A Reflective Practitioner's Guide to (Mis)Adventures in Drama Education - or - What Was I Thinking? (Theatre in Education) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783204737 ISBN 13: 9781783204731

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

This collection of essays from many of the world's preeminent drama education practitioners captures the challenges and struggles of teaching with honesty, humour, openness and integrity. Collectively the authors possess some two hundred years of shared experience in the field, and each essay investigates the mistakes of best-intentions, the lack of awareness, and the omissions that pock all of our careers. The authors ask, and answer quite honestly, a series of difficult and reflexive questions: What obscured our understanding of our students' needs in a particular moment? What drove our professional expectations? And how has our practice changed as a result of those experiences? Modelled on reflective practice, this book will be an essential, everyday guide to the challenges of drama education.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Duffy, Ed.D., is head of the master of arts in teaching program in theatre education at the University of South Carolina.

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A Reflective Practitioner's Guide to (Mis)Adventures in Drama Education - or - What Was I Thinking?

By Peter Duffy

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-473-1

Contents

Foreword, 
Introduction, 
Part One: Hoops of My Making, 
Chapter 1: "Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near": A Letter of Apology Brian S. Heap, 
Chapter 2: The Vicious Circle: A Study in Stupidity Peter Duffy, 
Chapter 3: Teaching in Role: Just Another Name is Never Enough Pamela Bowell, 
Chapter 4: Storying the Dramas of Teaching Drama Christine Hatton, 
Chapter 5: Giant Mistakes Patrice Baldwin, 
Chapter 6: "A Lord of the Flies Moment": The Consequences of Wrong Gaming Directions Johnny Saldaña, 
Chapter 7: Teaching by Terror: Ordeal, Ego and Education John O'Toole, 
Part Two: Assumptions and Expectations: Failing Better, 
Chapter 8: Kindling Fires and Facing Giants: Learning About Drama from Children with Special Needs Robert Colby, 
Chapter 9: An Alaskan Education: From Service to Sustainability Kathryn Dawson, 
Chapter 10: What Was I Thinking: Why Am I Thinking As I Do? Gustave J. Weltsek, 
Chapter 11: Encountering the Unexpected and Extending the Horizons of Expectation: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Developing Teaching Practice Michael Anderson, 
Chapter 12: Democracy Over-Ruled, Or How to Deny Young Children's Agency and Voice Through Drama! Julie Dunn, 
Chapter 13: What You Don't Know CAN Hurt You Christina Marín, 
Chapter 14: "Texting" in the Drama Classroom: Pedagogical Adjustments to Unfamiliar Cultures from a Guest Artist Perspective Allison Manville Metz, 
Chapter 15: The Day that Shrek Was Almost Rescued: Doing Process Drama with Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder Carmel O'Sullivan, 
Chapter 16: Failing Better Juliana Saxton, 
Afterword: Looking Back to See Ahead David Booth, 
Contributor Biographies, 

CHAPTER 1

"Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near": A Letter of Apology

Brian S. Heap

Dear Erstwhile Students,

This epistle is addressed to you by way of an apology that is long overdue. How time flies! I was given a stark reminder of this recently when I was approached in one of the parking-lots at my university by a very polite and helpful security guard who addressed me by name and asked whether I remembered coming to his school to conduct a drama class. It is always a little embarrassing when, at my stage in life, adults who bear little resemblance to the children they once were approach you and still appear hopeful that you will remember them. However, I do seem to have the uncanny ability to maintain a 100 per cent recall of the many dramas in which I have participated over time and once the security guard had prompted me with a brief description of the content of the drama in question, I realized it had taken place over 30 years before! Clearly such experiences remain vividly in the memories of many people, as does a particular one in mine, although for very different reasons, I fear, and for which I now feel the urgent need to atone.

You students who were with me on that fateful day must also be all quite grown up by now, and you may even have had the good fortune to develop into fine, well-adjusted individuals. If you have, and I hope that you have, it can be no thanks to me and my misguided attempts to enrich your lives through the experience of drama. It's my own fault entirely, and I take full responsibility for my lack of competence. I really should have listened much more carefully to the briefing that I was offered ahead of time by your school administration. If I had done so then perhaps I would not have agreed to conduct that excruciating drama session in the first place. But then again, in my arrogance I considered myself to be both eminently well-qualified and up to the task. As far as I was concerned, you were simply a regular group of Jamaican primary school children, and, after all, I had already been working in the Jamaican primary school system for many years, so by then I had already worked with thousands of children just like you. I had also, by the time we met, been training teachers and supervising teaching practice in some very challenging situations across Jamaica. I had frequently travelled to schools in a variety of rural settings. Indeed, I had come to know the Jamaican parish of St. Mary like the back of my hand, with its schools in districts, villages and towns with names like Castleton, Devon Pen, Broadgate, Scott's Hall, Annotto Bay, Port Maria and Galina. Your school, I felt, must be just like these were, albeit in the more urban setting of Jamaica's capital city of Kingston, and with its own particular set of challenges.

I considered myself then, and still to this day, to be a committed teacher, and one who tries very hard never to stop learning. I had even taken off for a year to trek to the northern English city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to study with that consummate teacher and educational philosopher Dorothy Heathcote. That experience in itself had been a baptism of fire, for it was there that I first became aware of just how inadequate I was as a teacher. Many years later I am, of course, still processing most of the things that happened during that year of study, but by the time of my encounter with you students, I had already begun dabbling about with my own personal interpretations of Dorothy's concepts of teacher in role (TIR) and mantle of the expert with what I judged then to be a reasonable amount of success. So I really was not in the least bit fazed when the request arrived asking me to come and work with you.

As I recall, I had been invited by your school administration to conduct a drama session as part of a Summer Reading Programme that you were attending. In a follow-up session, one of your parents made the startling revelation that might have been very helpful to know in advance. The parent told me that so many of you student participants really associated reading with punishment. In my mind's eye, I began to conjure up a somewhat fanciful vision of a Tenth Circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno, where the unfortunate Damned would be condemned to suffer for Eternity sitting quietly reading their books!

You may have noticed the heading at the beginning of this missive. The first part consists of a Jamaican proverb that illustrates something of the economy of expression Jamaicans have in communicating deep traditional wisdom. "Chicken Merry, Hawk deh near" speaks to the fact that whenever, as humans, we become just the slightest bit complacent, something is very likely to happen to pull the rug from under our feet. And really, I should have known better. Alarm bells should have gone off when I heard the term "multi-grade" used to describe you as a group. Multi-grade schools still exist in many parts of rural Jamaica, particularly in districts where the population is too small to support a complement of full-grade classrooms. In the Jamaican multi-grade school, typically one teacher works with a combination of first and second grade students, another with grades three and four, and yet another with grades five and six. Often the teachers will be working together in one large space with their individual classes separated by free-standing partitions or chalkboards, so that the sounds of a music lesson may, on occasion, freely intermingle with the doleful chanting of the times tables, in a cacophony of pedagogic industry.

In my careless state of complacency, I did not pay sufficient heed to my briefing, and so had not fully...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783204737
• ISBN 13: 9781783204731
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 294
• Herausgeber: Duffy Peter
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland