speaking and listening through drama

Name               : Masnawati

NIM                : 171230082/TBI 6C

Subject            : Micro Teaching

Chapter One: How to Approach Speaking and Listening Through Drama

Why Use Teacher in Role?

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 . Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. However, it is our experience that when a teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children, so that there are less control problems because they become engaged.

Many times we have watched trainee teachers with a class of children struggling to get attention when giving instructions in traditional teacher mode. Yet, as soon as they move into role, they obtain that attention more effectively. For example, a trainee was talking out of role to a class to explain that they were about to meet a girl who was having trouble with her father and needed their help . She was talking over them and trying to teach without getting their full attention.

Then she explained that they could ask questions of one of the roles from the story and that she was going to become that role when she sat down. She picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as the role signifier. When she sat down as Hermia, they were focused entirely on her and were listening very closely, putting hands up to ask questions and taking turns in a very orderly way. The trainee was not doing anything different a part from using role and committing to it very strongly.

The trainee was using the simplest form of TiR, hot-seating the role, where the class meets the role sitting in front of them and can ask questions. You are not effective as a teacher if you do not at some point engage fully with the drama yourself by using TiR. Remaining as teacher, intervening as teacher, side-coaching, structuring the drama from the outside, and/or sending the class off in groups to create their own drama must at best restrict and at worst negate any opportunity for the teacher to teach effectively. It is far more effective for the teacher to engage with the drama form as artist and be part of the creative act.

It is very useful in a Literacy lesson for the teacher to use roles from the text. The very fact that you take on a key role can provide important ways of defining and exploring the text. Let us look more closely at the Hermia role. Here is another way that the role could be introduced.

Sit on the seat with a piece of paper in your hand reading it silently to yourself. In the first it is the note from her father, Egeus, outlining her situation . In the second instance it is a letter from Demetrius declaring his love for her and her blindness in seeking Lysander’s love. This extreme social expectation and law makes the fiction like their reality but also different from it, something that helps drama create a useful distance, which helps the class reflect on their own beliefs and look at the drama world in a more balanced and thoughtful way.

All of this introduces an interesting set of issues which children at this age are beginning to experience and understand about their relationship with parents and about their relationship with the opposite sex. Even if the main aim of the work is not a study of the Shakespeare play, the role can be used to open up very 12 How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama important areas for personal and social education that the children can identify with. It will motivate them and produce some very strong engagement with Hermia and later, if you introduce them, Egeus, and Demetrius and Lysander, the rivals for her love. For another example of the simple use of hot-seating see the Tim the Ostler section in ‘The Highwayman’ drama.

This can show important elements of how the children see the text, what their comprehension of it is. It provides a more stimulating way of approaching comprehension than questions from the teacher.

Teacher as Storyteller.

            The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. The pupil’s role will be dominated by listening and this will be interlaced with questioning, responding and interpreting the meaning and sense of the fiction. The teacher’s role will be to communicate the text in a lively and interesting manner, holding their attention and engaging their imagination.

In making judgements about the quality of this method of teaching, the critical questions will be around whether the content of the story interests the class and holds their attention, whether the delivery of the teacher, i. The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach. 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.

However, if the pupils are locked into the original narrative it is problematic. It is the negotiable and dynamic elements of the relationship between drama and narrative that liberate the pupils and the teacher from merely retelling the known story. A class can take part in a drama where all of them know the story, where none of them knows the story, or a mixture of both. As long as some fundamental planning strategies are observed, knowledge of the story is not a barrier to participation.

2 A willingness to move away from the fixed narrative to an exploration of the narrative. The use of drama strategies to explore events and their consequences, to look at alternatives and test them. 3 If narrative consists of roles, fictional contexts, the use of symbols and events then the teacher needs to hold some of those elements true and consistent with the story so far. For example, roles and contexts may already be decided but new events may be introduced, the delivery of a letter, for example.

How the class respond to this event is not known and it is at this point that they become the writers of the narrative. Let us illustrate these ideas with an example from ‘The Pied Piper’ drama . The Mayor has got the Pied Piper to clear the town of the rats but has broken his promise of payment and in revenge the children have been led up the mountain. You put the pupils in role as the townspeople making their way up the mountain when they meet TiR as a child coming in the opposite direction.

This provides the background to a simple hot-seating of the child. Ask the pupils what would they like to ask the boy. They certainly will ask him why he is coming down the mountain and what has happened to the other children. Preparation for the role 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. This not only provides the teacher with some security in knowing what is going to be asked, at least initially, but also allows some minutes to refine the planning, so that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions. The questions will, to a certain extent, be predictable because they are largely generated by the circumstances of the drama so far and the role the class has taken, which will be that of anxious parents. Before the drama session, decide what attitude you are going to take when questioned by the class.

You are going to be telling them a story but it will be as if they had just met you and it will not be the voice of the narrator re-telling someone else’s story but in the present tense as if it is happening now. This interactive storytelling has an immediacy and urgency and is working at a different level of discourse from the read story, and yet it is still storytelling. It is essential that the teacher stops and comes out of role and reflects with the class on what has been said, but that is also true of the more traditional mode of reading from a book. They are questioning from within the story, as if they were there.

Next we consider this key skill of moving in and out of role. Teaching from within Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it We are describing using role as ‘teaching from within’ because the teacher enters the drama world, but it is very important to step out of the fiction often and not let it run away with itself. 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 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.

Let us look at an example to see how you as the teacher have the opportunity to negotiate how the role behaves with the class. This also shows a step from hot-seating to role-playing as a demonstration with a small group. As with all of this section of the book, we are using an example from drama based upon ‘The Pied Piper’ . You set up going into role with one of the groups that you know will handle the situation well.

The whole class is involved in defining the role and can use their imaginations, their ‘drama eyes’, to help create the appropriate appearance/behaviour and their own understanding. This is in contrast to an actor who has to use acting skills to create the role in its entirety for an audience. We are making a distinction between role behaviour and acting. Both depend on appropriate signing, but whereas the actor must give the non-participant audience the bulk of the signing, a teacher using role can get away with a committed minimum.

The class will see the Rat-catcher as overworked and probably needing help to put his/her case to the Mayor. When you have discussed enough you can move back into role and take their stories about the problems the rats are causing. Give the groups time to prepare their evidence before you go into role to receive the input. The Rat-catcher ‘writes down’ the points and then asks the class/family if they could come to the Mayor to help put the case.

The person playing the role can then simply walk forward adopting a serious tone, holding the blanket, without having to pretend any of those outward signs an actor would have to portray if it were a play being performed to an audience. When the drama is stopped they can describe, recap, interpret, think through, consider next moves and understand what is the significance of their work. It is very important to get the participants to look at and interpret what is going on, frequently by stepping out of the drama. Depth in drama depends on the very clear and regular use of OoR negotiation so that the awareness of the co-existence of two worlds is effective at all times.

Children commit to the fictional world of the drama but need always to be aware that it is fiction and to step outside it often to look at what they are doing. Contrary to some opinions, depth is not dependent upon maintaining the fiction all of the time, nor does it depend upon the children losing themselves in the drama. In fact, if the latter takes over, children will get an experience but not understanding. 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.

           

The requirements of working in role

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. In order to make the TiR most effective, we need to look at educational drama from the point of view of the ‘audience’, an audience who in this instance are participants at the same time. This will help us shape up the TiR elements particularly according to how the audience is seeing things. Here are two responses to considering the ‘audience’ position.

In drama the pupils are making sense actively, knowing their meaning can be acted upon. You’re asking a very complex thing of the group of children. They have to switch from operating as audience to participant and back again often and suddenly. An example of responding to the critical incident occurred in a session on the drama based on Macbeth.

When considering the way of showing the overthrow of Macbeth, one of the class of 10-year-olds said, I want to sit on the throne and stop him sitting on it. The teacher took this up and put two of the servants on the thrones of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, with the rest of the servants gathered behind the thrones. He then set up the entry of Macbeth to the throne room. TiR as Macbeth entered slowly and stopped as though taking in the situation.

The class cheered as Macbeth bowed his head and the two pupils stood up, triumphant. 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. In setting up the drama we are doing what Heathcote calls ‘trapping within a life situation’ . The result of constructing the situation thus is that they can then discover what it all means. The key is how children are given information.

They can be handed it on a plate or they can be given opportunities to uncover/discover/be surprised by information. In this last case there is much more involvement and ownership, especially if they have to work to get the information from someone who is reluctant to give it , someone who only gives clues as to what is really going on , someone who does not realise the importance of the information . Hence the skill of the teacher lies in the art of the unexpected. An example of this occurs in ‘The Governor’s Child’, a drama based on Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The class are in role as a village community helping a woman with a baby, who, unbeknownst to them, has fled a revolution. Responding to your class The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responses 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.

If a teacher runs drama without using TiR there tends to be a lack of dialectic because the teacher produces the structure that the children engage with, but the teacher can only manipulate it from outside that structure.

We are making the distinction here between the aesthetic actor and the social actor. The aesthetic actor will have learned skills related to voice, gesture and physicality that are not required by the teacher using TiR. The teacher in role will already have the skills of the social actor that are used in everyday life.

The class will use their creativity to see the role in a particular way that has been indicated as long as it has been properly signed to them. Whereas the actor defines for the audience the message of the play within the circumstances of the plot, the teacher uses signing as an indication to the audience to join in the encounter, effecting and affecting the enterprise. As a result of this difference, an actor, using lines written as a script, behaves in a very different way from a teacher improvising within a planned structure, who has to take account of what the class will say in response to the moves he or she makes. The audience in the theatre waits for something to happen, but the participants in a drama session make it happen.

As the class feed back their responses and make possible development of the role’s importance the teacher must respond appropriately and therein lies the skill of the ‘subtle tongue’ and the possibility for authentic dialogue. The teacher must respond to these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the role. The class must be made to work to achieve the aim they have been given in the drama. Let us look at handling an extended example from the ‘Pied Piper’ drama when the class as the villagers finally arrive at the mountain.

At this point in the drama they have accepted the main aim as the villagers of getting their children back from the Piper. Mark the space in front of the class, where the children have been said to have entered the mountain, with two chairs. OoR ask them to describe the mountain in front of them and whether there are any clues as to whether the children have, in fact, gone into the mountain as they have been told. This will give them more ownership of setting the current context.

When they are not aware of you, slip behind them and when they are carrying out their task ‘appear’ behind them as the Piper. This simple, theatrical surprise engages the children even more. Consider how you 20 How to Approach Speaking and Listening through Drama deliver the opening lines. The dialogue that transpires here is critical to the outcome of the drama.

The burden placed on the class at this point is to offer some way of showing their thankfulness, their sincerity and their trustworthiness to the Piper so that he will accept the apology and return the children. Accept any imaginative offer as long as it is not materialistic but is related more to establishing a human relationship of trust and honour with the Piper. A different learning area would be to have a Piper who is too full of himself, someone who needs to be taught a lesson about justice and fairness. The drama is set up as a framework and is not finished in the same way as a play written by a playwright.

In fact, the secret of educational drama is to have the framework, even a tight framework, such that the class feel they have some ownership because of the parts that they are developing. A drama technique can be used to help them define possible reasons. The TiR is not exclusively the teacher’s creation. The ‘play’ we are creating is a joint enterprise and, when the beginnings of a role are in place and we have established the givens, the class will know what we are creating and why and can develop that role by the way they respond and the way they see it. TiR creates an ownership dynamic that is attractive to the participants.

In drama this power relationship is made overt. We must start from the point of view that if the class do not want the drama to work then it will not. The nature of drama makes the interest level a dynamic and flexible dimension. The pupils will, to a certain extent, define a level of interest in a drama by focusing upon the issues that interest them.

This may be a tacit agreement, it may depend upon many factors but in it the teacher is in charge and there are certain rights and privileges attached to your role. Of course, in drama we have the possibility of shifting the power when we are inside the fiction because we may choose a role that has low status and has little power. There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama. The authority role This is a role like the Duke in the ‘The Dream’ drama, who is presented with Egeus’s problem and has to rule on it.

This figure is usually in charge of an organisation and has the class in a role subordinate to him/her. The role is fair, applies rules and governs properly, but often does not know the full facts and issues and needs the class to investigate and enlighten him/her. The opposer role This is a role that is often in authority but dangerous to and/or creating a problem for another role and, by extension, the class. Egeus is an opposer role who is against Hermia and therefore in opposition to the class role, as they take her side against his dictatorial treatment of her.

The opposer role has to be used carefully because the response to it can be difficult to handle if it becomes too strong. The intermediate role This is often a messenger or go-between, as the servant role used in the ‘The Dream’ drama. This role is then caught between opposing sides and can appeal to the empathy in the class to help them out of the predicament. The needing help role This is a role like Hermia, who is in need of help to fight the injustice of her father’s decision.

This role, like the servant described above, is the best way to get empathy from a class and most raises the status of the class, putting them in a position of responsibility and thus generating interest and learning possibility because the teacher is the one who does not know what to do for once.

We do not have this sort of role in our ‘The Dream’ drama but the Steward in the ‘Macbeth’ drama is like this. He faces the same problem and danger as the other servants represented by the class. The three low status roles present more possibilities for the pupils’ learning because the teacher–pupil power relationship is shifted and they have a semblance of power. We say ‘semblance’ because the pupil power only lies within the fiction and, as always, the teacher is running the class and can come out of role at any time to assume control.

In a fiction what seems to be the truth is as powerful as if it were real. Related to issues of power and role is the issue of power and control in the classroom. Let us look at what might appear to be a potential recipe for chaos in the planning of a lesson on ‘The Pied Piper’ and analyse how it is handled and chaos avoided. The class have been told they must confront the Mayor.
First you must tell me how big the doors into his parlour are. The distance between the chairs indicates how big the class want the door to be. This is the desk and chair in which the Mayor sits. Tell me about the desk.

Use your ‘drama eyes’ and tell me what you see. The class offer suggestions, building the image of the desk. They then do the same with the Mayor’s chair. The townspeople are marching down to the Mayor’s parlour.

Suggestions are made and those that have a rhythm and meter and words that will maintain the seriousness of the event are chosen. The chant is rehearsed and when it feels and sounds like an angry crowd it is ready to be used. So, we have a parlour, we have an angry crowd and a chant. We need someone to give a signal to stop the chant otherwise we won’t hear the knock on the door and the conversation with the Mayor.

Finally we need one person to be spokesperson to say to the Mayor what you all think. I am going to take the role of the Mayor and I am going wear my chain of office. When I take it off I will be your teacher again and we can talk about what has happened. Get rid of the mayor.

The mayor is acquiescent, compliant and biddable. The key issue in this example is the way in which a potentially chaotic event in the drama is managed by careful structuring and rehearsing before it takes place. In this way, the lesson remains under control and the learning possibilities are maintained while at the same time the class has a carefully managed experience of the confrontation.If you consider the points, rules and suggestions we have offered, you can construct very influential roles for all sorts of teaching.