As promised in my first post about drama and education, I have given the way we learn some more thought. I also expressed the hope that I soon could use drama as a practice for participatory and engaged learning. So I did, and I can conclude from my own experience now that using drama and creativity is an immense resource for learning.

The most important thing is that drama or creativity connects our minds with our bodies, and then connects us with the world we live in. Learning takes place because we have physical experiences, because we identify and explore the subject to be learned by actually doing it or acting it out (see if you want to learn more about this for instance “Out of our minds, learning to be creative” by Ken Robinson (2001)).

My personal experience is founded on research too. Cross-national European research (DICE 2010) shows that using drama in education increases our communication skills, interpersonal, inter-cultural, social and civic competences, our entrepreneurship and our capacity in cultural expression. These competences are also known as five of the eight Lisbon Key Competences in Education. Moreover, the practice of educational theatre and drama on itself (not necessarily as a means to learning) helps us to understand “what it is to be human” in general (EU DICE report: 2010: 13).

Learning and teaching: how do your participants learn?

In the past 10 weeks of this first term the same question has been asked over and over again in our Pedagogies course: How do you make sure the participants of your workshop, or your students, once they have left the room, have learned? And how do you, as a facilitator, know?

Last Thursday and Friday we shared a Drama Workshop, a ‘demonstration’ Drama Workshop that was planned and delivered by ourselves, with our peers as participants and our tutors as assessors. This was the practical assessment of the terms course on Pedagogy. My workshop was aimed at increasing different skills (like communication, expression and interaction) through drama. My target group was young children with special needs.

My classmates choose different and rather interesting methodologies and target groups, like process drama to prevent domestic violence in relationships or physical theatre to teach children at primary schools about science and in particular about the subject of electricity. Some choose the different techniques from Theatre of the Oppressed, which I have not yet explained on this website, but will definitely write about in the coming year.

During this term, my classmates and I found ourselves in a double learning loop. We were asked to reflect on our own style of teaching or facilitating, while we as students ourselves at the same time were in the middle of learning how to teach and to facilitate. Here we were constantly asked to reflect on our learning path, in order to make it a powerful one.

Examples of the use of drama to realise more engaged learning

Of course we were not alone on this path. Apart from Central’s excellent Applied Theatre staff there were many guest lectures and workshops. Too much to mention them all, but some highlights:

• Siân Morrisson from Bloom Productions explained much more about the “use of drama as a tool to develop critical and creative thinking” (see their website on Drama in the Creative Curriculum). After her workshop about Comedia Dell’Arte and teaching drama, Siân invited us to a drama class in a statutory school in North London. Here, we worked together with adolescents aged 16-18 and their teacher in a drama class. Afterwards we discussed the class and its outcomes. Most importantly, she taught me to think of the use of “skills based drama” as a means to teach essential skills to students.

• Theater group “Dante or Die” impressed me with their physical theatre workshop on medication and illness, inspired by the exposition in the British Museum Cradle to Grave – showing a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs -. They aim this workshop at intergenerational target-groups, meaning young and old people explore together what it means to be sick, to have injuries and to take medications. This workshop showed me how important it is to physically experience a situation, instead of rational analyzing (“I have a headache so I take a pain killer”). Moreover, their workshop makes you think off the medicine you take, your personal sickness history and looks at health and sickness from an integral perspective, rather than distancing the mind from the body.

• Tony Coult from Rivercross brought Edward Bond to my attention. Tony is a famous applied drama practitioner with an impressive CV. Rivercross is one of his current projects, where he works on an original TV soap-drama series devised and created by young people with mental health issues, hospitalized in sometimes emergency situations in a hospital here in London.
  Edward Bond is a rather controversial theatre play writer, who always emphasizes the importance of drama and imagination. Our sence of justice, according to Bond, comes from our imagination, since imagination is our ability to create. He takes it a step further when he states that to imagine something new is the essential evolutionary tool of human beings. Drama to Bond, and the use of our imagination in particular, is at the centre of everything we do. Tony paraphrased this importance of imagination in learning in his memo to us,

“The way we learn is by reaching up to what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, what we find difficult, or sometimes scary. In that effort, we inevitably have to engage the Imagination, that evolutionary tool at the heart of being human.”

• We’ve been invited to different Theatre in Education performances. One of those was the Raft of the Medusa by the theatre-company Blah blah blah. This participatory performance showed how you can bring history alive in the classroom. We were invited on the journey of the raft of the Medusa (the Medusa ran aground at the coast of Mauritania, were 15 people of the 147 people on the raft survived and those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness, later portrayed by the French painter Théodore Géricault). Going on this journey together with Blahs actors, made me physically experience how history took place in the Gulf of Mauritania, all the way back in July 1816. A lesson in history I will not soon forget!

To conclude: what have I learned from this Pedagogies unit?

Closing the term, closing the year, closing ‘London Life part 1’. What have I learned? There are three main conclusions I will always think of in all my future classes or workshops. I will from now on always try:

1. to focus on the importance of knowing your students in advance: who are they? What’s their background? What do they bring to the class?
2. to think of the objectives of working with them and to define these: what do you want them to learn? How do you know they’ve learned that?
3. to think of different ways people learn and to include these in a workshop. Here it is important to offer different learning styles, and include for instance creative, evaluative, analytic, applied, understanding and remembering learning styles (this order of learning styles comes from Siân Morrisson, but you can also look at the multiple intelligence theory by Howard Gardner (1983)). We all have different ways to understand and internalize information. A good drama teacher accommodates these different learning styles by offering different activities.

My lessons described above are learned for me for life, and I’m happy to share them with you. If you feel like anything missing or would like to add something, please do leave a suggestion or a comment below.

Let’s close for now with an old Chinese Proverb:

“Tell me and I’ll forget, Show me and I may remember, Involve me and I’ll understand.”

Enjoy your Christmas and have a wonderful 2011!

References:

• Coult, T. (2010) Memo: to the Applied Drama students from last Friday, nov.19. Unpublished memo.
• Gardner, H. (1983) Multiple Intelligences: The Theory In Practice. New York: Basic Books.
• Drama Improves Lisbon Key Competences (DICE) (2010). The Dice has been cast. A DICE resource research findings and recommendations on educational theatre and drama.
• Hall, S. (1992) ‘The question of cultural Identity’, In: Modernity and its Future (Understanding Modern Societies). Cambridge, Open University.
• Robinson, K. (2001) Out of our minds, learning to be creative. West-Sussex: Capstone Publishing Limited.

Photos by Suzan Leydesdorff and rubberpaw and Oscar D. on Flickr.