Literature Review 1

Literature Review: Acting in classroom Drama, a critical analysis – Gavin Bolton

As my ideas for inquiry point toward the direction of the transition of actor to drama teacher, whilst attending a Drama PGCE workshop at Goldsmiths University for new drama teachers, I was given a key reading list and it seemed a sensible place to start my search for my literature review. Through discussion I was introduced to the notion on ‘process and product drama’. Gavin Bolton’s name was attached to the ideology, after researching into the relevance to the idea towards my practice and inquiry, I found it a fantastic way to begin building the bridge between my current and future practice.  Gavin Bolton’s ‘Acting in classroom drama, a critical analysis’, provides a historical perspective and a reformulation of drama classroom behaviour. Most of my professional practice has been product based, as an actor I have rehearsed and performed for customers (audience), I was the product and I sold my services. Gavin Bolton, a key pioneer and practitioner of drama teaching introduces me to the idea of process drama, the emphasis being on the creativity the subject can bring as appose to the end result. He guides the reader through various historical pioneers of the drama classroom and by comparing their teaching methodology; he explores process and product drama. A hugely relevant concept to me, as in the rehearsal room my practice focuses on the performance I give to an audience, it is now time to explore removing an audience and engage in the creative growth and learn what the drama classroom can bring.

Bolton beings his analysis with Harriet Finlay-Johnson, head teacher to a village elementary school in East Sussex, comparing her to English head master to an independent school in Cambridge, Henry Caldwell Cook. Bolton describes Finlay’s method, “discovered that such a desire for knowledge can be aroused through dramatisation… creating a motivation to learn and a responsibility towards learning”.  Bolton explained that Finlay’s classroom concept resulted in children being keen to know, self-reliant and self taught and that the teacher should be seen as a fellow worker or companion. Claiming that teaching knowledge through the arts utilises the natural learning instincts within a child and by, “doing away with the audience,” and rather displaying the drama to the stage managers and directors (all made up by the students), she is able to bring knowledge alive in her classroom and allow the drama process to teach the students. Bolton then introduces Cook as the first pioneer of the notion of ‘play as practice’, claiming that school was all one big play and rehearsal for the big world. Cook placed his students in direct engagement with what was being learnt and by stretching their imagination and allowing them to ‘play’ with the learning, strengthened the child’s concept of the learning. He argued that dramatizing a play was about learning about the people in the time and place in which they lived, he encouraged students to not see themselves as real people in a real dramatized situation, but rather as players putting on a production. By taking a Shakespeare play and using the Elizabethan staging he is able to give the students room to, “consider himself subject to the condition the very play was written for… and recreate the original atmosphere intended for the play… achieving an authentic representation of the original.  Bolton provides an instant contrast to process and product drama, while Finlay removes the audience and focuses on the creative learning process, Cook’s attention is on making the play and giving students a deeper meaning to the text. 

Bolton’s next chapter spotlights two professors of education Sir Percy Nunn and Susan Isaac. Bolton challenges Nunn’s position as misplaced with his critical analysis, claiming that his methods did amount to a discouragement of acting as a classroom activity. Despite being a strange choice, he does re-instate the ideas of Nunn as relevant to the analysis by spotlighting his idea of a link between education and ‘play’, nether the less as soon as this important link is made, Bolton informs the reader that, “Nunn does not seem to rate the function of make-believe,” and the idea of learning through play should be left behind at secondary level.  Keeping with the theme of linking drama with play, Bolton then moves on to Isaac, justifying her position with the analysis as the first professor to conduct a scientific observation in a progressive institution. Her observations lead her to categorise child’s play, ‘imaginative’ play, when make believe slips into genuine enquiry and the second is ‘symbol-formation’, using a child’s natural innocence and acceptance, they find symbolic meaning rooted in infantile phantasy. Bolton points out that this is the first classification of child’s play and it was this theory that lead to Isaac composing the preface to the first publication for a call for dramatic work for children (Langdon, 1948). This publication drove the ideas of Isaac, expressing a desire for a drama curriculum in schools and gave her a platform to display her notion of, “making knowledge really his own, reinforcing the notion of ownership”. Langdon’s publication embraced Isaac’s theories by exploring when pretending becomes acting and noticing a conceptual difference of the child to the process of learning.

Mackenzie (1935) explores the differences between the professional actor and the child actor and Bolton concludes it to be a difference in the quality or emotional belief in the performance, Bolton points out that Mackenzie, “urged teachers to recognise that even pre-adolescent children are ready to learn technique and consciously respect the rights of an audience”. For the first time Bolton gives us a pioneer that encourages student’s awareness of an audience in terms of transporting emotion and characterisation. Bolton then highlights Mackenzie’s view on improvisation as a way of revealing resources in players no other method can reveal, inducing inventiveness and freedom to open imagination and by training a child as a product of drama, the student can intuitively know what is learnt.

Bolton the moves on to Peter Slade, first professional in drama education Slade describes drama as the art of living, it’s in the doing and the structuring of life, the child generates activity. Bolton breaks down Slade’s theory as personal and projected play, “personal play is obvious drama and projected play is when the main action is taking place outside the body, and the whole in characterised by mental absorption”. Slade’s idea of drama and life itself being so closely linked, fuels his idea that drama should be at the centre of education. Bolton explains that Slade's theory was to destroy the stage as children would only want to re-create what adults do on stage, Slade wanted his classroom to be free of adult and teacher interference and maintain an essence of freedom over the process of creativity. Bolton then introduces Brian Way’s methodology of the, “development through drama as part of an all embracing philosophy of education whose practice is basically concerned with human development’. Bolton points out that Way’s; ‘work in a space on your own’ approach is now implemented in schools all over the country. Bolton points out that Way’s structuring and shaping of the drama class is an idea used by himself and most other practitioners, all to embrace the process of human development with a child.

Bolton’s next drama pioneer, Dorothy Heathcote was based at Durham university has given great influence to the practitioners of today. Her methodology is one known as “teacher in role’. This is when the teacher themselves play a pivotal character in the children’s make believe play. Using her character she furthers and manipulated child learning. The method means that the teacher provides the script or text and the children spontaneously react to the situation. Bolton then informs that Heathcote’s method of working as a constant whole class gave her lessons a communal perspective and gave a sense of unity to the class…

Hetahcote exploits two ‘lures’ to promote the image of the work itself. At some point in the work, she will insist that ‘someone else somewhere in the world is doing this’, implying that we’re not just playing games – this is a real problem for someone. Further ‘bait’ to the pupils is the promise of an audience, not of course one you rehearse for, but the audience to whom the pupils will be able to teach something. As Heathcote put it in an interview: “They won’t come to see our performance but to understand something”. Thus the pupils are persuaded, should they need it, that what they are doing is important in two ways, “that this is happening to others as well as us”, and that “others, even people like headmasters, can learn from what we do”.

This is the underpinning of process drama, the idea that the children do not work towards the final product but take ownership and responsibility for their position in a community and their behaviour with in it. Bolton states that unless in experienced hands Heathcote’s approach could turn into over manipulation and one would need to use reflection to ensure the process delivers the creativity it set out to bring.

Bolton comes to a final chapter as he attempts to gather a conceptual framework based on the methodology in earlier chapters of the book enabling, “teachers to adopt an eclectic approach to communicate”, acting in classroom drama. Bolton then begins to reflect on this idea of process and product drama, making an analogy of  ‘playing’ and ‘play’, ‘pretending’ and ‘acting’, likening the ‘playing’ element to the professional rehearsal process to that of the improvised classroom drama. Bolton then highlights that even though process drama emphasises the experimentation and personal development aspects of learning, one should not be mistaken that process drama to is to be an alternative to product drama. Rather it is a difference in theoretical language, “the distinction between a football match and playing football… Presenting experience dramatically implies both process and product”. Though the emphasis can be on the process of the making, a product is the thing being reflected upon and together balancing both in the drama class can promote a sense of relationship with the ‘self’ and the ‘world’.    

References:

Bolton, G. 1999.  Acting in Classroom Drama, a Critical Analysis. Calendar Islands Publishers, Maine.