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Schooling the imagination in the 21st century
Playbuilding has been a constant focus, particularly in NSW, in terms of formal drama curriculum in schools. Learning about drama by doing drama is at the core of drama syllabus documents within Australia and in numerous other countries. Drama pedagogy centres around the artistic practice of the art form, enabling students to ‘learn about’ the art form as they ‘learn to’ negotiate drama as artists. In drama, experiential learning is key as students collaborate and embody their learning through role-play, performance and critique. The ‘live’ experience of making, performing and appreciating the drama work is critical to building students’ foundational understandings of the subject. Playbuilding has been a central feature of NSW syllabus documents for over 20 years now, as a core or compulsory context for study, where students from K–12 learn how to create their own original plays. The prominence of playbuilding in NSW drama curriculum has in turn enabled teachers to hone their practice and develop sophisticated pedagogy and approaches to assessment and examination in this area. Surprisingly, however, there is little research that captures this pedagogy in action and describes its nuances and learning benefits, from a drama or a general education point of view. This chapter will describe and theorise the practice of playbuilding in the drama classroom and will position playbuilding pedagogy centrally within the current discourses of 21st-century learning.
These are tumultuous times for education. Late modernity presents many challenges for educators; the shifts and demands of economic crises, globalisation, ecological and social change and the impact of ubiquitous technologies are all critical forces that are shaping the way schooling is done around the world. Various contemporary educationalists and researchers would argue that considering the precarious future we face, education and schooling need to change dramatically to meet what we guess might be ahead (Kalantzis & Cope 2005; New London Group 1996; Heppell 2012; Robinson 2011). There is a growing chorus of educational leaders, researchers, and communities calling for a radical shake up in the way we ‘do’ school in the 21st century and they argue that there is an urgent need to revise buildings, pedagogies and approaches to curriculum to cater for 21st-century learners.
In the knowledge or learning age of the 21st century, learners’ needs have changed while education systems and decision-makers are slow to act and transform systems and approaches (Heppell 2012; Prensky 2006; Wagner 2008). Our school systems and thinking remain locked in the outmoded industrial past and misguidedly focus on standardised testing, regimes of accountability and risk management rather than the real (and possibly expensive) work of preparing schools, teachers and learners for a complex and difficult future. There is continuing discussion around the need for a rethink about what pedagogical reforms need to occur. Much of this rhetoric adopts an arts flavour as prominent educationalists and commentators speak of the critical need for creative capacity-building to be at the heart of future-oriented education and learning (Robinson 2011; Heppell 2012; Pink 2005).
While there is much in these discussions and debates that resonate with drama educators and give some hope (i.e. ‘at last they are talking about what we know’), the absence of drama and the arts in providing clear evidence of these creative pedagogies in action is nevertheless seriously concerning. Good drama pedagogy is, as O’Toole argues, perhaps the most productive pedagogy of all (2002). However, the arts are rarely used as models of excellence when it comes to pedagogies of the future. While at political and system levels there is new interest in creativity capacity-building for the future, there is still some reticence by the wider education field to acknowledge the many and varied ways drama and the arts already do this kind of work. Drama has concrete processes, methods and forms to develop these 21st-century skills and understandings that are now so highly prized. This chapter seeks to redress the absence of drama within these wider debates by framing drama, and specifically playbuilding pedagogy, within the context of these calls for dynamic 21st-century pedagogies that cater for flexible, risk-taking, creative student collaborators. Drama learning processes cut to the core of these attributes and exemplify much of the rhetoric of 21st-century pedagogies.
There is continuing discussion around the needs of 21st-century learners and the shift from old content-driven approaches in education to more fluid, ‘child-led’ (Heppell 2012) approaches where the learner is actively engaged as a content creator, learning the skills to manoeuvre across disciplines and using varied tools in a range of spaces, both real and virtual. There have been increasing calls for learning to be more like a game (Gee & Levine 2009; Barab et al. 2009), where end-focused creative play is a necessary part of the learning and inquiry process. While drama education has been reasonably slow to engage with ICT and to integrate technologies into creative processes, many of the creative, playful learning processes and ways of working in drama offer clear evidence of 21st-century attributes in action. Drawing on the input of business leaders, Tony Wagner (2008) outlines some of these 21st-century skills in his book, The global achievement gap:
Repeatedly, notions of playfulness, creative thinking and collaboration feature heavily throughout much of the literature on 21st-century learning (Pink 2005). Erica McWilliam’s publications on creative capacity-building and cognitive playfulness are analogous with the open creative processes of the drama classroom and playbuilding in particular (McWilliam 2008; Tan & McWilliam 2009). In playbuilding processes where knowledge is assembled and performed on the workshop floor, and where playfulness is a critical part of the collaborative process of devising, students are engaging directly in and developing the kinds of learning dispositions that are considered most necessary in a future-oriented learning process. Tan and McWilliam see play as a ‘multiliteracy’ for 21st-century life and work (2009, 1). Similarly Cope and Kalantzis’s (2009) theories of multimodal multiliteracies take in many of the modalities playbuilders work with to construct original embodied artworks for performance:
In playbuilding processes learners are engaged in complex forms of representation for specific theatrical purposes and audiences, where play and playfulness is a necessary part of the devising process. They independently create the work at hand and negotiate dramatic elements, as well as the complexities of self as a collaborator, responding to context and working with specific frames of dramatic form.
To understand the connections between playbuilding and 21st-century learning, it is important to first theorise and describe the nature of the playbuilding learning process. Playbuilding is a unique drama method involving drama teachers working with groups of students to devise and perform their own plays from their group’s imagination. Through playbuilding, students can investigate, shape and symbolically represent ideas, feelings, attitudes and their consequences. It is a creative process that has rich possibilities for learning as it gives students a powerful means to share their views with others in the community. For groups of students undertaking a playbuilding project, ideas need ‘to be given flesh and blood and emotional reality: [and] it must go beyond imitation’ (Brook 1993, 9). The essence of playbuilding is for the group to explore ways for their imaginative ideas to be re-invented, to be fresh and new, or perhaps challenging and ultimately to give their ideas dramatic substance. It is a transformative educational process at work. The playbuilding group creates its own dynamics while undertaking this process and product journey, as playbuilding encourages a cooperative approach to exploring the world through enactment. Therefore the collaborative nature of playbuilding enables students to engage in a creative process of sharing, developing and expressing ideas. The form can also help students transform their knowledge and engage in reflection and criticism as it is through the context of group inquiry in playbuilding that a student may reach a ‘greater critical knowing about her/his actions and how they are informed and influenced’ (Smith & Lovat 1991, 77). Playbuilding allows groups of students to enter and experience imagined worlds collectively and collaboratively. These imaginative worlds begin at the start of the process when playbuilders are given the opportunity to enter into an experiential learning phase which operates through playing and improvising.
It is valuable to explore the connections between ‘playing’ and ‘improvising’ in playbuilding in order to glimpse the connections between the affective, cognitive and physical domains of learning. As drama educators, we know that drama students love to play (Lovesy 2004, 23); playing games with rules and consequences, playing with ideas, playing with spontaneous and structured improvisation, and playing with various theatre conventions and techniques. Playing and improvising brings freedom to students’ imaginations, creativity and instincts, and helps them grow effectively; it enables students to discover meaning in the world, and this opens up spaces for creativity and intuition; meaning and understanding therefore become part of the experience (Winnicott 1971, 41). Play and improvisation, whether created informally by students or in a more formal drama games structure, creates dialectical moments, the winners and the losers, the tagged and the free, the excitement and the disappointment, the rules and the sub-rules. The players are playing in a dual world; in some sense they are exploring the actual and fictional worlds within their games and activities. These kinds of classroom activities have critical benefits for the learner that can strengthen their confidence and sense of identity. In Christine Hatton’s doctoral research (2005) on student learning in playbuilding processes she found that the girls in her study relished the experience of exercising control over the drama and character’s emotions. Experimenting in this way through role and performance, where the students had artistic control over the dramatic structure and performance event, gave them important opportunities to be visible and in charge of their learning. Knowledge and skill (about self, dramatic artistry, story and context) are performative in playbuilding projects and represent significant ‘acts’ of learning.
Improvisation is a major teaching and learning tool which begins the playbuilding process as it allows freedom of student expression and movement. The spontaneity inherent in any type of improvisation activity can minimise the number of students trying to imitate other people’s ideas and give the students freedom to explore their own ideas. Spontaneity in improvisation can be inspiring as thoughts and actions not previously dreamt about come alive. Improvisation creates a group curiosity, where the group’s ideas can be examined closely in a non-threatening environment. Improvisation is practical and provocative; practical as it is played out on the classroom floor allowing students to develop their personal techniques and skills, and provocative because it taps into the untold potential of the students which awakens intuition. Viola Spolin argues that intuition, in improvisation, transcends the limitation of the familiar and responds to immediacy – the right now. Intuition comes bearing its gifts in the moment of spontaneity when the person is free to relate and act in the changing dramatic world (Spolin 1963, 3–5). Improvisation is used to release the potential of not just the individual but the group, and is an organic means of releasing imaginative intuition that underpins the group’s process work. Playbuilding is built upon these foundations and as such it can be ambiguous and move in several directions at once in the classroom. In this environment the group can change the rules, create tensions, and use their collective energy to provoke ideas within their collective imaginings. In Sarah Lovesy’s doctoral research she discovered that if a playbuilding group can release a dramatic immediacy and intuition in their playing and improvising, then the firing of students’ imaginations starts to take place. In turn, this allows playbuilding groups to work together with enjoyment, to take dramatic risks, to manage and solve problems and to step into their initial exploration of devising a story (Lovesy 2004).
Imagining is a dynamic process that belongs to the conscious and subconscious. Awakening the imagination belongs to the realm of emotions, imagery, memory, and is a state of mind and body (Greene 1995, 28). The imagination’s ‘imaginings’ are curious and inquisitive and can be transformed.
Playbuilding students use their own unique imaginations to explore the visual, verbal and non-verbal ideas in their learning. They often create their own theatrical language through muscular and emotional classroom activities. In the initial stages of playbuilding the students share with one another their previous drama and theatre knowledge and observations, and hence their imaginings. Although they can create this information in a variety of ways, the individual observations and imaginings are tied to their perceptions of the world. Each student’s belief in the topics or issues chosen for playbuilding informs another students’ perceptions. This ‘informing’ can provide a dramatic tension as members of the group may have different perspectives depending whether they perceive through looking, seeing or doing. This tension arises from letting the imagination run freely, and the group eventually forms its own group perceptions. These in turn flow into the devising and, as such, there is a complexity in the imaginative and creative processes that power the students’ work (Lovesy, 2004).
In a playbuilding project, imaginative complexity comes from the range of students’ interests, levels and abilities, and in any given class there may be what some drama educators call ‘super-dramatists’ (Dunn 1996, 21). Betty Jane Wagner clarifies this notion of the super-dramatist, arguing that in a drama class the teacher can find students intuitively leading the dramatic action. These super-dramatists are providing a framework upon which other students can build a new understanding (Wagner 1995, 68). The drama teacher’s role is to create an environment where super-dramatists can be extended, while still providing a dynamic learning experience for students who do not have the same level of ability.
Playbuilding groups have the capacity to construct multiple realities within their conceptual networks as they explore the potential for transforming. Transformation is inherent in the drama process, as is the process of imagination which ‘utilises affective states and intuition in its functioning’ (Burton 1991, 172). Maxine Greene says that ‘transformative pedagogies must relate both to existing conditions and to something we are trying to bring into being, something that goes beyond a present situation’ (1995, 1); here she is analysing the power of the imagination. Similarly, Bruce Burton believes that ‘imagination is a potent element in learning because it permits the individual to transform experience and transcend the limits of what is already known’ (1991, 172). Burton further notes that drama is essentially a creative experience, and ‘creativity is a universal and complex element of human behavior which is significant in a whole range of learning experiences’ (Burton 1991, 173). These ideas encompass the concept that imaginative and creative experiences generate and transform the playbuilding process though ‘illuminating, extending and enhancing . . . learning’ (Burton 1991, 176). In playbuilding, drama students collaborate within this imaginative and creative experience.
A metaphor is an active mode through which to experience drama ideas symbolically. It is another way of transforming the imaginative and creative energies in playbuilding. Moore and Yamamoto describe metaphor as a way to transfer bodily meaning; they say that metaphor creates ‘a new context and configuration of meanings, thus becoming not merely a poetic device, but a whole new way of thinking about the world’ (Moore & Yamamoto 1988, 29). Students need to understand not only what a metaphor is but how it affects their thinking. Through this effect students can be encouraged to creatively explore information and knowledge and to ‘highlight certain features’, and to ‘suppress or hide certain features’ (Moore & Yamamoto 1988, 30) in their devising. When playbuilders engage in metaphoric work it provides a contextual framework and gives rise to new modes of interpretation, allowing students to see ideas in a new light, hence metaphors both amplify and diminish the human experience.
Metaphoric imaginative thought and action can provide rich possibilities for students learning more about their work, and it is an important property in playbuilding which enables students to catch the essence of their group stories. It can give playbuilding its dramatic power, as metaphor exists through the embodiment of the physical, cognitive and affective domains of the students. Students can be encouraged actively to be responsible for their own metaphoric devising in the drama aesthetic, and this can occur when the students are engaged in opening their minds and feelings. A metaphor allows students to extend their knowing so that they have the opportunity to layer and broaden the inner and outer life of their fictional work. The metaphoric world of the idea can be expanded within the minds and imaginations of the students through practical experiences in the drama classroom (Moore & Yamamoto 1988). For instance, in drama, students may wish to transform themselves into an anthropomorphic idea; in this case they will endow their ideas with symbolic and metaphoric life.
In playbuilding, students explore metaphoric creating so that they understand, use and interpret their own examples. Students may approach this through verbal imagery, and through the creation of visual metaphors with their bodies. Helping groups to select and emphasise imagery in words and phrases and to use their physicality entails experimentation and failure. This experimentation and failure allows a creative freedom for students to explore their own as well as other students’ imaginations. Metaphor, imagining, devising and creating can be fused together in drama education, allowing metaphoric osmosis to take place.
All drama learning is informed and shaped by students’ understandings of the elements of drama and their skills in using these on the floor and in performance. Haseman and O’Toole provide a useful model of the art form and the way its elements convey dramatic meaning:
The human context (situations, roles, relationships) driven by dramatic tension directed by focus made explicit in place & time through language & movement to create mood & symbols which together create the whole experience of dramatic meaning. (1986, viii)
When we think about playbuilding processes other elements can be added to this model such as:
As students become more expert dramatists and playbuilders they learn from their embodied experiences and gradually become more adept and independent when using the elements of drama in their work. When students are improvising leading to playbuilding they manipulate these elements for effect and impact, communicating their ideas through their selective use of the various elements. In playbuilding, students should have a range of different opportunities to play with the elements of drama in different combinations so they can consider the ways in which the elements are working to achieve their dramatic purpose and impact. Different types of playbuilding processes may involve students emphasising particular elements for a specific style or purpose (e.g. a heightened use of symbol in non-realist or abstract forms and styles).
Every activity and playbuilding process should involve students experimenting with the elements in practical ways and also critically reflecting on the way the elements are working at any given point in their drama work. Discussing the elements of drama during the devising process offers opportunities for rich discussion about the art form and the way students are using it. Teachers can focus on the elements of drama in the way they structure activities, as well as self or peer evaluation processes. This encourages students to develop their critical thinking skills and their ability to respond to the live and dynamic experience of the drama as both a participant and as an audience member (Hatton & Lovesy 2009).
Drama educators use the term ‘metaxis’ to describe the interplay between the actual and the fictitious in the drama classroom. Metaxis appears to have an elusive quality, as the notion of ‘interplay’ can vary in degrees among groups of students and teachers. Bruce Burton explains the importance of metaxis by proposing that the ‘drama process requires a special act of the imagination, effectively defined by Augusto Boal as metaxis’ (Burton 1991, 7). Burton argues:
‘for the drama process to occur, and create the interplay of metaxis which can lead to insight, certain essential elements of experience must be present. These elements are: imagination, creativity, identification, transformation and discovery’ (Burton 1991, 8).
Metaxis is a term that is intangible, yet definable, as it exists as an integral part of the drama education process, and hence playbuilding.
Metaxis reciprocates between both the ‘real and the fictional’ worlds, or in other words the duality between the ‘actual and fictitious’, is explored. This duality is examined not only through the students’ playbuilding, but also through the exchange between teacher and students in the drama experience. Metaxis helps drama teachers and students alike to comprehend drama aesthetics and dramatic meaning. It is therefore like the ‘subtexts’ (O’Toole 1992, 75) of the drama class, where words, images, ideas, knowledge, physicality, feelings, conscious and unconscious imaginings occur simultaneously. This capacity of drama teachers and students to hold two worlds simultaneously in their minds and bodies in the drama classroom implies that metaxis underplays the work being carried out by everyone in the class.
Metaxis is connected to the liminal (Turner 1982), in that the liminal can be visualised as a space that makes way for new ideas yet still connects to the old ideas. A liminal period of time refers to when ‘the actual work of rites of passage takes place’ (Schechner 2002, 57), and hence a liminal transformation occurs when students enter this period of time. The concept of liminal is therefore embedded in metaxis and the rituals of a playbuilding classroom. A drama group’s playbuilding has a particular kind of being in-between the actual and fictitious worlds, a ‘metaxis which feeds into the drama’ (O’Toole 1992, 220) so that the body, mind, and environment can be connected willingly within the imaginative moment; this could be described as metaxical embodiment.
In playbuilding the dual affect of the actual and the fictional can provide a tension in the space between the two worlds that occur in the classroom. An example of this is when a playbuilding group is discussing, debating and improvising ideas to begin the playbuilding process. At this time students are continually working in their actual world, but tapping into the fictional world; their ideas sometimes work and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes ideas that seemed significant in group discussion break down in the fictional improvisation, and ideas that seemed insignificant in the group discussion may come to life in the fictional improvisation; this is metaxical embodiment at work. It incorporates the tension of the two colliding worlds, and produces experiences that give the playbuilders a passage into embodiment.
Warren Linds connects metaxis to embodiment, arguing that:
The two worlds of metaxis in ourselves are autonomous. Metaxis occurs in the artist’s body and is embodied. Self and mind are woven through the entire human body and through the web of the relationships in which that self takes shape. (Linds 1998, 74)
Therefore it is through the process of metaxis that playbuilding becomes the interplay between the imagined and the actual, the tangible and the ephemeral. Metaxis is like an invisible film over playbuilding practice.
As an ‘artful’ pedagogy, playbuilding requires a repertoire of artistic practice and skills of drama teachers and students. Teachers must support students’ creative processes as they weave the elements of form to create dramatic meanings that are their own. The skills and understandings dynamised within the playbuilding process cross over into skills and multiliteracies necessary for living in the 21st-century. Teachers artfully create the contexts and processes for students to engage in playbuilding projects that can have lasting outcomes for learners. The teacher must expertly construct, guide and manage the devising process as it happens. In doing so they must consider: what will be the school drama moments that may profoundly affect them in the future, and how can they teach this form to create evocative thinking, doing and purposeful imaginative engagement in the arts?
Sue Davis argues for teachers to unpack what creativity might mean in drama teaching and learning in the 21st-century and states that more students tend to believe that drama work such as playbuilding was the most creative kind of drama (Davis 2010, 39). Roslyn Arnold’s theories on educating for empathic intelligence are a dynamic teaching model that explores human emotions in the drama classroom. She explores the interpersonal engagements in a classroom that facilitate student-centred pedagogy and argues that the development of empathy in a teacher ‘requires, and indeed helps us to develop a non-judgmental stance in our responses to human behaviour’ (Arnold 2000, 6). She asserts that ‘Empathy is an act of heartfelt, thoughtful imagination’ (Arnold 2000, 7) and through calling it an ‘act’ indicates that emotion involves affect as well as cognition. An empathic drama teacher will stress the special devising nature of playbuilding which necessitates a high level of trust between participants because of that very special, personal and imaginative creating that occurs. An empathic learning environment enables playbuilders to create their own unique diverse imaginations, thereby opening up a myriad of creative possibilities in the drama learning space. A playbuilding group’s imagination is being tried, tested, re-arranged and shifted through the teaching that occurs. Furthermore, the groups and individual students within them, continue to advance their learning when teaching is attuned to their needs (Arnold, 1998, 2000). This is ‘artful’ pedagogy.
Joe Winston discusses how teachers might foster a vision for arts education in which the social values this learning embodies are as important as the appearance of the final creative product. He believes that this type of arts education values the creative energies of students in a way that allows them to channel understanding of their communal world, and their own individual creativity (Winston 2010, 86–108). He also argues for the pedagogic importance of a final creative product stating that for students who love performing ‘there is nothing quite so thrilling as the moment when their work is shared, watched and/or listened to’ (Winston 2010, 76). This sharing with an audience creates a sense of aesthetic necessity which develops and guides the students’ reflections, decisions and evaluations of the creative process. Joe Winston’s arguments relate directly to why playbuilding is a pedagogy for the future as they demonstrate the educational importance of drama process work combined with the actor/audience relationship.
Ken Robinson (2011) proposes that 21st-century education should focus on helping students to become creative thinkers and doers, as we are now living in a cultural and social revolution, a tumultuous time of change, an extraordinary complex world that demands new skills, knowledge and understanding. This means that education should become personalised as 21st-century students may not know what they are capable of unless given the opportunity – we all have a different sense of possibility. By equally valuing the educational potential of the arts, with its convergence on creativity and helping students to explore their imaginative capacities, teachers can create classrooms that focus on learning without frontiers. Arts education is at the centre of this dynamic conception of a revolution in education. In a playbuilding classroom these theorists and educators ideas have the potential to ‘play’ a central role in the learning that takes place.
In our NSW curriculum some of what goes on in the classroom works against playbuilders’ imaginations as education systems and authorities have an obsession with assessment, evidence and benchmarks. The act of imagining is connected to students’ creativity through transformation and this transformation links directly to exploration, experience and discovery in the drama classroom. Yes, this can be assessed and examined but at what costs? How do we assess or examine playfulness and risk-taking in terms of dramatic form in a contemporary sense? Are our curriculum constraints and imperatives in fact limiting the innovative practice of teachers and students? Playbuilding promotes relationships with theatre practitioners, relationships that can encourage drama students to examine and connect with the artistry of others. In addition, playbuilding projects engage with traditions, stories and communities, often where students are working in interdisciplinary ways and using research dynamically within their dramatic choices in the work. This in turn means that students are exploring the imaginations and creativity of others and developing a wider self-expression through their cognitive, affective and physical selves in dialogue with others and other contexts. In this way playbuilding projects provide creative spaces for personal engagement and empowerment as students position and situate themselves and their creative practice within wider issues and communities of artists. Importantly, playbuilding enables young people to engage in big picture issues and stage their own stories.
The collaborative playbuilding learning process described here resonates with models of 21st-century learning. Playbuilding projects provide learners with critical opportunities to develop personal meaning, creativity, cognitive playfulness (Tan & McWilliam 2009), empathy and shared imagination. The open, metaphoric, project-based way of working in playbuilding shares much of what Daniel Pink (2005) refers to as the six essential attributes for success and satisfaction in the 21st-century: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. The wider field of education has much to gain from understanding the pedagogies of the drama classroom, where we work daily with students personal learning and meaning making as agentive and active creators.
ACARA see Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority
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