wasn’t just left to you and I. The country acts as both deranger and container’. Acknowledging this leads finally to acknowledgement of the role of country in learning. San Roque describes the colloquium as something arranged ‘so that we could begin to think about such things in a place that still has the power to influence human being and human thought’. Cameron agrees. ‘I have a feeling that although our planning and catalysing helped, it was the quality of this presence that was most important and most enduring. Perhaps this is one of the hallmarks of a social ecology’ (88).

Imagination seems almost too soft a term to describe the construction of meaning when location is admitted as an educator. Here drama and imagination have constructed responsibility. This is reflected in the abiding importance of story, dream and drama. I remember most particularly a story told by Bobby Stuart in the final days of the colloquium, about the formation of a nearby section of the MacDonnell Ranges. His story depicted the ranges as a consequence of the interaction between mythological beings. And as he told the story I could see the story in the mountain range. I could read it in the rises and falls that he pointed to, in the outcrops and escarpments, in the ridges and valleys, in the wavering tensions of this fragile landscape. I could see this person chasing that person and at that place making camp. I could see the tension of the pursuit and the weapons and the old men and the young girl. I could see the place where the spear was thrown and the place of transformation where death gives birth to new life, which then becomes mythologised. This is the place where the story becomes the mountain range. In telling the story of the range the custodian tells the story of its coming into being. In maintaining the story, the custodian sustains the mountain range and the land in its vicinity and its creativity: its divinity. To the degree to which we share in it, it is our creativity, our drama as well: our cathedral, our text, our learning ecology embracing and encompassing us, to the degree to which we are able to admit it.

Implications for practice

The globalising, technologically based vision of learning that now dominates educational discourse places insufficient emphasis on localised and embodied aspects of learning. The enactment of this vision has often been to the detriment of arts-based learning. This is despite the fact that creative insight into the interdependent relationship between individuals, societies, environments, technologies and belief systems are integral to an arts-based education and our students’ informed participation in our unfolding future.

Those innovative practitioners interested in exploring the vast range of knowledge and skills implicit in drama learning can enrich basic understanding through focus upon localised, embodied learning, in part through reference to the complex web of relationships through which knowledge is constructed. A systemic worldview draws attention to the many variables that determine consciousness. This is why drama, in the hands of thoughtful, sensitive and creative facilitators, is an exciting arena for this sort of work. The dramatic moment, when given due attention, can be seen to exist within an extraordinarily rich nest of relationships, each capable of turning the moment one way or another. All involved in that moment should be attuned to its possibilities and open to reflection upon them.

In practice, the drama student must be encouraged to consider his or her relationship to the self, as moderator of the encounter; to the character as part of the means by which an alternate reality is constructed; to other participants – as individuals, as bodies, as skilled performers, as avenues or impediments, as rhythms, as aesthetic forms, as characters, as integral in a process of dramatic development; to the environment – both natural and constructed, both within the space and beyond; to design – in body, body arrangement, costume, pattern, colour, shading, shape, setting; to technology – in-built and/or effects created as required; to musicality – in tone of speech and composition; to audience – as sharing participants in the suspension of reality, as fellow travellers in a dramatic journey, critical observers, as customers, as friends or family, as co-participants in a changing world, as examiners perhaps; to context – the educational-social-political-cultural-ecological encounter with life within which this creative construction unfolds, and more. All these, plus key decision or choices that have lead to the strategic and/or inadvertent encounter with these elements. And of course the overall phenomenological experience. How it felt in the moment of its occurrence. How it feels now, some time after the event. What lingers; what is forgotten.

In the context of drama this can be seen as a subset of the vast array of encounters that determine consciousness. Alternately it can be seen as a powerful exercise in entering into this vast array (and thereby opening up to this potential). The limits to consideration here, to imagination, insight and understanding, can be as critical as the creative choices made at any stage of the process. Here educators have the responsibility to open to possibility rather than to close to truth. All decisions of this kind construct a basis for further action: ‘all doing is knowing; all knowing is doing’ (Maturana & Varela 1992, 27).

This mapping of the web of relationships is a practical exercise often used in environmental studies to help individuals position themselves in relation to the interweaving elements that sustain life. It is an approach that has a place in drama. Identifying, indeed mapping the networks that sustain performance challenges practitioners to enter deeply into the relationships that sustain individual and collective roles.

A systemic worldview requires that individual teachers reflect upon their participation in their learning and that of their community. This requires that the teacher understands him or herself as a participant in the reflection that facilitates learning and that this reflection be accepted as an experience of learning with significance for all in the community of learners (of which the teacher is only one). Out of this arises an ethical responsibility to act upon that learning.

This sort of learning has the potential to transform the assumptions that construct attitudes and actions. Work in transformative learning expands on that potential (Taylor, et al. 2012).

Essential to transformation of this kind is story. In the words of Gregory Bateson:

Conclusion

In all the stories told in this chapter, some of which are more easily translated to drama education practice than others, locality, embodiment and relationship are central. Each is a story of relational learning. All are located quite specifically, in focused experience. That focus can be driven by specific events. This is not abstract knowledge, it is grounded and yet it carries relevance to a variety of setting and situations outside of that being discussed. Thomas Berry’s argument, in his foreword to Edmund O’Sullivan’s treatise on the transformation required for an emerging ‘ecozoic’ era, is worth citing here;

In this respect drama education can be seen as a laboratory for the ongoing exploration of participation in unfolding awareness. Accordingly, one of the principal functions of an education in drama is insightful pursuit of understanding and the circumstances that facilitate that understanding.

If drama is an education in the employment of conscious awareness, this awareness affirms the way in which drama facilitates ‘more than drama’, because ecological understanding is certainly ‘more than drama’. Employed skillfully, drama processes have the capacity to enable an enriched awareness of the numerous relationships in which we participate. This underpins all arguments for drama as an epistemological form, with particular relevance to ecological understanding. In presenting this discussion this chapter has looked at a series of sites, practices and learning experiences and suggested questions about how and why these practices place so much importance on creative responses to individual, social and ecological encounter.

Works cited