RESUME " Speaking and Listening Through Drama "

Aisyah Rahmah

171230145 / TBI 6E

How To Approach Speaking and Listening Through Drama

(Chapter 1 )

v  How to Begin with Teacher in Role

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. 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. The trainee was using the simplest form of it, hot-seating the role, where the class meets the role sitting in front of them and can ask questions. it creates a particular context and can raise the level of commitment and the meaning-making.

You are not effective as a teacher if you do not at some point engage fully with the drama yourself by using it. Remaining as a 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 an 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.

v  Teacher as a storyteller

The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognize, 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 judgments 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. 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.

v  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.

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.

v  Moving in and out of role – managing the drama and reflecting on it

We are describing using the role of ‘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 it, 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.

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 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. it changes the nature of the contract entered into by the class. What is that contract? It is ‘the imaginative contract’:

a)      It is not, I will teach you by telling you what you need to know – the style of much classroom teaching.

b)       It is not, I will present a play before you and you will watch me, as the actor contracts with an audience.

c)      It is not, Listen and I will tell you a story. It is my story and you must not interrupt it.

d)      It is, You will become a playmaker, an author with me, and will be a part of the story that I start and we create together. The result is to make the creative community.

v  The requirements of working in a role

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. In drama, the pupils are making sense actively, knowing their meaning can be acted upon. You’re asking a very complex thing about the group of children. They have to switch from operating as an audience to the participant and back again often and suddenly. This is why this sort of whole group drama has so much learning potential. It involves the ‘audience’ in the process of the play-making, at the same time providing the teacher with ways of influencing directly the situation and the meanings, an example of responding to the critical incident occurred in a session on the drama based on Macbeth.

v  Disturbing the class productively

The teacher’s function is to provide challenges and stimuli, 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. If pupils acquire knowledge and understanding by working for it, stumbling upon it, or having it sprung upon them such that their expectations are challenged, their learning experiences will be more dynamic than simply being told. An example of this occurs in ‘The Governor’s Child’, a drama based on Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. The class is in the role of a village community helping a woman with a baby, who, unbeknownst to them, has fled a revolution.

v  The teacher–taught relationship

In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. Of course, as there are more of them than there are of you, they hold the power. In the classroom, the pupils enter into an agreement with you the teacher that you are in charge of, this may be a tacit agreement. The power relationship is asymmetric. 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. So what are the possibilities in terms of power and choosing a role? There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama.

a.       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 organization and has the class in a role subordinate to him/her.

b.      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. The opposer role has to be used carefully because the response to it can be difficult to handle if it becomes too strong.

c.       The intermediate role, this is often a messenger or go-between, as the servant role used in the ‘The Dream’ drama. In the ‘The Dream’ it might be a servant to Egeus who is sympathetic to Hermia but does not know what best to do as she cannot just tell her employer what she thinks he should do.

d.      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.

e.       The ordinary person, this role is in the same position as the role given to the class. We do not have this sort of role in our ‘The Dream’ drama but the Steward in the ‘Macbeth’ drama is like this.

The class have been told they must confront the Mayor. Before we can confront the Mayor we must set out how his office looks, This is the Mayor’s parlor. First, you must tell me how big the doors into his parlor 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 desks your ‘drama eyes’The class offer suggestions, building the image of the desk. The townspeople are marching down to the Mayor’s parlor. They are getting near enough to be heard. Suggestions are made and those that have a rhythm and meter and words that will maintain the seriousness of the event are chosen, this strategy binds the group together, makes concrete their community and an attitude they can hold as a group. So, we have a parlor, 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 a 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, ‘The mayor sat at his desk and outside he could hear a crowd chanting getting louder and louder, nearer and nearer.’ You break out of the role: let’s stop the drama there and look at what has happened. This response is not expected by the class. It surprises them, defuses their anger. They expect the Mayor to argue. 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.