How To Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama
The most important resource you have as a teacher when using drama is yourself. Learning demands intervention from the teacher to structure, direct and influence the learning of the pupils. One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role (TiR). This chapter will set out approaches to TiR and give examples of how it works. TiR creates a particular context and can raise the level of commitment and the meaning-making. It can ‘feel real’ even though it is not. It is very useful in a Literacy lesson for the teacher to use roles from the text. The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently. The relationship between story and drama in education is a complex and dynamic one. It means a known narrative can still be used, the knowledge of the narrative is not a barrier to its usage. In preparing to be this kind of storyteller the teacher must have made particular decisions about this child. Begin by asking the class out of role what they want to ask the child and the order of those questions. When using TiR, the teacher is operating as a manager as well as participant and must spend as much time stopping the drama and moving out of role (OoR) to reflect on what is happening and give the pupils a chance to think through what they know and what they want to do. This OoR working is as important as the role itself. It manages the role and therefore the drama; it manages the risk, establishes where the class is and helps pupils believe in the drama. It provides time and space for the teacher to assess and re-assess the learning possibilities. OoR is very important as a way of negotiating the intent and meaning of the role and is the way the teacher can best control and manage learning.In effective drama, children can actually feel the ‘as if’ world as real at certain points. The teacher must make sure that if the drama does engage in that way, the pupils know it is a fiction at all times, especially by stopping and coming out of role frequently. The relationship developed by the teacher with the class is dependent on the movement between these two worlds. TiR changes the nature of the contract entered into by the class.
The requirements of working in role : The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the work and develop it. One of the key issues is seeing them as co-creators. If sufficient ownership is not given to the class, it is possible to turn them into the wrong sort of audience, giving them too passive a role. When they are given opportunities to influence the outcomes, to make decisions, the drama becomes partly theirs.
The teacher’s function is to provide challenge and stimulus, to give problems and issues for the class to have to deal with. The drama is developed through a set of activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate role.We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that comfort productively. The class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method. This is another reason that the class have more ownership.This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach.
There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama : The authority role, The opposer role, The intermediate role, The needing help role, The ordinary person.
The frame of a drama : We are using the idea of a frame as a way of seeing key decisions in planning.
The ingredients of planning : Learning objectives :The learning can be in any of five areas:Language Development; Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal ; Content; art form drama ; thinking skills. Strong material, Roles for the teacher, Roles for the pupils.
Building context : Usually having one main location helps the drama to be properly focused.
Building belief :choosing worthwhile material, having the right ‘hook’ at the beginning,planning in times to contract and re-contract with the group, choosing the right strategie.
The drama conventions, strategies and techniques: create context, build belief in the roles and therefore the drama, focus learning, help explore a situation and deepen understanding, help to reflect on the meaning of the event.Planning for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind brought in to develop its full potential.
Types of drama : There are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved: ‘living through drama’, where the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and ‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or strategies and where chronology is more broken. The more you plan the more you will sense the needs of the group and the style that suits.
What about ending drama? The class must always go away feeling they have achieved something. They need to have solved the problem.Avoid that easy ending. We must be satisfied ourselves with the feel of the drama at all times; it must feel authentic. It is better for the class to have struggled with the issues and to see possible futures without the problem role necessarily changing or the dangers being completely avoided.
What is speaking and listening? Speaking and listening is the most important communication form that human beings use. Really effective oracy, developmental speaking and listening, will help pupils build their language, their understanding, their ability to handle their own world, making sense of it and who they are in it.
Dialogic teaching: This is one of the most interesting, potentially powerful and new concepts being promoted in educational circles in the UK. Too often talk is this ‘recitation’ (Alexander, 2005, p. 34) where teacher speaks most and pupils listen or only answer questions. The resulting classroom games include: Guessing what is in the teacher’s head, linguistic tennis, point scoring. Alexander promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom. He identifies its key elements as: Collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, purposeful.
Drama certainly demands these as well. One of the key changes that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. When the teacher uses role herself she is able to dialogue in a very different way with the pupils; she leaves teacher talk behind.So the teacher is able to talk and interact with the pupils in many ways and with many purposes. Drama is the creation of meanings in action and pupils have to struggle all the time to make sense of what is going on around them so that they can engage with it. In drama we can get new levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the problem-solving of the drama itself. The focus of the problem or dilemma that the pupils face embodies the nature of the language. The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe. There is a perception of drama dealing with issues in a safe way because it uses fictional contexts. We must remember that pupils have no choice about attending school; they are required to attend, whether they want to or not and there are consequences for pupils and parents if they do not do so. The risk of making mistakes does not automatically vanish because we are using role-play.
Having a voice in society: If we return to the central idea in drama of creating an ‘as if’ world we see that it is a world that is, at least in part, created by the participants through their ideas. As we have seen in the planning section, good planning creates gaps and spaces for pupils to input their ideas.
Having no voice in society: We cannot leave our real-world selves outside the door of the classroom and consequently there is a dynamic relationship between how we think and behave in the fictional world of the drama and how we think and behave in the real world.In the drama lesson the individual’s responses have three components: What we think (thoughts), What we say (utterances), What we do (actions).
The relationship between inclusion and citizenship:The PSHE and Citizenship framework comprises four interrelated strands which support children’s personal and social development. The strands are: developing confidence and responsibility and making the most of their abilities; preparing to play an active role as citizens; developing a healthy, safer lifestyle; and developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people.There are limited opportunities for pupils in the primary school, even the older pupils, to directly participate in the world. They can of course be involved in the school itself and learn about responsibility by taking part in school activities and institutions like the school council.
Here is a list of the issues and ideas that were identified as present in this drama by a group of teacher trainees when they examined it: Giving the children something they can relate to. They have their say – they have ownership of the key decisions in the drama. The villagers assert their point of view. Negotiation – what we want/what he demands. Moral and citizenship issues – implications for RE: Caring; Trusting; Respect for privacy; Acceptance of a stranger; Putting yourself at risk for others; Judging others; Lies – excused by the pressure of the context; Protection of the community.
Empathy – the way different people feel – a fictional representation of: The feeling of being tricked by the woman as she did not tell them the truth when she came to the village; That is set against empathy for the woman in her love to protect the child;Dealing with the soldier and outwitting him.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, suggests that ‘empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion’
The components of empathy : 1. Cognitive component: Understanding the other’s feelings and the ability to take their perspective’. 2. The second element to empathy is the affective component. This is an observer’s appropriate emotional response to another person’s emotional state.
An example of structuring drama for empathetic response : Building the cognitive component, Framing the affective component – thought-tracking and dealing with the Workhouse Master, The cognitive stage, The affective stage,
The role of the pupils : While placing the pupils in a positive, problem-solving and high status role (government commissioners) gives them the power to make judgements about people’s circumstances from a positive point of view, it is also possible to generate empathy for the dispossessed.
The role of the teacher : The modelling by the teacher of roles who are unable to empathise enables the pupils to witness their shortcomings and therefore have a sense of how disabled they are without these skills. All this sounds very manipulative and it is! We are deliberately structuring drama to engage with issues of empathy and our learning objective is that in this process pupils will ‘learn ways to identify and label these feelings … they will have opportunities to develop empathy and work out what others are feeling’.
Balancing the tensions – stories and history : The first rule must be complete honesty with the class about what we know, what we think we know and what we need to find out. We need to be clear about our learning objectives, about what we are trying to teach.In using drama we are using a dense form of teaching, because the currency of drama is language, listening and speaking, and we have a cross-curricular approach that will touch upon learning objectives from several areas of the curriculum.
In order to help the class to look at the photograph sensitively we give them a role that carries both power and professional distance. The discussion of the role of the historian is a preparation for this. This imposition of high status and expertise is designed to engage the class with a sense of responsibility for the task ahead and leads into the introduction of the first piece of historical evidence, the photograph.
the instructions and constraints that help the task to work for both teacher and pupils: The teacher begins to narrate, The teacher continues – this time OoR, Teacher as a narrator.
Drama teaches about history by creating carefully researched historical contexts and roles. These roles will generate the need to do something about a particular issue, however this debate about the particular is really a means to make sense of larger more general themes.
The requirements of working in role : The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the work and develop it. One of the key issues is seeing them as co-creators. If sufficient ownership is not given to the class, it is possible to turn them into the wrong sort of audience, giving them too passive a role. When they are given opportunities to influence the outcomes, to make decisions, the drama becomes partly theirs.
The teacher’s function is to provide challenge and stimulus, to give problems and issues for the class to have to deal with. The drama is developed through a set of activities that build the class role, which is usually a corporate role.We have to help them into the drama, making them comfortable, and then disturb that comfort productively. The class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method. This is another reason that the class have more ownership.This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach.
There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama : The authority role, The opposer role, The intermediate role, The needing help role, The ordinary person.
The frame of a drama : We are using the idea of a frame as a way of seeing key decisions in planning.
The ingredients of planning : Learning objectives :The learning can be in any of five areas:Language Development; Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal ; Content; art form drama ; thinking skills. Strong material, Roles for the teacher, Roles for the pupils.
Building context : Usually having one main location helps the drama to be properly focused.
Building belief :choosing worthwhile material, having the right ‘hook’ at the beginning,planning in times to contract and re-contract with the group, choosing the right strategie.
The drama conventions, strategies and techniques: create context, build belief in the roles and therefore the drama, focus learning, help explore a situation and deepen understanding, help to reflect on the meaning of the event.Planning for true learning is a social activity and needs to have more than one mind brought in to develop its full potential.
Types of drama : There are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved: ‘living through drama’, where the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and ‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or strategies and where chronology is more broken. The more you plan the more you will sense the needs of the group and the style that suits.
What about ending drama? The class must always go away feeling they have achieved something. They need to have solved the problem.Avoid that easy ending. We must be satisfied ourselves with the feel of the drama at all times; it must feel authentic. It is better for the class to have struggled with the issues and to see possible futures without the problem role necessarily changing or the dangers being completely avoided.
What is speaking and listening? Speaking and listening is the most important communication form that human beings use. Really effective oracy, developmental speaking and listening, will help pupils build their language, their understanding, their ability to handle their own world, making sense of it and who they are in it.
Dialogic teaching: This is one of the most interesting, potentially powerful and new concepts being promoted in educational circles in the UK. Too often talk is this ‘recitation’ (Alexander, 2005, p. 34) where teacher speaks most and pupils listen or only answer questions. The resulting classroom games include: Guessing what is in the teacher’s head, linguistic tennis, point scoring. Alexander promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom. He identifies its key elements as: Collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, purposeful.
Drama certainly demands these as well. One of the key changes that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. When the teacher uses role herself she is able to dialogue in a very different way with the pupils; she leaves teacher talk behind.So the teacher is able to talk and interact with the pupils in many ways and with many purposes. Drama is the creation of meanings in action and pupils have to struggle all the time to make sense of what is going on around them so that they can engage with it. In drama we can get new levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the problem-solving of the drama itself. The focus of the problem or dilemma that the pupils face embodies the nature of the language. The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe. There is a perception of drama dealing with issues in a safe way because it uses fictional contexts. We must remember that pupils have no choice about attending school; they are required to attend, whether they want to or not and there are consequences for pupils and parents if they do not do so. The risk of making mistakes does not automatically vanish because we are using role-play.
Having a voice in society: If we return to the central idea in drama of creating an ‘as if’ world we see that it is a world that is, at least in part, created by the participants through their ideas. As we have seen in the planning section, good planning creates gaps and spaces for pupils to input their ideas.
Having no voice in society: We cannot leave our real-world selves outside the door of the classroom and consequently there is a dynamic relationship between how we think and behave in the fictional world of the drama and how we think and behave in the real world.In the drama lesson the individual’s responses have three components: What we think (thoughts), What we say (utterances), What we do (actions).
The relationship between inclusion and citizenship:The PSHE and Citizenship framework comprises four interrelated strands which support children’s personal and social development. The strands are: developing confidence and responsibility and making the most of their abilities; preparing to play an active role as citizens; developing a healthy, safer lifestyle; and developing good relationships and respecting the differences between people.There are limited opportunities for pupils in the primary school, even the older pupils, to directly participate in the world. They can of course be involved in the school itself and learn about responsibility by taking part in school activities and institutions like the school council.
Here is a list of the issues and ideas that were identified as present in this drama by a group of teacher trainees when they examined it: Giving the children something they can relate to. They have their say – they have ownership of the key decisions in the drama. The villagers assert their point of view. Negotiation – what we want/what he demands. Moral and citizenship issues – implications for RE: Caring; Trusting; Respect for privacy; Acceptance of a stranger; Putting yourself at risk for others; Judging others; Lies – excused by the pressure of the context; Protection of the community.
Empathy – the way different people feel – a fictional representation of: The feeling of being tricked by the woman as she did not tell them the truth when she came to the village; That is set against empathy for the woman in her love to protect the child;Dealing with the soldier and outwitting him.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, suggests that ‘empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion’
The components of empathy : 1. Cognitive component: Understanding the other’s feelings and the ability to take their perspective’. 2. The second element to empathy is the affective component. This is an observer’s appropriate emotional response to another person’s emotional state.
An example of structuring drama for empathetic response : Building the cognitive component, Framing the affective component – thought-tracking and dealing with the Workhouse Master, The cognitive stage, The affective stage,
The role of the pupils : While placing the pupils in a positive, problem-solving and high status role (government commissioners) gives them the power to make judgements about people’s circumstances from a positive point of view, it is also possible to generate empathy for the dispossessed.
The role of the teacher : The modelling by the teacher of roles who are unable to empathise enables the pupils to witness their shortcomings and therefore have a sense of how disabled they are without these skills. All this sounds very manipulative and it is! We are deliberately structuring drama to engage with issues of empathy and our learning objective is that in this process pupils will ‘learn ways to identify and label these feelings … they will have opportunities to develop empathy and work out what others are feeling’.
Balancing the tensions – stories and history : The first rule must be complete honesty with the class about what we know, what we think we know and what we need to find out. We need to be clear about our learning objectives, about what we are trying to teach.In using drama we are using a dense form of teaching, because the currency of drama is language, listening and speaking, and we have a cross-curricular approach that will touch upon learning objectives from several areas of the curriculum.
In order to help the class to look at the photograph sensitively we give them a role that carries both power and professional distance. The discussion of the role of the historian is a preparation for this. This imposition of high status and expertise is designed to engage the class with a sense of responsibility for the task ahead and leads into the introduction of the first piece of historical evidence, the photograph.
the instructions and constraints that help the task to work for both teacher and pupils: The teacher begins to narrate, The teacher continues – this time OoR, Teacher as a narrator.
Drama teaches about history by creating carefully researched historical contexts and roles. These roles will generate the need to do something about a particular issue, however this debate about the particular is really a means to make sense of larger more general themes.
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