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The power of drama pedagogy
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Emily Dickenson, 1862
Dwelling in possibility for Emily Dickenson is dwelling in the metaphoric house of aesthetic freedom where she can create the emotional, intellectual and spiritual dimensions of experience through the limitless possibilities of poetry. For me, ‘dwelling in possibility’ is imagining and using the force and potential of drama as a process of learning. Dickenson’s poem also encapsulates the windows and doors that PhD research has opened for me in terms of possibilities. This chapter is about the power of the research journey and drama pedagogy to open doors for both students and teachers to explore their learning capacity and potential.
My research journey is the ‘backstory’ of this chapter. As a backstory it explains the context in which I find myself. The backstory is significant because it gives value to the process of research and explains how the product or outcomes of the research have been formed to frame and construct the post-research ‘fore story’. The fore story is the drama literacy and teacher capacity-building program I am currently running in primary schools. Communicating and connecting the backstory and fore story serve to extrapolate how research is an ongoing narrative. It is a narrative that illustrates how research and drama pedagogy can contribute to innovation and the ongoing development of quality learning programs and outcomes for students and teachers. It is a story about engaging with pedagogy.
My PhD research (Jefferson 2011) was about drama, film and teaching. Inherent to these art forms and in many ways to learning is the act of storytelling. Stories make sense of our experience of the world. Experience is temporal and the telling and understanding of experience involves a selective emphasis of the experience (Dewey 1958). Choices and consequences of choices shape our lived experience, and the representation of those choices over time become stories (Bruner 1987). Stories not only make sense of our own lives and our experience, but the telling of stories are the means by which we can experience others’ experience (Clandinin & Connelly 1994).
Narrative is retrospective meaning-making – the shaping or ordering of past experience. Narrative is a way of understanding one’s own and others actions, of organising events and objects into a meaningful whole, and of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time (Chase 2008, 64).
In life and learning, storytelling opens windows of perception and understanding. In this chapter I use the structure of a story to organise and communicate my experience with research and drama pedagogy. I have constructed two narratives in the story pattern of a seven-part film narrative schema.1 The chapter is not about the possibilities of two parallel stories as in the movie Sliding doors (Dir. Howitt 1998); it is about connecting two stories. The first story is about research and the second about opportunities to implement ideas arising from that research. The stories are about the possibilities of effective and sustainable innovation in schools through research, drama and quality professional learning.
My backstory in research begins according to the narrative schema with a ‘setting’ and a ‘character’. It also begins with the opening of two doors.
I am the protagonist of this story, and the backstory begins with me working as a drama and film teacher in the setting of a NSW performing arts high school. After teaching a drama class and closing the door to the classroom I crossed the hallway and opened a door to another classroom to teach film. In the hallway I experienced a sense of metamorphosis, evolving from drama teacher into film teacher, and in that moment I asked the Kafkaesque question, ‘What’s happened to me?’
At the same time, I wasn’t completely transformed, so the question, ‘What has not happened to me?’ was equally relevant. It was in the tension between being a film teacher and a drama teacher that my research journey began. Research is ‘a systematic attempt to re-see the everyday’ (Freebody 2003) and it was in the moment of metamorphosis that I wanted to understand and explore the newly emerging area of filmmaking in schools through the experiences of drama teachers.
The broader setting for the research story is the curriculum context of the state of NSW. This context does not determine the outcomes of the research but it does identify the conditions from which issues arise (Corbin & Strauss 2008). In drama these conditions are called the ‘given circumstances’. In film narratives they are the ‘state of affairs’ and they contextualise the ongoing events of this research story.
When I was teaching film from 2001 to 2005, filmmaking in schools was still a relatively new and uncertain area. In NSW it was explored in a piecemeal fashion and in different ways across curriculum areas such as English, visual arts, drama, and design and technology. At the performing arts high school where I was teaching we introduced a film course from years 9 to 12. This was in response to student interest, the accessibility and affordability of user-friendly camera and editing software, and as a response to the rapidly digitised and mediated world. The course was endorsed by the state curriculum authority, the NSW Board of Studies, and was immediately popular with students.
The introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) in schools at the time was compared to a ‘hammer in search of a nail’. This describes the phenomenon where the implementation of technology is ‘contrived or incongruent with classroom practice and discipline-specific pedagogy’ (Hofer & Owings-Swan 2005, 102). Drama teachers interested in filmmaking were unsure how to develop pedagogy for effective learning with the new digital technology. They were ‘in search of a nail’.
From this state of affairs a ‘critical moment’ or ‘initiating event’ in the narrative occurred.
The initiating event in the narrative was Michael Anderson from the University of Sydney asking me to co-write a book about the theory and practice of film pedagogy (Anderson & Jefferson 2009). He also encouraged me to do a PhD in this newly emerging and developing area of the curriculum. As an experienced drama teacher at a performing arts high school I had the opportunity to teach film as a discrete subject. This was unusual within the curriculum structures of most schools in NSW at the time. I was uniquely positioned to consider the aesthetics and pedagogy of film-learning possibilities from a drama-learning perspective. Our book explored filmmaking through an interdependent and recursive arts pedagogical model in making and appreciating.
Separate but related to the book, my PhD research was grounded in interpreting the real world experiences (Greenwood & Levin 2008) of drama teachers with film. It involved a case study of six drama teachers who, with other teachers, participated in an intervention of 36 hours of film pedagogy workshops that I facilitated. The aim of the case study was to provide a rich, detailed and close portrait of drama teachers and their film-learning experiences in the workshops and in their schools.
Case study research focuses on the particular or an instance, and attempts to gain theoretical and professional insights from a full documentation of that instance (Freebody 2003). The focus on the instance also reflects the universal, a connection made by Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘a man is never an individual; it would be more fitting to call him a universal singular. Summed up and for this reason universalised by his epoch, he in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in its singularity’ (1981, ix). To study the particular then is also to study the universal.
The strength of a collective case study is to explore a phenomenon that leads to better understanding and perhaps better theorising about a larger collection of cases (Stake 2008). The benefit of a case study in education is to use localised experience in order to appreciate and integrate the complexity and uniqueness of practice, and to avoid theorising ‘in a vacuum’ (Freebody 2003).
Undertaking research however requires the researcher to have motivation or objective to catapult the research process forward. For me the motivation was to make a difference.
The emotional response to undertaking a book and PhD as a first-time experience was excitement at the challenge but incredulity that I made such a decision. It is however the statement of a goal that ultimately drives the researcher and the research narrative forward. I had the curiosity to gain personal knowledge through research but I was also passionate about developing what I saw as the effectiveness and benefits of drama and film in many young people’s learning experiences. I wanted to make a difference by contributing to the professional learning of the teachers participating in my research and more broadly to the policy and practice of arts learning in NSW.
Such goals are perhaps fanciful but I found my research aspirations in the words of Peter Freebody (2003). He describes research in education as a ‘discourse of cultural optimism’ that aims to ‘change the social world by discovering better understandings of its qualities’ (218). It was this sense of optimism and idealism to make a difference that set me on the research path. But despite aspirational goals and intentions to change the ‘social world’, research like a story is never without the cause and effect of unforeseen events or complicating actions to upset those goals.
In a film narrative complicating actions are obstacles in the way of attaining a goal. In research complicating actions are often unplanned events. A case study is described as a ‘naturalistic-experiment-in action’ (Freebody 2003) but unforeseen events are at first considered a derailment of a well-thought-through research design. An unforseen event during my PhD occurred after I had collected my research data. It was the development of the Australian curriculum, and the draft ‘Arts shape’ paper in 2010. The national curriculum for the arts was to include five subjects: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. The inclusion and possibilities of the new subject media arts changed the ‘state of affairs’ for my research narrative. It re-oriented my discussion of how drama teachers in NSW could integrate and innovate a pedagogical approach to film.
The changing ‘given circumstances’ of a national curriculum set about a chain of events of another post-research ‘fore story’ about media arts. But that post-research story is a chapter for another book. Complications such as unplanned events in research do however create a fresh perspective on the research data and highlight how unforeseen problems and challenges are further possibilities for knowledge. In this case, it was how an aesthetic experiential pedagogical approach to film could be accommodated in a changing curriculum landscape. As the ‘social world’ of education was changing around me different paradigms and narratives in curriculum construction (Pinar et al. 1995; Ewing 2010) arose as a tension and issue in the research analysis.
Another ‘complicating factor’ or ‘obstacle’ in the research was the unexpected emergence of teachers’ professional learning as a theme in the data. As the interviews, questionnaires and reflective logbook data was gathered and codified, the nature of teacher professional learning became meaningful as a pattern across the collective case study analysis (Patton 2002). The original focus of the research was about drama teachers and film but the interventionist film workshops made the nature and effectiveness of teacher professional learning a significant area of focused study.
The unexpected events in national curriculum development and the unforeseen data in teacher professional learning were ‘complications’ that enriched the study and contributed significantly to the research narrative. Complications serve to demonstrate how the open and challenging process of analysis in research can lead to the discovery of possibilities and new meanings in knowledge. The ultimate findings of the PhD were highly influenced by these unforeseen and complicating factors. Complicating actions in a narrative lead to an outcome, and in a research narrative these are the conclusions or findings.
The ‘outcome’ of a narrative is the climax and resolution that ends the conflict. The obstacles preventing the protagonist to attain their goal are overcome. Complicating actions are obstacles in PhD research but writing up a PhD is in itself an obstacle. A PhD is a monolith, a mountain and a millstone that has to be overcome and conquered. Sheer tenacity is the only way to resolve the ‘conflict’ of completing it. The climax in the research narrative is successfully submitting the PhD. In terms of attaining goals I had explored and analysed the problematised areas of film and drama, technology and pedagogy, and innovation in professional learning and curriculum development.
Imperative to me was empowering the teachers involved in the research and so underpinning the research was the collaborative, participatory and transformative orientation of critical theory (Freire 2006 [1970]; Kincheloe & McLaren 2005). I had aimed to empower the research participants to reflect upon and understand their own situation and support future action in their teaching and learning of film and drama. As the data shows, the research did have a positive and transforming impact on the professional learning of the teachers involved in the project. However my goal to ‘make a difference’ beyond the research process wasn’t realised. It became a motivation for the ensuing fore story.
The outcome of the research was the recommendations based on the collective case study. These conclusions were ‘naturalistic generalisations’ (Stake 1978) made from the detailed and rich analysis of six drama teachers and their experiences. The six teachers’ reflections suggested that the creative and experiential pedagogical processes of the research workshops contributed to dynamic and transformative professional learning. An implication of the research was that teachers are empowered by professional learning that is characterised by experiential, creative and collaborative processes (Moran & John-Steiner 2003) and ongoing action learning with an academic partner (Aubusson et al. 2009).
The 36 hours of film pedagogy workshops created a vibrant professional learning community modeled on the shared understanding and participation of a ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger 1991). Teachers with a mutual interest in film and drama, and with shared problems and challenges came together to share, reflect on and develop professional practice through creative and critical learning processes. As the researcher mentor I was able to facilitate and support action learning processes in reflection, community, action and feedback. Solving problems through action and learning by the people who face the problems is the ethos of action learning (Revans 1980). The group’s sharing experiences, and supporting and challenging each other to take action and to learn ‘implies both organization development and self-development – action on a problem that changes both the problem and the actor’ (Pedler 1996, xxx). Hargreaves (2003, 25) argues that, ‘Not one teacher knows enough to cope or improve by himself or herself. It is vital that teachers engage in action, inquiry, and problem-solving together in collegial teams or professional learning communities’.
Throughout and after the workshops the teachers reflected together about their own learning and the learning of their students, and solved issues about how to innovate and develop film in their schools. For the teachers the intensive and experiential workshops were a unique and stimulating experience that developed confidence, motivation and a more positive yet critical approach to teaching generally. The teachers’ reflections in the research suggested opportunities for establishing effective and ongoing professional learning communities in NSW. Such communities are not widely accessible, sustained or inherent in the current systemic and school structures. Unfortunately, I was unable to continue with the teachers as a professional ‘community of learners’ (Brown 2005) due to my focus on analysing and writing up the study, and a lack of resources to support such an idea. To make a difference by supporting the capacity-building of teachers through processes informed by my research was an idea that came to fruition later in the ‘fore story’.
Another recommendation from the research was the need to develop deep and scaffolded, creative and critical learning in the aesthetic of film within the curriculum context of the new Australian arts curriculum and the subject of media arts. For the drama teachers in the research project, learning through the making and appreciating of film had the capacity to create a rich and complex, challenging and authentic learning experience for students. The teachers observed that effective film learning used creative and collaborative learning processes, experiential and performative processes of learning, and narrative and performative codes of representation for an audience. These ideas seemed specific to the pedagogy of drama and film at the time but in my post-research journey, they resonated with broader concerns and possibilities in learning.
The findings in the PhD research are not the end of the story. The research narrative ends with an epilogue.
According to Branigan (1992) the seventh and last component of the narrative schema is ‘reactions to the outcome’ or an epilogue. An epilogue is the moral lesson implicit in the events of the narrative or the lesson made explicit by the character’s reactions to the narrative’s resolution. My reaction was relief that the PhD was over, but also an uneasy sense that it wasn’t. I did not feel I had put my research findings into practice. I had not fulfilled my goal of making a difference.
Research is an ongoing narrative. The ‘findings’ of my PhD have continued to evolve well beyond the finished thesis. The PhD research continues to be synthesised and analysed in light of the life experiences I continue to have. The door didn’t close with the research but has remained open to further outcomes that continue to play out. This is where the research as a backstory connects to the fore story of this chapter. The fore story is about the consequences of research and the possibilities of drama pedagogy as future action in the classroom.
The fore story begins again with the introduction of setting and character. I continue to be the protagonist but at the beginning of this story I am a teacher with a PhD lecturing part time at the University of Sydney. Like Pirandello’s Six characters in search of an author I search for a role and place to apply my PhD learning and findings. My ‘setting’ is a psychological space shaped by the uncertainty that the all-consuming PhD research had not been realised more broadly in an ongoing sense in the real world. I felt the doors had closed and no longer felt I was ‘dwelling in possibility’. Was I naïve to think that my research could make a difference?
Sixties’ singer Peggy Lee’s rendition of ‘Is that all there is?’ (Leiber & Stoller) and its lyrics of disillusionment were resonating in my head. But another maxim was also residing in my head: ‘Drama bridges the conversation between our inner selves and the outside world’ (Saxton & Miller 2009; Hughes 1991). Could drama be the conduit between my inner research learning self and real life actions in the outside world? The answer lies in the subsequent events of this story. These events are shaped by the state of affairs in the outside world. The state of affairs begins with the state of drama in NSW schools.
Drama has grown as a subject in the secondary curriculum in NSW since the development of Board of Studies syllabi in 1986 and 1991, and in the primary curriculum in 2000. Despite its emergence in the curriculum and the recognition that drama is a pedagogy that promotes the development of multiliteracies, creativity, critical thinking, empathy and collaborative work practices drama still lies in the fringes of education with other arts subjects.
In primary schools drama is rarely core learning, nor is it utilised as a widespread pedagogy in other areas of the curriculum. Despite teaching practitioners and academics extolling the virtues of drama as a pedagogy in English (Anderson, Hughes & Manuel 2008; Neelands1992) and primary researchers and practitioners setting up programs using drama as literacy learning (Ewing & Simons 2004; Miller & Saxton 2004), drama and the arts more generally are still on the educational margins. O’Toole and Stinson’s (2009) description of drama in education as clinging and ‘unregarded but limpet-like out there beyond the mainstream’ is the current state of affairs in NSW. Drama is not central to the curriculum and not core pedagogy.
But O’Toole and Stinson also point out that it is in the liminal space of the fringes where change agents can be found. It is in this liminal space where an ‘initiating event’ gave me an opportunity to be a change agent and make a difference.
In the uncertain setting of what to do post-PhD I was asked by Mark Hopkins at the Parramatta diocese Catholic Education Office (CEO) to be a critical friend for a drama and literacy program that had just been implemented in a few primary and secondary schools in Western Sydney. Mark was interested in my PhD research and the possibilities for developing arts pedagogy in primary schools, and developing the arts more generally in schools across an extensive diocese stretching from Parramatta to the Blue Mountains. The other issue to consider was developing literacy learning in these schools. It is in this initiating event that a ‘door to possibility’ had been opened.
The drama and literacy program had run only for two terms and involved a theatre artist, year 5 students and their teachers. The teaching theatre artist visited the primary classes once a week and explored a picture book through the pedagogy and aesthetic of drama. Linked to the drama classes were other literacy tasks to be explored by the primary classroom teacher. At a nearby secondary school the same theatre artist developed with secondary students a devised performance piece from the picture book. The devised work was then performed for the primary schools that had explored the same text through the drama and literacy program. The aim of the program was to improve students’ literacy and encourage teachers to use drama as an experiential and kinaesthetic pedagogy.
Exploring picture books through drama and then connecting those explorations with other aspects of literacy has been investigated and instigated by seminal educational practitioners (e.g. Ewing & Simons 2004; Gibson & Ewing 2011; Miller & Saxton 2004; O’Toole & Dunn 2002). Through drama processes students embody the story’s language, images and ideas. In enactment they combine affective and cognitive understandings, and by being actors and audience they make critical connections through reflection and analysis. It is literacy in three dimensions. Learning through picture books and drama provides ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ for the imagination to explore issues and feelings through metaphor and multiple perspectives (Saxton & Miller 2013).
In the age of communication and social connectivity through the internet there is an imperative for students to interrogate multimodal texts2 beyond surface understandings. Exploring the text and images of picture books through drama has the capacity to develop learning in multimodal literacy, literary understandings, aesthetic experiences and critical literacies3 as well as fostering students’ imagination and creativity (Ewing et al. 2008). Drama as an experiential and kinaesthetic process provides an alternative way of learning for students often excluded by other teaching methods. Drama therefore supports functional literacy, as well as provides opportunities for empathetic engagement and a deeper understanding of texts and ideas (Belliveau & Prendergast 2013; Dunn et al. 2013; Ewing 2009; O’Mara 2008; O’Toole & Dunn 2002).
The contribution of drama and literacy was not a focus of my PhD research, but drama as pedagogy was and so was supporting teachers to develop and innovate in their teaching practice. As a reaction to the initiating event of a door opening through the drama literacy program, I, the protagonist in the narrative, responded with the statement of a goal.
My goal was to be able to apply my research findings to the real-world context of schools. I wanted to support teachers in creating deeper student learning experiences through ongoing, in-situ professional learning. My research and experience could support and guide the development of the drama and literacy program but there was more for me to learn about the needs of literacy learning in schools often with students from EAL (English as an additional language), disadvantaged and culturally diverse backgrounds.
CEO team leader Mark Hopkins and I believed the success of combining drama and literacy lay with classroom teachers empowering themselves to develop and innovate, and could only be supported systemically if we had data and results. I had concluded in my PhD research that innovation and change in schools could only be achieved with the integration of a ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approach. My research supported Darling-Hammond’s (2005) view that:
‘Neither a heavy-handed view of top down reform nor a romantic vision of bottom-up change is plausible. Both local intervention and supportive leadership are needed, along with new horizontal efforts that support cross-school consultation and learning’ (366).
To implement and sustain pedagogical and curriculum change, Fullan, Hill and Crévola (2006) argue that it is necessary to personalise and precisely meet the student’s learning needs and deliver ongoing organisational and collaborative professional learning for teachers. But Groundwater-Smith and Mockler (2009) describe how the recent rise of a compliant culture in education does not encourage and support teachers to have the professional judgment and courage to reflect, question and innovate through ‘bottom-up’ initiatives. Groundwater-Smith and Mockler (2009) contend that the practices of ‘top-down’, inflexible auditing and standardising in education, and a lack of systematic support for active, explorative and inventive teacher practice have generated a compliance agenda in schools and the curriculum.
It is with these concerns – about a compliance culture in education, the need to cater to student learning needs in situ and to integrate bottom-up and top-down professional learning approaches to effectively build teacher capacity – that I set out to achieve my goal, to use my research to make a difference. In life as with stories there are complicating factors and obstacles. With the drama literacy program it began by getting school principals and teachers to understand something they hadn’t come across before. The program also opened up issues in learning beyond drama and literacy.
Innovation is often hard to sell. This was the first problem or complicating action encountered in the fore story narrative. School leaders were unsure what the drama literacy program was. They didn’t have an established model of drama literacy learning on which to base their understanding. They also didn’t have a model for a teacher capacity-building program that involved theatre artists, classroom teachers and an academic mentor (me) working together with students in situ on an ongoing basis.
The drama literacy program was innovative and novel like any creative idea. Often new ideas are rejected because the crowd does not realise that a proposed idea represents a valid and advanced way of thinking (Sternberg 2003). Upsetting the status quo is perceived as annoying and irrelevant. The status quo in primary schools is that drama learning exists on the fringes and is usually treated as ‘relief face to face’. To give the classroom teacher relief time, drama is taught by a casual teacher for a lesson perhaps once a week for half a year (at best) to each class in the school. Connecting drama pedagogy to literacy development and capacity-building in classroom teachers who perceive themselves as ‘non-specialists’ in drama, and presenting professional learning as an ongoing action learning enterprise and not as a one-off workshop, challenged the status quo.
The compliance agenda and a perceived crowded curriculum meant schools seemed unable to make space for innovation. It could not be assumed that the drama literacy program as a new and creative idea would sell itself. The idea and value of the program needed to be sold. Not in terms of the monetary cost of the program for it was funded by CEO at Parramatta and later through Low SES School Communities National Partnership government funding direct to the schools. Energy had to be spent convincing school leaders to come on board. It was only through the success of the program in one willing school, that momentum began to grow in ‘selling’ the program to other schools. For the program to be taken up and developed it needs not only top-down support from the CEO as an administrative and policy system, but also willing bottom-up support from schools and teachers.
Another complicating action was caused by the program beginning to develop into something more than drama and literacy. Through observation of the program and professional conversations with participating teachers I realised ‘innovation’ in the program was more than learning through embodiment and role playing to achieve engagement and empathy in literacy. I realised that in the follow-up literacy tasks finding the ‘elements’ or the essentials to deeper learning through scaffolding and creative and critical thinking were further supporting and developing teachers in the primary classroom.
Initially the drama lessons were a link to suggested literacy exercises for the classroom teacher to undertake. The accompanying literacy tasks are now a model program in scaffolded and sequenced units in literacy through creative and critical pedagogy for deeper learning. Creative pedagogy can be described as the interrelated elements of creative teaching, teaching for creativity and creative learning (Lin 2011). Critical pedagogy (Freire 2006 [1970]) proposes that education can be socially transforming by actively engaging students to question, critique and challenge.
The classroom teachers use the creative and critical learning tasks to focus on other codes and structures in literacy representation, purpose and audience. These literacy tasks spring from the experiential, performative and narrative processes of the drama literacy lessons. Some of the schools are now exploring drama pedagogy in other curriculum areas such as ‘Human society and its environment’. The program also leads the primary classes to create performances for their school community based on the picture books or topics of study.
These complications or developments in the program all resonated with findings I had made in my PhD research. In my research I had recommended that deep and scaffolded, creative and critical learning needed to be developed in film and media arts. I had concluded that effective film learning used experiential and performative processes of learning, and narrative and performative codes of representation for an audience. I now realised what was ‘a given’ in drama pedagogy was not only relevant to film learning but also relevant to literacy learning and really all learning. What is best in drama pedagogical practice is creative and critical pedagogy that should be applied across the curriculum.
Creative and critical pedagogy however has no relevance if students cannot concentrate on learning. In some of the schools with poor literacy and numeracy skills, characterised by EAL learners, or those from low socio-economic and culturally diverse backgrounds, there is the complicating issue of students being challenged to focus and imagine in their once-a-week drama literacy lesson. Students’ staying focused is a problem across many of the learning environments in these particular schools. Drama made the problem more obvious and apparent, and has revealed deeper learning issues.
These socialisation and learning issues may be supported in part through the techniques and processes of drama pedagogy. Effective drama pedagogy can socialise learning through community and agency (Neelands & Nelson 2013); develop skills in critical thinking, listening and empathy (Chan 2013); activate oracy (O’Toole & Stinson 2013) and writing skills (Dunn, Harden & Marino 2013); motivate language learning and use (Stinson & Piazzoli 2013); and help students envision and rehearse alternative modes of action for personal and social change (Cahill 2013). The learning issues in these disadvantaged schools are complex and require a unified, sustained and multi-faceted approach towards teacher and leadership capacity-building, and systemic support.
As with the PhD research backstory, complicating actions are the problems and tension that further our understanding and knowledge. By applying the PhD research to the drama literacy program my understanding of drama, creative and critical pedagogy and deep-focused learning was given an opportunity to develop
The drama literacy program has been running for a year and the findings so far have shaped its ongoing development. The program is developed through constant reflection in-action and research with all the participants. It is not a program where one size fits all; it is a program where teachers endeavour to find complex solutions to complex problems. I hope through development, refinement and tangible data and outcomes it will gain funding to become a program that is effective in making a difference for students across a wider range of schools. It does however fly in the face of the compliance and reductionist agenda so prevalent in the education system today. The program is working to create and support literacy and the development of learning through essential scaffolds, critical and creative pedagogy, process and performative drama learning experiences and forging stronger links across the curriculum in deeper learning.
The effectiveness of the program is measured by data collected by participating teachers and responses from the students. The data are observations by the teachers of their students’ development and work samples collected. Teachers acknowledge that learning has impacted upon students’ engagement with literacy tasks and has opened up a broader understanding and development of multimodal literacy. Students who rarely shine in other classroom literacy exercises are engaged and contributing higher order thinking in discussions in the drama literacy lessons. In schools where there is stronger literacy and focused socialised learning environments, teachers observed in students an increase in collaborative skills, social confidence, creativity and critical thinking.
Average literacy students are more engaged with their writing, and formulate their writing better through the aid of the literacy scaffolds. The experience of deeper learning with one picture book or stimulus over two terms in the drama lessons and literacy tasks is encouraging a deeper engagement with literacy and with learning. The literacy tasks are challenging but students are showing more insight, imagination and skill in their writing. Embodied drama pedagogy contributes to these skills and understandings but just as important are the scaffolds and creative and critical pedagogy applied to the follow-up literacy tasks. Students’ talking and listening, and creative and critical thinking is gradually being developed in the once-a-week drama literacy lessons. In socially disadvantaged schools the students are slowly learning how to learn through drama, and learning how to focus on and engage with learning.
What is also integral to the program is the collaborative and sustained capacity-building of teachers. The program is a partnership with teachers and provides other ways to explore literacy learning. In the individual schools a mini ‘community of practice’ has been created through the relationships and mutual endeavours of teachers, visiting theatre artists, students and me as researcher and mentor. We have an opportunity for professional conversations where we share, reflect upon and develop our professional practice through feedback and research.
The challenges to develop and ‘sell’ the ideas and value of the program are surmounted when the reaction from teachers, students and school leaders is positive. In one school participating teachers in the program have ‘moved out of their comfort zone’ and are leading drama literacy in other classes across the school. The drama performances evolving from the program develop and profile arts pedagogy in the school community, curriculum and learning culture. Innovation, evolution and vibrancy in learning is happening in these schools because teachers, school and systemic leaders are willing to ‘invest in creativity’ (Sternberg 2003).
The ‘findings in action’ as the outcome is the not the end of the story. The end is the reaction to the outcome, and in essence it is the focus of this chapter and why I wrote it for State of the art.
The premise of this chapter is that research and drama pedagogy has continued to open doors to possibility. The insights gained so far through the drama literacy program and my preceding PhD research lead me to conclude they are ongoing narratives. They are not cyclic like an absurdist play by Beckett, but move forward into the future with cause and effect. They are also not a French farce with opening and closing doors going nowhere.
Doing research can empower drama teachers to develop their practice and make a difference to student and teacher learning. To dwell in the house of possibility is to take the journey of possibility but it takes courage to meet adversity, and challenges, and time for creative and critical thinking. The key to the ongoing research narrative is opportunity and collaboration. The story doesn’t exist without the dynamic and passionate teachers, researchers and visionaries who have been there on my journey of possibility.
The possibility inherent in drama pedagogy opens up a critical understanding of learning more generally. Drama pedagogy is multifaceted in its learning approach; it is embodied, enacted and social; it uses creative, critical and reflective thought; it is authentic, rich and collaborative, and combines cognitive thought with our emotions. Drama guides us to an understanding that deep and effective learning combines a creative and critical pedagogy scaffolded for the empowerment of students and teachers alike.
When defining deeper learning, The National Research Council of the National Academies (NRC) (2012) developed three domains that cluster competencies necessary for students in the 21st century: the cognitive, the intrapersonal and the interpersonal. The cognitive domain includes competencies such as critical thinking, information literacy and innovation. The intrapersonal is the ability to be flexible, show initiative, appreciate diversity and reflect on one’s own learning. The interpersonal domain contains competencies in communication, collaboration and responsibility. It all sounds like drama pedagogy. Research is showing how cognition is supported by intra and interpersonal skills, and that cognition skills increase positive interpersonal skills (NRC, 2012).
Learning experiences that promote and support the cognitive, the intra- and interpersonal domains are more likely to achieve deeper learning, that is learning that is transferable from one situation and another. These are skills needed for the 21st century. Drama pedagogy has demonstrated to me how the skills and knowledge in the cognitive, intra- and interpersonal domains can be confluent in the classroom.
Drama pedagogy is illustrative of what all learning processes should aim to be: scaffolded and deep, creative and critical, collaborative and affirming. The ‘drama literacy program’ I am working on may soon lose its nomenclature. In reality, the program is becoming ‘creative and critical pedagogy for deeper learning’. This is the power of research and drama pedagogy in the ongoing narrative of students and teachers learning. A school principal has asked me what the drama literacy program can do about numeracy. Another door opens . . .
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1 Branigan in Narrative comprehension and film (1992) explains that a schema is a type of mental structure. A narrative schema is only one of many types of schema that can be applied to data to solve everyday problems. He asserts that nearly all researchers agree that the narrative schema has the following format: 1. introduction of setting and characters; 2. explanations of a state of affairs; 3. intitating event; 4. emotional response or statement of a goal by the protagonist; 5. complicating actions; 6. outcome; 7. reactions to the outcome.
2 Multimodal describes texts that combine two or more semiotic systems such as linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial. Multimodal texts are delivered through different media; they may be live, paper, or digital.
3 Critical literacy is to examine texts as a sociological analysis. Originating from the work of Freire (2000 [1970]) critical literacy is to decode and construct language by analysing the relationships between texts, language, social groups and social practices.