MartyGull
Ten Years Ago - A Philosophy of Drama Education
- Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
© Chris Port, 1999
Introduction
This evaluation is divided into four sections as detailed below:
(i) an account of developments in my philosophical understanding of what is meant by art in contemporary British society (and drama’s place within it);
(ii) an account of developments in my philosophical understanding of what is meant by education in contemporary British society (and drama’s place within it);
(iii) a criticism of my professional educational setting contextualized within my philosophical understandings of the above;
(iv) an analysis of my abilities (strengths and targets) as a practitioner of drama education contextualised within all of the above.
As a general caveat for the reader, my philosophical analyses of art and education exclude immeasurably more than they include. These should therefore be regarded as salient features on a map rather than a detailed survey.
(i) A philosophy of art (and drama’s place within it)
The problem with proposing a single definition of art is that we may unintentionally exclude forms which are, nonetheless, recognisable as art and include forms which are recognisably not art. For example, Tolstoy (cited in Jones, 1994) proposes that art should serve a moral purpose. However, such a proposal fails as a definition of art since it is possible for something to serve a moral purpose without being art (for example, an act of kindness). Conversely, it is possible for art to be amoral (or even immoral) by the moral standards of the time.
Even attempts to define art as an overlap between two joint and necessary conditions (such as imitation and expression) fail because they are unable to account for purely abstract artworks (for example, music).
George Dickie (cited in Cooper, 1992) settles for a value-neutral definition of art as ‘an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public’ (Cooper, 1992,p.112). I am heavily influenced (although still dissatisfied) with Wittgenstein’s (cited in Barrett, 1978) ‘family resemblance’ concept which recognizes art by strands of similarities rather than common properties. In essence (although it is usually a mistake to reduce Wittgenstein to any essence) art may be recognised by the common use of the term rather than a concept of any common nature.
This approach implies that we should abandon any attempt to define what art is and study (via Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’) the sociological processes by which some thing becomes art (and by whose criteria?).
However, before we turn to a sociological analysis of art in society, I wish to draw attention to an article which has profoundly influenced my philosophical understanding of why theories of art fail. Richard Kamber (1998) observes that theories of art fail not because art is by necessity an ‘open concept’ (users of art are free to change their minds about its use and its meaning) but because we are unable to demonstrate any continuing unity of the concept of art over time. Kamber believes that in order to show such a continuing unity we would have to explain art in terms of what he calls ‘deep structures’ of the human condition. While there may be many contenders for such a deep structure (human emotions being one), Kamber believes that such theories ‘end up being untestable under any reasonable interpretation of testability’ (Kamber, 1998, p.45).
This problem of ‘testability’ is, I believe, not only an objection to any deep structural theory of art but also to any assessment of art. Borrowing from quantum mechanics, I believe that whenever we try to assess art (whatever art may be) we do not measure an exactitude of quantity and quality. Instead, we inadvertently and inescapably affect art in a way that cannot be predicted or tested. An understanding of this interference and safeguards against it (say guidelines, criteria, a sense of fair-play, double-marking, blind-marking etc.) do not remove this fundamental uncertainty at the heart of art and its assessment.
If we accept that the function and aesthetic of art are not self-determinate quantities or qualities, then we have to ask whose agenda is being implemented? While traditional (liberal humanities) discourse has tended to query the relevance of a Leavisite canon and ‘high’ art in general, I have some conservative sympathy (tempered with liberal distaste) with the right-wing backlash of philosophers such as Roger Scruton. Scruton (1999) claims that second-rate art and culture have prevailed in modern British society because students (and, to some extent, educators) have lost the ability to recognize what is first-rate. In his view, what is first-rate is the canon, writers such as Shakespeare; what is second-rate is popular culture given undue academic credence by what he terms the ‘political posture’ of deconstructionists such as Derrida and Foucault (Scruton, 3 January 1999, p.13). Scruton even goes so far as to suggest that ‘cultivated’ teachers are well-meaning hypocrites, pretending to accept the validity of popular culture while concealing their contempt for it in order to find young novices who might be groomed to popularize ‘high’ art.
Scruton does more than attack popular culture because it is not high art. He attacks popular culture (and in particular, popular music) because they have deconstructed the very literary and judgmental values which might enable them to articulate their protest against the parent culture. As Scruton puts it:
‘Encrypted within the routine protest, therefore, we find another and more strangulated cry - a protest against the impossibility of protest. Trapped as he is in a culture of near-total inarticulation, the singer can find no words to express what most deeply concerns him.’ (Scruton, 10 November 1999, p.18).
Sociologists such as Paul Willis (1990) would no doubt take issue with Scruton, claiming that he is hopelessly elitist and out of touch with the ‘grounded aesthetic’ of common culture. The problem here, as Scruton points out, is that to be judgmental about art and popular culture is to place oneself in the elitist Western tradition ‘excoriated for its “sexism”, “ethnocentrism”, “elitism” - or whatever other “ism”...’ (Scruton, 3 January 1999, p.13); to be non-judgmental about art and popular culture is to fail to compare, criticize and justify why some works of art are more worthy of study than others. A sophisticated pragmatic relativistic perspective (in essence, a multicultural perspective) cleverly avoids the tricky problems of demonstrating universals and avoiding the various ‘isms’ but does not help us arbitrate between competing judgements. Surely, if art is to have any purpose beyond aesthetic pleasure (for a drama education practitioner, I think that this is a given), it should be able to help us make judgments?
Matarasso (1997) makes various sociological claims for the benefits to society of participation in the arts. He lists 50 (beneficial) social impacts of participation in the arts ranging from the individual to the community, from the socio-economic to the political. All of his findings for the arts are well-meaning, superlative and vague, as are the various methodologies employed to discover them. We return here to the problem of ‘testability’. As Matarasso truthfully observes :
‘Public policy loves indicators, neat measures of success which can be applied across the board. Helpful as they may be, there is a danger that the outcomes of projects will be stretched or trimmed to fit them...’ (Matarasso, 1997, p.90).
Nobody is saying that ‘the arts’ are a bad thing, that people should not have them, that society can get along without them. The problem is not one of competing arguments but one of funding. Reports on the benefits of the arts usually have an agenda; that agenda is not a disinterested reminder of our artistic heritage and practice but a plea for financial support. Is it plausible that Matarasso’s report might have made alternative findings, that the arts are a distraction from reality, that access should be restricted to the discerning few? Could the report have been written just as persuasively without the research? Just as The Arts In Schools (Robinson, 1982) proclaimed the importance of the arts in education, the underlying arguments do not hinge upon principle but upon purse strings (or rather, principles are used as leverage on the purse strings). Arguments for or against funding are usually determined by cost-effectiveness (what are we paying for, how much will it cost, what will we get from it and how can we test/predict that?).
Creativity, enjoyment, community, understanding - these are not testable or predictive qualities (although we can probably predict some test results by simply gauging the agenda of the interviewer, the questions asked and the sample surveyed). I do not deride the motives of such reports (I am, after all, an advocate of the arts). I simply find them disingenuous. Support for the arts is a matter of belief, not one of proof.
Although I have not yet specifically mentioned drama it is implicit and central in all of the above analyses. I therefore wish to conclude this section with a brief review of what I think drama is, and how it may be differentiated from other art forms.
During my first year at Central I wrote my embryonic philosophy of drama education. After some cursory prevarication, I decided to define drama as follows:
‘... Drama is, primarily, a belief that the portrayal of fictional situations or actions by acting them out in such a way that they have significance constitutes a distinct art form. The distinctive paraphernalia of such an art form (e.g. play texts) separates it from other art forms (e.g. dance, music, art) although it may include elements from them.’ (Port, 1997,p.1).
This early and reductionist definition of drama was undoubtedly heavily influenced by my reading of David Hornbrook in Education and Dramatic Art (1989) and Education in Drama (1991). If pushed towards academic puritanism (advocating drama in the curriculum as an autonomous subject), I still adhere to this definition although my practition has become more holistic with experience.
The real quibble is not with the paraphernalia (although I am partial to playtexts as my personal strengths lie in writing and my targets in physicalization). It is whether I prefer drama as an autonomous artform or as a cross-curricular enquiry process. Obviously it is both and some of the internecine debate in the drama education community (I was unimpressed by the level of debate in the Drama 2000 conference) between the choice of extreme alternatives (between Hornbrook and Heathcote) has not been helpful in promoting our common cause (the importance of drama in education).
The choice of drama practition is rather like looking at a subtly blended spectrum. It becomes impossible to tell where one colour stops and another starts, but one does become aware that the colour has changed. However, even though this debate is now considered slightly anachronistic and overly reductionist (certainly by our tutors), I do not believe that the underlying antagonisms have been resolved, only hushed up. In an ideal world, drama should be all things to all people. However, in the battle for staff, time and resources, it tends to be one thing or the other.
In physics, the discrepancy between the idealized movement of an object and its realized movement is explained by the distorting effect of friction. If drama is not moving where we think it should go, perhaps we should borrow a methodology from our curricular cousin (physics describes a means while art describes an end) and look at the causes of friction. We will still have to make course corrections, but at least we will be better able to understand why we have to make them and predict to what extent we have to make them. This should be the true purpose of reports on the arts in education, a predictive model of sociological trends and drama’s comparative trajectory so that we do not end up pondering why the real world does not match our dramaturgical ideals. If such predictive models indicate that we are not living in a very pleasant or creative society then perhaps this should be emphasised, not concealed? Perhaps this is where ‘high’ art has the edge over popular culture and judgmentalism has the edge over non-judgmentalism?
(ii) A philosophy of education (and drama’s place within it)
I first need to discuss my understanding of what learning is and how this may be similar (or different) to education.
First, I should make it clear that in this treatment I am mainly concerned with secondary education. Second, I sympathise with Yasha Frank’s proviso (cited in Goldberg, 1974) that ‘Children love to learn but hate to be taught’ (Goldberg, 1974, p.15). This succinct quote neatly encapsulates my suspicion that, regardless of our theories and practices as educators, there may be some irreconcilable antagonism between learning and teaching.
Before discussing any such antagonisms I need to decide which theoretical model of learning I am discussing. Piaget’s (cf. Piaget, Boden, 1994) constructivist model of learning as ordered structural change, a complex interaction between new thoughts and previous experiences, seems to allow for overall cognitive differences between individuals but not for particular differences in abilities.
Howard Gardner’s (1993) theory of multiple intelligences allows for more complex assessments of intelligence and learning ability than simple intelligence quotients (which have an inherent mathematical bias). It also concurs with the common-sense perception that different people have differing levels of ability in different areas while not being noticeably more or less intelligent than each other.
My main concern with Multiple Intelligence theory is that, with the identification of eight autonomous intelligences and the mooting of a ninth (naturalist intelligence) the list may start to grow unwieldy and unusable. Between over-simplification and over-complexity, between bias and non-commitment, there has to be a happy hunting ground of workable meaning. I will therefore close off my options by discussing learning as an ability to build on previous knowledge and experience in the Piagetian model but differentiated between autonomous intelligences as specified in Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence model (up to a limit of eight intelligences as follows: musical intelligence; bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; logical-mathematical intelligence; linguistic intelligence; spatial intelligence; interpersonal intelligence; intrapersonal intelligence; naturalist intelligence).
I have deliberately excluded the social constructivist model of learning from my definition. This is not because I think that Vygotsky’s emphasis on the social context, and Bourdieu’s emphasis on the middle-class domination of cultural competence and capital, are irrelevant. It is because I see them as blurs in the spectrum which take us into another colour (metaphorically red).
Art, drama, learning and education are all inextricably caught up in a socio-political context, but this is not the problem. The problem is whether or not we agree with the socio-political context and, if we don’t, how might we change it? How do we separate our political convictions from our prescribed educational responsibilities when they are so closely bound? My answer is that I do not see the education of children as a weapon for my political convictions, although I do often see them as a casualty of the experiments of others. If the educational system disadvantages particular groups of children not through incompetence but through inherent cultural bias, then it is the culture that is at fault, not the school, the teacher or the children.
What, then, is education? I think that there is a great difference between what education should be and what it often is. In its idealistic form, I believe that education should be more than structured learning. I believe that it should be a transitional stage, from the arbitrary learning process of early experiences to the focused pursuit of learning goals at a higher level based on personal interest, aptitude and ability. To some extent, this ideal is exemplified in the progression from compulsory primary and secondary schooling to optional further education and the competition for places in higher education. Education deviates from this idealized progression due to the frictions of the social contexts. Money and class buy a better education. So do we loathe private education as a socially divisive abomination, a sort of cultural apartheid, or do we ruthlessly apply the principles of the free-market to improve our state schools as if they were loss-making nationalized monopolies? It is a dilemma rank with hypocrisy, as government ministers extol the virtues of the state system while sending their children to private schools when (understandably, if not justifiably) parental concerns override public principles.
George Walden (1996) argues that opening the private sector to all (on the basis of talent by examination rather than parental tuition fees) is an essential condition to ending our two tier educational system and raising the standards of the state sector. I agree. I understand that some schools are better than others (for a variety of reasons) and this disparity should be levelled (upwards). What I cannot accept is that some schools should be better than others simply because of private money rather than public money.
What, then, should be the role of a teacher in our less successful state schools? As an analogy, I would compare it with the Hippocratic oath, the medical code of ethics which can be summarized with the injunction that a practitioner should always help and never harm a client. In battlefield medicine, however, this principle is soon compromised by the necessity of triage, the sorting of casualties according to priority on the basis of expediency rather than moral principles. The wounded are sorted into three categories: the walking wounded (those who can wait); the critically wounded (those who require immediate attention) and the fatally wounded (those who should be left to die). We accept such ruthless prioritization in matters of life and death but would find such a practice horrific if transposed to our educational system. And yet, is this not what happens? If a teacher is overworked, underpaid, and their performance (and the performance of the school as a whole) is judged by exam results and league tables, such a practice seems eminently sensible. Those children who are able, more or less, to cope with minimal tuition should be left in favour of those children who might survive the process with care and attention. The ‘walking dead’, those written-off by the system as unwilling or unable to benefit from the procedure, should be made as comfortable as possible (comfortable for the school, that is) until they leave.
The above scenario is not an ideal of education to which I would subscribe. Yet, in all my experiences of education (as a student, as a practitioner, and in conversations with teachers away from the brochure-mentality of many a school policy statement), it is real. There are many strands of argument I would like to develop from this pessimistic observation, but the one I will limit myself to here is the failure of liberal studies as this leads into both my summation of drama’s place in education and some of my observations about my professional educational setting.
In With respect to the yobs (Edwards, 11 May 1999), the writer and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards recounts her miserable experiences as a naive liberal studies teacher working with young male working class apprentices in an East London school in the 1960s. Much of her experience is undoubtedly too personal, parochial and anachronistic to extrapolate into a critique of the arts in education as a whole, and both theoretical debate and educational practice have moved on from the assumption that the arts somehow ‘civilize’ in themselves (the Heathcote/Bolton model of ‘mantle of the expert’ comes across as a covert educational operation rather than as an exposure to liberal morality). However, they serve as a cautionary reminder that education (and in particular, drama in education) should always be sceptical of the idea that it can somehow instruct or manipulate children in the ways of liberal righteousness.
What, then, is drama’s place in education if not some holistic notion of making people into better human beings? Are we collapsing our definitions back to the old debate about drama as an autonomous subject versus a cross-curricular inquiry process? A leaked report, drawn up by the government’s Creativity Taskforce, claims that the new traditionalism with its emphasis on literacy and numeracy is suppressing childrens imagination (cf. O’Reilly, 9 May 1999, p.13) The report advocates that unemployed actors should be brought into classrooms to encourage creativity and support rather than inhibit cultural education. To illustrate the creative poverty of neo-positivism, it quotes one headteacher’s maxim that “a test tests what a test tests” (O’Reilly, 9 May 1999, p.13).
There are two issues I would like to pick up on here. First, should drama in education be about dumping unemployed actors (and presumably unqualified teachers) into classrooms? Second, if testing is a form of assessment, what is wrong with it?
On the first point, it obviously depends on how, when and why actors are brought into the classroom. If they are introduced as part of a coherent educational scheme of work, then they may prove to be a valuable resource. If they just turn up because they ‘know something about creativity’ then this seems to be embarrassingly reminiscent of Ruth Dudley Edward’s miserable experiences with liberal studies and the patronizing assumption that exposure to one person’s ‘creativity’ somehow has a knock-on effect.
On the second point, to fail to assess is to fail to teach properly. This does not seem particularly contentious when applied to core curriculum subjects, but it is problematic when applied to notions of creativity. It is unlikely that drama in education will ever achieve comparative academic respectability until it demonstrates that its assessment criteria are comparably rigorous with other subjects. Here is the real problem. As drama practitioners, do we want to end up ‘teaching the test’ while hoping that some deeper intellectual and emotional learning engagement is going on? For myself, I suspect not and so I conclude this section with the personal observation that we need to differentiate between what we want from drama in the testable confines of the curriculum and what we want from drama in the broader realms of human experience. The two blur into each other, and the curriculum is contained within the broader context, but if you teach it then you test it and if you test it then you inhibit and affect it. Drama in education is not about creativity. Dramatic creativity means the freedom to not have to justify what you are doing and this belongs outside of the curriculum (although it can certainly be an extra-curricular activity, say an after-school youth theatre). Such an approach would obviously be reliant on a personal dedication (probably unpaid) by the teacher/facilitator and a personal interest (rather than obligation) by the students/participants. Once we remove the obligation of attendance and the pressure of testing, then children may engage with the drama more as learning than being taught.
- Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
© Chris Port, 1999
Introduction
This evaluation is divided into four sections as detailed below:
(i) an account of developments in my philosophical understanding of what is meant by art in contemporary British society (and drama’s place within it);
(ii) an account of developments in my philosophical understanding of what is meant by education in contemporary British society (and drama’s place within it);
(iii) a criticism of my professional educational setting contextualized within my philosophical understandings of the above;
(iv) an analysis of my abilities (strengths and targets) as a practitioner of drama education contextualised within all of the above.
As a general caveat for the reader, my philosophical analyses of art and education exclude immeasurably more than they include. These should therefore be regarded as salient features on a map rather than a detailed survey.
(i) A philosophy of art (and drama’s place within it)
The problem with proposing a single definition of art is that we may unintentionally exclude forms which are, nonetheless, recognisable as art and include forms which are recognisably not art. For example, Tolstoy (cited in Jones, 1994) proposes that art should serve a moral purpose. However, such a proposal fails as a definition of art since it is possible for something to serve a moral purpose without being art (for example, an act of kindness). Conversely, it is possible for art to be amoral (or even immoral) by the moral standards of the time.
Even attempts to define art as an overlap between two joint and necessary conditions (such as imitation and expression) fail because they are unable to account for purely abstract artworks (for example, music).
George Dickie (cited in Cooper, 1992) settles for a value-neutral definition of art as ‘an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public’ (Cooper, 1992,p.112). I am heavily influenced (although still dissatisfied) with Wittgenstein’s (cited in Barrett, 1978) ‘family resemblance’ concept which recognizes art by strands of similarities rather than common properties. In essence (although it is usually a mistake to reduce Wittgenstein to any essence) art may be recognised by the common use of the term rather than a concept of any common nature.
This approach implies that we should abandon any attempt to define what art is and study (via Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’) the sociological processes by which some thing becomes art (and by whose criteria?).
However, before we turn to a sociological analysis of art in society, I wish to draw attention to an article which has profoundly influenced my philosophical understanding of why theories of art fail. Richard Kamber (1998) observes that theories of art fail not because art is by necessity an ‘open concept’ (users of art are free to change their minds about its use and its meaning) but because we are unable to demonstrate any continuing unity of the concept of art over time. Kamber believes that in order to show such a continuing unity we would have to explain art in terms of what he calls ‘deep structures’ of the human condition. While there may be many contenders for such a deep structure (human emotions being one), Kamber believes that such theories ‘end up being untestable under any reasonable interpretation of testability’ (Kamber, 1998, p.45).
This problem of ‘testability’ is, I believe, not only an objection to any deep structural theory of art but also to any assessment of art. Borrowing from quantum mechanics, I believe that whenever we try to assess art (whatever art may be) we do not measure an exactitude of quantity and quality. Instead, we inadvertently and inescapably affect art in a way that cannot be predicted or tested. An understanding of this interference and safeguards against it (say guidelines, criteria, a sense of fair-play, double-marking, blind-marking etc.) do not remove this fundamental uncertainty at the heart of art and its assessment.
If we accept that the function and aesthetic of art are not self-determinate quantities or qualities, then we have to ask whose agenda is being implemented? While traditional (liberal humanities) discourse has tended to query the relevance of a Leavisite canon and ‘high’ art in general, I have some conservative sympathy (tempered with liberal distaste) with the right-wing backlash of philosophers such as Roger Scruton. Scruton (1999) claims that second-rate art and culture have prevailed in modern British society because students (and, to some extent, educators) have lost the ability to recognize what is first-rate. In his view, what is first-rate is the canon, writers such as Shakespeare; what is second-rate is popular culture given undue academic credence by what he terms the ‘political posture’ of deconstructionists such as Derrida and Foucault (Scruton, 3 January 1999, p.13). Scruton even goes so far as to suggest that ‘cultivated’ teachers are well-meaning hypocrites, pretending to accept the validity of popular culture while concealing their contempt for it in order to find young novices who might be groomed to popularize ‘high’ art.
Scruton does more than attack popular culture because it is not high art. He attacks popular culture (and in particular, popular music) because they have deconstructed the very literary and judgmental values which might enable them to articulate their protest against the parent culture. As Scruton puts it:
‘Encrypted within the routine protest, therefore, we find another and more strangulated cry - a protest against the impossibility of protest. Trapped as he is in a culture of near-total inarticulation, the singer can find no words to express what most deeply concerns him.’ (Scruton, 10 November 1999, p.18).
Sociologists such as Paul Willis (1990) would no doubt take issue with Scruton, claiming that he is hopelessly elitist and out of touch with the ‘grounded aesthetic’ of common culture. The problem here, as Scruton points out, is that to be judgmental about art and popular culture is to place oneself in the elitist Western tradition ‘excoriated for its “sexism”, “ethnocentrism”, “elitism” - or whatever other “ism”...’ (Scruton, 3 January 1999, p.13); to be non-judgmental about art and popular culture is to fail to compare, criticize and justify why some works of art are more worthy of study than others. A sophisticated pragmatic relativistic perspective (in essence, a multicultural perspective) cleverly avoids the tricky problems of demonstrating universals and avoiding the various ‘isms’ but does not help us arbitrate between competing judgements. Surely, if art is to have any purpose beyond aesthetic pleasure (for a drama education practitioner, I think that this is a given), it should be able to help us make judgments?
Matarasso (1997) makes various sociological claims for the benefits to society of participation in the arts. He lists 50 (beneficial) social impacts of participation in the arts ranging from the individual to the community, from the socio-economic to the political. All of his findings for the arts are well-meaning, superlative and vague, as are the various methodologies employed to discover them. We return here to the problem of ‘testability’. As Matarasso truthfully observes :
‘Public policy loves indicators, neat measures of success which can be applied across the board. Helpful as they may be, there is a danger that the outcomes of projects will be stretched or trimmed to fit them...’ (Matarasso, 1997, p.90).
Nobody is saying that ‘the arts’ are a bad thing, that people should not have them, that society can get along without them. The problem is not one of competing arguments but one of funding. Reports on the benefits of the arts usually have an agenda; that agenda is not a disinterested reminder of our artistic heritage and practice but a plea for financial support. Is it plausible that Matarasso’s report might have made alternative findings, that the arts are a distraction from reality, that access should be restricted to the discerning few? Could the report have been written just as persuasively without the research? Just as The Arts In Schools (Robinson, 1982) proclaimed the importance of the arts in education, the underlying arguments do not hinge upon principle but upon purse strings (or rather, principles are used as leverage on the purse strings). Arguments for or against funding are usually determined by cost-effectiveness (what are we paying for, how much will it cost, what will we get from it and how can we test/predict that?).
Creativity, enjoyment, community, understanding - these are not testable or predictive qualities (although we can probably predict some test results by simply gauging the agenda of the interviewer, the questions asked and the sample surveyed). I do not deride the motives of such reports (I am, after all, an advocate of the arts). I simply find them disingenuous. Support for the arts is a matter of belief, not one of proof.
Although I have not yet specifically mentioned drama it is implicit and central in all of the above analyses. I therefore wish to conclude this section with a brief review of what I think drama is, and how it may be differentiated from other art forms.
During my first year at Central I wrote my embryonic philosophy of drama education. After some cursory prevarication, I decided to define drama as follows:
‘... Drama is, primarily, a belief that the portrayal of fictional situations or actions by acting them out in such a way that they have significance constitutes a distinct art form. The distinctive paraphernalia of such an art form (e.g. play texts) separates it from other art forms (e.g. dance, music, art) although it may include elements from them.’ (Port, 1997,p.1).
This early and reductionist definition of drama was undoubtedly heavily influenced by my reading of David Hornbrook in Education and Dramatic Art (1989) and Education in Drama (1991). If pushed towards academic puritanism (advocating drama in the curriculum as an autonomous subject), I still adhere to this definition although my practition has become more holistic with experience.
The real quibble is not with the paraphernalia (although I am partial to playtexts as my personal strengths lie in writing and my targets in physicalization). It is whether I prefer drama as an autonomous artform or as a cross-curricular enquiry process. Obviously it is both and some of the internecine debate in the drama education community (I was unimpressed by the level of debate in the Drama 2000 conference) between the choice of extreme alternatives (between Hornbrook and Heathcote) has not been helpful in promoting our common cause (the importance of drama in education).
The choice of drama practition is rather like looking at a subtly blended spectrum. It becomes impossible to tell where one colour stops and another starts, but one does become aware that the colour has changed. However, even though this debate is now considered slightly anachronistic and overly reductionist (certainly by our tutors), I do not believe that the underlying antagonisms have been resolved, only hushed up. In an ideal world, drama should be all things to all people. However, in the battle for staff, time and resources, it tends to be one thing or the other.
In physics, the discrepancy between the idealized movement of an object and its realized movement is explained by the distorting effect of friction. If drama is not moving where we think it should go, perhaps we should borrow a methodology from our curricular cousin (physics describes a means while art describes an end) and look at the causes of friction. We will still have to make course corrections, but at least we will be better able to understand why we have to make them and predict to what extent we have to make them. This should be the true purpose of reports on the arts in education, a predictive model of sociological trends and drama’s comparative trajectory so that we do not end up pondering why the real world does not match our dramaturgical ideals. If such predictive models indicate that we are not living in a very pleasant or creative society then perhaps this should be emphasised, not concealed? Perhaps this is where ‘high’ art has the edge over popular culture and judgmentalism has the edge over non-judgmentalism?
(ii) A philosophy of education (and drama’s place within it)
I first need to discuss my understanding of what learning is and how this may be similar (or different) to education.
First, I should make it clear that in this treatment I am mainly concerned with secondary education. Second, I sympathise with Yasha Frank’s proviso (cited in Goldberg, 1974) that ‘Children love to learn but hate to be taught’ (Goldberg, 1974, p.15). This succinct quote neatly encapsulates my suspicion that, regardless of our theories and practices as educators, there may be some irreconcilable antagonism between learning and teaching.
Before discussing any such antagonisms I need to decide which theoretical model of learning I am discussing. Piaget’s (cf. Piaget, Boden, 1994) constructivist model of learning as ordered structural change, a complex interaction between new thoughts and previous experiences, seems to allow for overall cognitive differences between individuals but not for particular differences in abilities.
Howard Gardner’s (1993) theory of multiple intelligences allows for more complex assessments of intelligence and learning ability than simple intelligence quotients (which have an inherent mathematical bias). It also concurs with the common-sense perception that different people have differing levels of ability in different areas while not being noticeably more or less intelligent than each other.
My main concern with Multiple Intelligence theory is that, with the identification of eight autonomous intelligences and the mooting of a ninth (naturalist intelligence) the list may start to grow unwieldy and unusable. Between over-simplification and over-complexity, between bias and non-commitment, there has to be a happy hunting ground of workable meaning. I will therefore close off my options by discussing learning as an ability to build on previous knowledge and experience in the Piagetian model but differentiated between autonomous intelligences as specified in Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence model (up to a limit of eight intelligences as follows: musical intelligence; bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; logical-mathematical intelligence; linguistic intelligence; spatial intelligence; interpersonal intelligence; intrapersonal intelligence; naturalist intelligence).
I have deliberately excluded the social constructivist model of learning from my definition. This is not because I think that Vygotsky’s emphasis on the social context, and Bourdieu’s emphasis on the middle-class domination of cultural competence and capital, are irrelevant. It is because I see them as blurs in the spectrum which take us into another colour (metaphorically red).
Art, drama, learning and education are all inextricably caught up in a socio-political context, but this is not the problem. The problem is whether or not we agree with the socio-political context and, if we don’t, how might we change it? How do we separate our political convictions from our prescribed educational responsibilities when they are so closely bound? My answer is that I do not see the education of children as a weapon for my political convictions, although I do often see them as a casualty of the experiments of others. If the educational system disadvantages particular groups of children not through incompetence but through inherent cultural bias, then it is the culture that is at fault, not the school, the teacher or the children.
What, then, is education? I think that there is a great difference between what education should be and what it often is. In its idealistic form, I believe that education should be more than structured learning. I believe that it should be a transitional stage, from the arbitrary learning process of early experiences to the focused pursuit of learning goals at a higher level based on personal interest, aptitude and ability. To some extent, this ideal is exemplified in the progression from compulsory primary and secondary schooling to optional further education and the competition for places in higher education. Education deviates from this idealized progression due to the frictions of the social contexts. Money and class buy a better education. So do we loathe private education as a socially divisive abomination, a sort of cultural apartheid, or do we ruthlessly apply the principles of the free-market to improve our state schools as if they were loss-making nationalized monopolies? It is a dilemma rank with hypocrisy, as government ministers extol the virtues of the state system while sending their children to private schools when (understandably, if not justifiably) parental concerns override public principles.
George Walden (1996) argues that opening the private sector to all (on the basis of talent by examination rather than parental tuition fees) is an essential condition to ending our two tier educational system and raising the standards of the state sector. I agree. I understand that some schools are better than others (for a variety of reasons) and this disparity should be levelled (upwards). What I cannot accept is that some schools should be better than others simply because of private money rather than public money.
What, then, should be the role of a teacher in our less successful state schools? As an analogy, I would compare it with the Hippocratic oath, the medical code of ethics which can be summarized with the injunction that a practitioner should always help and never harm a client. In battlefield medicine, however, this principle is soon compromised by the necessity of triage, the sorting of casualties according to priority on the basis of expediency rather than moral principles. The wounded are sorted into three categories: the walking wounded (those who can wait); the critically wounded (those who require immediate attention) and the fatally wounded (those who should be left to die). We accept such ruthless prioritization in matters of life and death but would find such a practice horrific if transposed to our educational system. And yet, is this not what happens? If a teacher is overworked, underpaid, and their performance (and the performance of the school as a whole) is judged by exam results and league tables, such a practice seems eminently sensible. Those children who are able, more or less, to cope with minimal tuition should be left in favour of those children who might survive the process with care and attention. The ‘walking dead’, those written-off by the system as unwilling or unable to benefit from the procedure, should be made as comfortable as possible (comfortable for the school, that is) until they leave.
The above scenario is not an ideal of education to which I would subscribe. Yet, in all my experiences of education (as a student, as a practitioner, and in conversations with teachers away from the brochure-mentality of many a school policy statement), it is real. There are many strands of argument I would like to develop from this pessimistic observation, but the one I will limit myself to here is the failure of liberal studies as this leads into both my summation of drama’s place in education and some of my observations about my professional educational setting.
In With respect to the yobs (Edwards, 11 May 1999), the writer and historian Ruth Dudley Edwards recounts her miserable experiences as a naive liberal studies teacher working with young male working class apprentices in an East London school in the 1960s. Much of her experience is undoubtedly too personal, parochial and anachronistic to extrapolate into a critique of the arts in education as a whole, and both theoretical debate and educational practice have moved on from the assumption that the arts somehow ‘civilize’ in themselves (the Heathcote/Bolton model of ‘mantle of the expert’ comes across as a covert educational operation rather than as an exposure to liberal morality). However, they serve as a cautionary reminder that education (and in particular, drama in education) should always be sceptical of the idea that it can somehow instruct or manipulate children in the ways of liberal righteousness.
What, then, is drama’s place in education if not some holistic notion of making people into better human beings? Are we collapsing our definitions back to the old debate about drama as an autonomous subject versus a cross-curricular inquiry process? A leaked report, drawn up by the government’s Creativity Taskforce, claims that the new traditionalism with its emphasis on literacy and numeracy is suppressing childrens imagination (cf. O’Reilly, 9 May 1999, p.13) The report advocates that unemployed actors should be brought into classrooms to encourage creativity and support rather than inhibit cultural education. To illustrate the creative poverty of neo-positivism, it quotes one headteacher’s maxim that “a test tests what a test tests” (O’Reilly, 9 May 1999, p.13).
There are two issues I would like to pick up on here. First, should drama in education be about dumping unemployed actors (and presumably unqualified teachers) into classrooms? Second, if testing is a form of assessment, what is wrong with it?
On the first point, it obviously depends on how, when and why actors are brought into the classroom. If they are introduced as part of a coherent educational scheme of work, then they may prove to be a valuable resource. If they just turn up because they ‘know something about creativity’ then this seems to be embarrassingly reminiscent of Ruth Dudley Edward’s miserable experiences with liberal studies and the patronizing assumption that exposure to one person’s ‘creativity’ somehow has a knock-on effect.
On the second point, to fail to assess is to fail to teach properly. This does not seem particularly contentious when applied to core curriculum subjects, but it is problematic when applied to notions of creativity. It is unlikely that drama in education will ever achieve comparative academic respectability until it demonstrates that its assessment criteria are comparably rigorous with other subjects. Here is the real problem. As drama practitioners, do we want to end up ‘teaching the test’ while hoping that some deeper intellectual and emotional learning engagement is going on? For myself, I suspect not and so I conclude this section with the personal observation that we need to differentiate between what we want from drama in the testable confines of the curriculum and what we want from drama in the broader realms of human experience. The two blur into each other, and the curriculum is contained within the broader context, but if you teach it then you test it and if you test it then you inhibit and affect it. Drama in education is not about creativity. Dramatic creativity means the freedom to not have to justify what you are doing and this belongs outside of the curriculum (although it can certainly be an extra-curricular activity, say an after-school youth theatre). Such an approach would obviously be reliant on a personal dedication (probably unpaid) by the teacher/facilitator and a personal interest (rather than obligation) by the students/participants. Once we remove the obligation of attendance and the pressure of testing, then children may engage with the drama more as learning than being taught.
