How to Begin
with Teacher in Role
Why use 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 TiR, hot-seating the role, where the class meets the role
sitting in front of them and can ask questions. TiR 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 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.
Teacher as 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.
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.
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 (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 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.
TiR changes the nature of the contract entered into by the class. What is that
contract? It is ‘the imaginative contract’:
● It is not, I will teach you by telling you what you need to know
– the style of much classroom teaching.
● It is not, I will present a play before you and you will watch
me, as the actor contracts with an audience.
● It is not, Listen and I will tell you a story. It is my story and
you must not interrupt it.
● 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.
The requirements of working in 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 of the group of children. They have to switch from operating as
audience to 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.
Disturbing the class productively
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. 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 are in role as a
village community helping a woman with a baby, who, unbeknownst to them, has
fled a revolution.
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, 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 organisation 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 parlour. 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 see your ‘drama eyes’ The class
offer suggestions, building the image of the desk. The townspeople are marching
down to the Mayor’s parlour. 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 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, ‘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 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.
