Ringkasan materi How to Approach Speaking and Listening Through Drama Part 1

Ringkasan materi How to Approach Speaking  and Listening Through Drama

Part 1

Name : Shofi Elsiana Maulida (171230071)

Class : TBI 6C

        CHAPTER 1  

1.      How to Begin with Teacher in Role

       Why Use Teacher in Role?

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.

The very fact that you take on a key role can provide important ways of defining and exploring the text. Let us look more closely at the Hermia role.

Teacher as storyteller

The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. 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.

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.

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.

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 requirements of working in role

This will help us shape up the TiR elements particularly according to how the audience is seeing things. 

An example of responding to the critical incident occurred in a session on the drama based on Macbeth. When considering the way of showing the overthrow of Macbeth, one of the class of 10-year-olds said, I want to sit on the throne and stop him sitting on it. The teacher took this up and put two of the servants on the thrones of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, with the rest of the servants gathered behind the thrones. He then set up the entry of Macbeth to the throne room.

TiR as Macbeth entered slowly and stopped as though taking in the situation. Of course, the pupils sat firm and outfaced him. He froze and one of the servants, picking up the idea of the situation, strode up to Macbeth, ordered him to kneel and took the crown from Macbeth to carefully and ceremoniously place it on the head of the usurping servant. The class cheered as Macbeth bowed his head and the two pupils stood up, triumphant.

Disturbing the class productively

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.

The key is how children are given information. They can be handed it on a plate or they can be given opportunities to uncover/discover/be surprised by information.

Responding to your class

The art of authentic dialogue – needing to listen – two-way responses

This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. If a teacher runs drama without using TiR there tends to be a lack of dialectic because the teacher produces the structure that the children engage with, but the teacher can only manipulate it from outside that structure.

The teacher can fully manipulate the structure from within and the resulting activity can be shown diagrammatically as in Figure 1.2.

The teacher gives the impression of handing over the power and does so in a way that allows him or her to teach properly and yet empower the participants significantly. We are making the distinction here between the aesthetic actor and the social actor.
The class will use their creativity to see the role in a particular way that has been indicated as long as it has been properly signed to them. 

The teacher must respond to these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the role.

The dialogue that transpires here is critical to the outcome of the drama. The drama is set up as a framework and is not finished in the same way as a play written by a playwright. In fact, the secret of educational drama is to have the framework, even a tight framework, such that the class feel they have some ownership because of the parts that they are developing. A drama technique can be used to help them define possible reasons.

The teacher–taught relationship 

In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. Of course, it does not look like this when the class are responding and contracting into the tasks set by the teacher but should some or all decide not to, the cohesion can be broken. In the classroom, the pupils enter into an agreement with you the teacher that you are in charge.

Chapter 2

2. How to Begin Playing Drama

The drama needs fuel and that fuel is a piece of strong material, a creative idea, and that is more inspirational than an objectives-led design. 

The frame of a drama

We are using the idea of a frame as a way of seeing key decisions in planning.
How did the ‘The Wild Thing’ drama evolve from initial ideas?

Mother sends Max to bed without supper because he has been naughty. Mother finds him gone and seeks help to find him. The next stage was to develop some sense of his mother, her handling of Max and her attitude to him. We considered the mother’s possible ambiguous signals, embodying ideas of softness and indulgence towards Max at the same time as being irritated by Max’s wildness and wanting to control him.

Thus we are exploring ideas of why Max is like he is, an exploration that the class will experience through the drama. This suggested including a line drawing of Max chasing his mother with a knife. Of course, we could have then developed a drama about finding Max, but it would be difficult to run that without descending into potentially silly non-activities for the pupils searching non-existent places. They do go to the shed his mother talks of, but there draw a blank, apart from the arrival of a figure they take to be him , hide to surprise him, only to find it is his sister.

Instead they have the responsibility to confront Max and make him aware of his problem, his behaviour and the mother’s attitudes. Max’s return and the confrontation with the Lost & Found agency is the central event of the drama, the moment that the previous stages have been building to and the event from which the challenges, the decisions will arise. The aim of the drama is now clearly focused, to have the children explore and consider a boy’s unacceptable behaviour and look at a parent–child relationship, to give advice and solve problems. The resolution of the issues is the final stage of the drama.

The pupils have to show him the error of his ways and how other people, his mother, his sister, really feel about him.

The ingredients of planning
● Language Development – the medium of drama and hence the key impetus to Speaking and Listening . 

● Spiritual, Social, Moral, Cultural, Personal – there is usually this capability in any drama. The very reflective nature of the work, going out of role to examine the meaning of situations and events in the drama, promotes metacognition.
● Comparing the drama version of the story and the original myth.
.

Strong material
They can be an expert community, the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role. The ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role gives the pupils status and an objective viewpoint to consider situations often fraught with emotions and opposing attitudes. 

Tension points – risks – theatre moments

Tension provides the momentum that pushes the class, demands a response, engages them. Tension can be planned in, but needs to be seized on according to how the class react. With a class of 10-year-olds the tension was created on the spur of the moment by the teacher’s use of the potential of the planned situation itself.

The tension rose even though, or maybe because of the theatricality of the moment. Tension here is produced by the collective imagination, what the consequence of discovery would be.

Building context

Usually having one main location helps the drama to be properly focused. It started with the tomb and we planned to spend time creating it and its wall paintings as the early belief building activity.

That consolidation of the context strengthened the integrity of the drama and helped structure it, as you will see from the full plan.

Building belief

It is the need to get the class to trust in the teacher and what the teacher is creating. Only if you create the belief that there is something in it for them. Use of TiR can interest and build belief.

All of the ingredients contribute to building belief

taking the cloth that becomes the baby in ‘The Governor’s Child’ and deliberately rolling it up into the shape in front of them and asking what it is representing.

In delivering the drama we have to

We have to remove ideas that may get in the way of the drama working , but doing it in such a way that the pupil offering the idea genuinely does not feel rejected in the process and is willing to continue to make suggestions.

As such we have to plan the key moments for critical decisions for the class.

There are teacher decisions and pupil decisions and we have to be clear about the timing and nature of both, why one should be the teacher’s and why another should be the pupils’. Many teacher decisions are built into the plan as givens, otherwise there will be no clear direction for the learning. What we embed as non-negotiable in the planning of a drama tightens the focus and ensures a concentration on the particularity of the main event. We must plan space for real dialogue, which will involve listening to and using, where possible, their ideas .

The success of the lesson will be how closely the pupils follow my plan and deliver what I have planned. 

The drama conventions, strategies and techniques
There are many techniques for structuring the stages of a drama.

Planning as a collaborative activity

In our team, one member may have the beginning of an idea and sketch that idea out, but usually turns to another member of the team for feedback and a planning discussion. This functions as a means to bounce ideas, to see flaws and to provide insights into the potential for learning. The complexity of drama means a multiplicity of possible learning outcomes. For example, when planning developments to the original ‘Macbeth’ drama, we wanted to add the ‘Witch’ section.

We began with the idea of facing the class with the ambiguity and teasing language that the witches in the original demonstrate. One of us, A, had ideas about the Witch arriving at the castle door, a vagrant, carrying something.

Road testing the first version

Participants in dramas offer us as the teachers insights into ways of using an established structure. Once we have the beginnings of a drama we need to try ideas out. When a class are responding to strong moments in a drama they not only provide ideas for future use, but also show us the sections which are weak and need replanning. Their positive responses reveal new possibilities and can often become incorporated as ‘givens’ when the drama is used in future.

He had to manage the situation carefully to avoid the drama deteriorating. It was clear that whilst that attitude in Max might recreate ideas from the book, the entry needed to be more subtle and the context of Max’s adventure built more in order to work.

Another example of the class offering new ideas as to what to do and the form to use when you run the drama occurred in a run of ‘Daedalus and

King Minos what they have found out about Daedalus’s plan, we were out of role discussing the pros and cons and putting forward powerful arguments on both sides when one pupil said, I’d like to see two of the servants discussing what to do. This method of moving forward can then be taken as the planned possibility for exploring the issue in future use of the drama. The group even took the drama further themselves. The quality of the drama develops in these ways.

You can choose to incorporate them in future versions of the drama.

There are two main types of this sort of classroom drama that have evolved

‘living through drama’, where the pupils face the events at a sort of life rate in the here and now, and ‘episodic drama’, or strategy-based drama, where the class are led by the teacher in creating situations and events through specific techniques or strategies and where chronology is more broken. Of course, most dramas have a mixture of the styles, but the younger or more inexperienced a class, the more ‘living through’ will dominate to create the tensions and challenges more directly.

Finally – the key decisions

With all plans you need to ensure that a tension moment comes early to spur the interest of the group and that a TiR features early to model the commitment and seriousness of the drama.

CHAPTER 3

3. How to Generate Quality Speaking and Listening

What is speaking and listening ?
When a pupil is speaking and listening properly, he or she is able to see how each contribution arises from what has already been said. Reading and writing come later in language learning and should not come until the child’s head is full of the words that reading and writing will demand.

Dialogic teaching

English pupils, in this characterisation at least, are individuals struggling to survive in the crowd. The context within which mistakes are admissible, as in the Russian classrooms, greatly reduces this element of gamesmanship. This explains the apparent paradox of why, although the climate of Russian classrooms tends to be viewed by Western observers as authoritarian, even oppressive, Russian pupils are eager to answer questions while in the supposedly more democratic climate of English classrooms they may be reluctant to do so.

Talk, being central to the development of the brain, must be a priority for teachers. Alexander promotes dialogic teaching as the most powerful form of talk in the classroom.

Drama shares the elements listed above, and it promotes pupils’ thinking because of the quality, dynamics and content of talk that can develop. It is about pupils having the desire to speak rather than being required to speak.

Drama gives the pupils plenty of opportunities to think through speaking and listening. It promotes speech from the pupils because they want to speak, not because they are being asked to speak.

What does dialogic teaching demand of the teacher?

One of the key changes that drama brings is a different position for the teacher. If the teacher is the young boy, Daedalus, who has taken his father’s secret project design, without his permission, and the pupils are the family servants, then they have important decisions to make about what they do with this knowledge. They will talk to Daedalus in a way that they can never talk to a teacher. The teacher working through drama is intervening as teacher but also as other roles within the drama, roles that are models and anti-models to promote the pupils’ language in ways that teacher language cannot.

They are framed within the drama context to oppose or sort out this behaviour, all the more motivated by the fact it is their teacher behaving in this way through the use of role. So the teacher is able to talk and interact with the pupils in many ways and with many purposes. The teacher engages with the class and their contributions help build the fictional world. The magical world of the fiction and the parallel real-world that we exist in can help each other, so that the language the pupils use in the drama can be looked at from the real world when we stop the drama.


How is listening of high quality taught through drama?

Drama is the creation of meanings in action and pupils have to struggle all the time to make sense of what is going on around them so that they can engage with it. In drama we can get new levels of listening because of the pupils’ interest in the problem-solving of the drama itself. Pupils feel valued in drama and consequently have more confidence in what they want to say and show more respect to what other contributors to the drama say. In order for drama to work the teacher has to listen very closely as well, to see where the pupils are, to pick up what the pupils are offering and use it within the drama.

Transcript from a session on Daedalus and Icarus

The teacher is taking the role of Daedalus and another adult the role of Icarus at the beginning of this. The class are enrolled as the servants of Minos the King.

CHAPTER 4

4. How to Use Drama for Inclusion and Citizenship

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between inclusion and drama as a pedagogical approach. 

The concept of drama and keeping pupils safe

There is a perception of drama dealing with issues in a safe way because it uses fictional contexts. 

 In teaching, whether working inside or outside fiction, we need to be constantly aware of the need to treat pupils in ways that demonstrate respect for persons and awareness of their particular social and emotional circumstances in that learning situation.

On one level, the teacher must make the content interesting and appropriate for the pupils, that is, it should be related to their needs and structured in such a way as to grab and hold their attention. 

The risk of making mistakes does not automatically vanish because we are using role-play. The principle of protecting pupils from humiliation and embarrassment remains inside and outside the fictional world of drama, in fact, it underpins good teaching and helps raise the social health of the class by modelling positive ways of treating each other.

He suggests three ways to deal with a topic indirectly

The drama teacher plans dramas with these devices in order to shift and adjust the emotional proximity of the class in relation to the social event they are examining. 

We can illustrate this by looking at a drama without structured protection by the teacher and then comparing this with the same drama with devices planned into it.

Later in the drama one child is asked to stand upon a chair with the label

They are totally inappropriate as ways of structuring a drama lesson. We have no right to subject pupils to this kind of treatment because it is under the cloak of drama and fiction. 

The stopping and starting of the drama helps defuse the raw emotion and allows pupils to reflect, negotiate and manipulate the fiction to clarify their own understanding. 

Let us draw an analogy with the social ritual of the funeral services in

With the protection of the class role – people who can help worried parents

– he was able to distance himself from the drama being about him, using the given role of someone who can help parents of pupils with autism.

Having a voice in society

If we return to the central idea in drama of creating an ‘as if’ world we see that it is a world that is, at least in part, created by the participants through their ideas. 

There will be a relative congruence or not in the relationship between these components. Whether what I think is close to what I say, whether what I say bears any relationship to what I do will shift in relation to the social circumstances of the moment. 

One can imagine that more secure pupils whose self-worth is high will present a more congruent view of these three factors. If they do not, they may feel the wrath of others in the group, not necessarily during the lesson but afterwards.

If the concept of ‘giving pupils a voice’ means enabling pupils to express their feelings, their ideas and their suggestions for action, then drama holds the possibility of being a truly inclusive experience. 

 How to approach Citizenship and PSHE through drama: practicing being part of a society

They can make trips out or relevant visitors can be brought in to make pupils aware of the important structures and ideas that community involves. 

When we consider that drama can link citizenship with personal and social education, and spiritual, moral, social and cultural education, then we can begin to understand the importance of drama as a teaching method.

So any whole class drama carried out in the methodology represented in this book is strong on the model of democracy, corporate learning, responsibility and tolerance.

A drama for teaching about citizenship

If we want the pupils to experience a particular political idea or social situation, the fictional world of drama can provide that situation efficiently and with an immediacy that reality cannot provide. 

We can see from a summary of the drama that a number of citizenship issues are immediately contextualised and presented to the children. 

Drama ensures that they have to explore them and get involved in them, to challenge and seek solutions in a number of ways.

We can see that the ideas listed cover important aspects of the Citizenship curriculum. In addition, the content of a specific drama can be planned to highlight key Citizenship areas.  

CHAPTER 5

5. How to Generate Empathy in a Drama

And later describe these learning outcomes for 7- and 8-year-olds

They will continue to build on their capacity for empathy and on their awareness and management of feelings, particularly fearfulness in relation to meeting new challenges . Drama makes one of its greatest contributions in modelling and generating this sort of learning. 

Drama works by focusing upon the particular and moving from the particular to the general. To understand drama’s relationship with empathy we need to deconstruct the process of empathetic behaviour and see how this is replicated in drama.

A working definition of empathy

We need a definition that not only belongs to the real world but can be replicated inside the drama lesson. Pupils will then be able to empathise without having to bear witness to or have the actual life experiences of those to whom they are directing their empathy.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, suggests that ‘empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion’.

Can we plan for generating empathy?
We can generate empathy through structuring roles and creating a drama frame where it is likely to happen.

The role of the pupils

While placing the pupils in a positive, problem-solving and high status role gives them the power to make judgements about people’s circumstances from a positive point of view, it is also possible to generate empathy for the dispossessed. Later in the workhouse drama the pupils shift their role to inmates, demonstrating life in the workhouse through tableaux based upon the workhouse rules.

The role of the teacher

The role of the pupils needs in the first place to be a community one so that they see the situation from one point of view and are not divided in their attitude. Just as the role of the pupils gives them a perspective from which they can empathise, the role you plan for the teacher is also part of structuring for an empathetic response. 

 The modelling by the teacher of roles who are unable to empathise enables the pupils to witness their shortcomings and therefore have a sense of how disabled they are without these skills.

CHAPTER 6

6. How to Link History and Drama

We are not historians, and in writing this chapter we shared our approach to using drama to teach history with Professor Hilary Cooper at St Martins.

Dressing up to go back in time

One popular method of ‘empathising’ in the teaching of history takes the form of dressing up in costumes from the past. Schools across the country plan days of ‘visiting the past’ by dressing up and sometimes actually going to historic sites in their costumes. Teachers may even be locked into roles from the past , thinking, misguidedly in our view, this will generate ‘empathy’ in the pupils with people from history. 

 The drama then has an assessment function, as knowledge gained in the research activities will be exposed during the drama.

Balancing the tensions – stories and history

In using drama we are using a dense form of teaching, because the currency of drama is language, listening and speaking, and we have a cross-curricular approach that will touch upon learning objectives from several areas of the curriculum. Let’s begin with the English and the History National Curriculum learning objectives.

In this way drama confronts pupils with the ideas, beliefs and values of people from the past. The juxtaposition of values and beliefs from the past with pupils’ own values and gives them the opportunity to ‘use techniques of dialogic talk to explore ideas, topics or issues’ through the prism of history and the safety of fictional contexts.  Continuity and change, similarity and difference are key concepts in the teaching of history and through drama these are made concrete experiences. 

The drama begins as a history lesson, with the idea of taking on roles in the lesson introduced from the beginning.

What skills do they need?

The discussion of the role of the historian is a preparation for this. We need to frame the class’s thinking in such a way that they are constrained to think like a historian.

This approach replicates Facts – Hypothesis – Research. The facts are those statements that the whole class can agree are indisputable, for example, ‘there are five boys and one man in the photograph’. 

 Modelling the roles

Part of the process of setting this up is the modelling of roles by the teacher before asking pupils to take on this responsibility. 

Setting up the boys

Avoid any names of pupils in the class. In the photo some of the boys do look like brothers, others do not. In Saõ Paulo gangs of street children go round together and refer to each other as ‘uncle’, hinting at a family-like grouping.

Whole class participation – a sculpture of children living on the streets

In this drama each frame takes the class closer to the children who are the subject of our historical investigations. The next task is to engage the whole class as a sculpture of the children living on the streets.

Who would be furthest away from the fire on this freezing night, December 24th

Find a position you can hold still for at least a minute. Welcome to our new exhibit on the theme of children in the nineteenth century. In the next room we have an interactive exhibit, a sculpture of children who were known as street children. 

 Whole class improvisation

We can use the sculpture and thought-tracking work as a starting point for a whole class improvisation or ‘living through’ part of the drama. I am going to take the role of a wealthy gentleman who comes across these street children on a bitterly cold night.

The teacher begins to narrate

A wealthy gentleman was making his way home. Dozens of children huddled together desperately trying to keep warm in front of the dying embers of a fire. He immediately organised his servants to bring soup, bowls and bread to the children and as they greedily ate bread and soup he sat with them.

Teacher as narrator

The next section is a transcript of some 10- and 11-year-olds at this point in the drama.

The teacher realises the class is too far away and that only the children close to him are responding verbally to him, although they are all engaged with what is going on. I’ve never heard such things.
The drama approach must be seen as a particular pedagogical approach to the subject. Drama needs to be recognized for what it does best, which is to negotiate meanings through engagement with imagined realities.

History as a metaphor for now – the global dimension

The issue of street children is an example of one of these. I came to Delhi with my mother and her second husband. Even if I find out where my mother is I will not return to her. I think I will study well and then help children like myself.

We can see from this that the ‘Street Children’ drama acts as a metaphor for now and enables us to open up issues that may be hindered by prejudice in a way that uses history as a prism through which to view global issues.

CHAPTER 7

7.    How to Begin Using Assessment of Speaking and Listening (and Other English Skills)  through Drama?

What is assessment?

The primary aim of assessment is to provide information about the development and achievement of those involved in the teaching and learning situation. Assessment records evidence related to students' abilities, both actual and potential, and charts their progression.

 Drama as a context for speaking and listening

·    Negotiating and co-operating with others in the creation of drama work and the roles within it.

·       Expressing imaginative ideas when contributing to the drama work development.

·     Taking and using effectively the opportunities within the drama that require oral and aural communication.

·    Modifying, selecting and relating language and vocabulary to the changing roles, moods and situations in the drama work.

·    Controlling effectively oral and aural communication particularly in challenging sequences of drama work, e.g. questioning, dilemmas, unfair or emotional situations.

·     Responding with enjoyment and enthusiasm to the exploration of speech, gesture and sound.

·       Contributing effectively to critical evaluation of their own work and that of others.

 What is the purpose of the assessment?

To: give feedback to the pupil, report to another teacher, and report to a parent.

         Formative assessment – honoring what children can do

In the formative role of assessment we need to be feeding back to the pupils during and after the drama. We might stop a drama and say to everyone, Can you see what Nafisa’s question made the Soldier say? That is very important here. Let’s see what the outcome is. Then we are building esteem and boosting achievement.

      How do we collect data more formally?

Assessment in this context is the detailed study of episodes of speaking and listening. We need to describe what we see and teachers need to operate as researchers of the dialogue in their classrooms. Educational research is becoming more encouraging of detailed description of events, particularly when looking at classrooms in the action research method we are advocating.

       Other issues to consider

We have to manage the exchanges in a drama so that the naturally dominant voices in the classroom learn to listen and we allow others space to talk. However, there is an unhelpful myth about speaking and listening that speaking is the major partner, with the accompanying vain aim for classroom talk that all must contribute equally.

       Capturing the samples of speaking and listening

There is readily available technology that can record work and allow us to consider it at greater length after the event, particularly video recording. This is an approach we have been taking for a long time now; it provides evidence that we use to assess our own performance as teachers working in drama. Again, if teachers are paired to do the assessment, one can handle the camera while the other teaches.

      Talk for writing – the wholeness of communication

In a school with a strong policy on speaking and listening there will be major gains in other areas. We can get clear evidence for assessment of the effectiveness of speaking and listening, particularly the latter, from other forms of communication like writing or art work. In addition the writing itself can benefit.