Chapter 1 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. One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role (TiR).
Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. However, it is our experience that when a teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children, so that there are less control problems because they become engaged.
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 class were calling out and not listening properly. She was talking over them and trying to teach without getting their full attention. Then she explained that they could ask questions of one of the roles from the story and that she was going to become that role when she sat down. She picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as the role signifier. When she sat down as Hermia, they were focused entirely on her and were listening very closely, putting hands up to ask questions and taking turns in a very orderly way.
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.
Teacher as storyteller
The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. 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. The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach.
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. It is the negotiable and dynamic elements of the relationship between drama and narrative that liberate the pupils and the teacher from merely retelling the known story.
A class can take part in a drama where all of them know the story, where none of them knows the story, or a mixture of both. As long as some fundamental planning strategies are observed, knowledge of the story is not a barrier to participation. Broadly these pre-requisites are:
1. An awareness of those elements of the story that will not be changed – and agreements about these must be made with the class at the beginning or during the drama.
2. willingness to move away from the fixed narrative to an exploration of the narrative.
3. If narrative consists of roles, fictional contexts, the use of symbols and events then the teacher needs to hold some of those elements true and consistent with the story so far.
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, so that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions.
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.
Then run the hot-seating. The dialogue might go something like this:
Class member in role as parent: Where are the other children?
TiR as the boy left behind: It’s not fair!
Parent: What do you mean, it’s not fair?
The boy: Them! They get to go into the fairground and I don’t! Some friends I’ve
got. So much for Joe and Kerry. Why couldn’t they wait? They could see I had a
stone in my shoe and had to take it out. I couldn’t keep up.
Stop and come out of role and discuss what they have found out. Negotiate what they need to ask next. At this point some questions about what the little boy saw will emerge. Then go back into role.
The boy: You should have seen it! Lights, big dipper, toffee apples. Oh! the smell of the toffee apples … and all free. He was standing at the entrance shouting ‘It’s all free. Help yourself. Any ride, any food, anything you want you can have.’ It’s just not fair!
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.
Teaching from within
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.
OoR is very important as a way of negotiating the intent and meaning of the role and is the way the teacher can best control and manage learning. It is very important to get the participants to look at and interpret what is going on, frequently by stepping out of the drama. Depth in drama depends on the very clear and regular use of OoR negotiation so that the awareness of the co-existence of two worlds is effective at all times. Children commit to the fictional world of the drama but need always to be aware that it is fiction and to step outside it often to look at what they are doing.
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 requirements of working in role
The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the work and develop it. 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.
Here are two responses to considering the ‘audience’ position.
Audiences are people who make sense of what they see in front of them.
(Year One drama student)
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. It could be that they find this difficult or, my hunch is, they’re very good at it. (Experienced teacher watching a video of a class in a drama)
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.
Disturbing the class productively
Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus
The ownership also arises out of the way the teacher operates. 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.
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
The class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method. This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach. 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.
As the class feed back their responses and make possible development of the role’s importance the teacher must respond appropriately and therein lies the skill of the ‘subtle tongue’ and the possibility for authentic dialogue. The teacher must respond to these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the role.
At other times the class can be given more input to developing the idea of the TiR themselves directly. The class must be made to work to achieve the aim they have been given in the drama.
The teacher–taught relationship
In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. The learners are bound together as a group merely by being the learners and, of course, as there are more of them than there are of you, they hold the power. If the class decide as a group they do not want to learn and they wish to make your attempts to teach them impracticable, they can do it. The power in the classroom lies with the class.
There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama.
The authority role
The opposer role
The intermediate role
The needing help role
The ordinary person
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. One of the best ways to do that in drama work is to be inside the drama. Therefore, at the centre of the dramas that we include in this book, is the key teaching technique that is used, namely teacher in role (TiR).
Many teachers see TiR as a difficult activity, particularly with older children in the primary school. However, it is our experience that when a teacher takes a role he or she becomes ‘interesting’ to the children, so that there are less control problems because they become engaged.
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 class were calling out and not listening properly. She was talking over them and trying to teach without getting their full attention. Then she explained that they could ask questions of one of the roles from the story and that she was going to become that role when she sat down. She picked up a ribbon with a ring threaded on it and put it round her neck as the role signifier. When she sat down as Hermia, they were focused entirely on her and were listening very closely, putting hands up to ask questions and taking turns in a very orderly way.
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.
Teacher as storyteller
The teacher as a storyteller is something all primary school teachers will recognise. Good teachers slip easily into it and use it frequently. In its most observable guise it occurs when teaching the whole class and engaging them with a piece of fiction. 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. The connection between the teacher as storyteller and the teacher using drama, lies in the fact that they both use the generation of imagined realities in order to teach.
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. It is the negotiable and dynamic elements of the relationship between drama and narrative that liberate the pupils and the teacher from merely retelling the known story.
A class can take part in a drama where all of them know the story, where none of them knows the story, or a mixture of both. As long as some fundamental planning strategies are observed, knowledge of the story is not a barrier to participation. Broadly these pre-requisites are:
1. An awareness of those elements of the story that will not be changed – and agreements about these must be made with the class at the beginning or during the drama.
2. willingness to move away from the fixed narrative to an exploration of the narrative.
3. If narrative consists of roles, fictional contexts, the use of symbols and events then the teacher needs to hold some of those elements true and consistent with the story so far.
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, so that the teacher can be specific in answering their questions.
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.
Then run the hot-seating. The dialogue might go something like this:
Class member in role as parent: Where are the other children?
TiR as the boy left behind: It’s not fair!
Parent: What do you mean, it’s not fair?
The boy: Them! They get to go into the fairground and I don’t! Some friends I’ve
got. So much for Joe and Kerry. Why couldn’t they wait? They could see I had a
stone in my shoe and had to take it out. I couldn’t keep up.
Stop and come out of role and discuss what they have found out. Negotiate what they need to ask next. At this point some questions about what the little boy saw will emerge. Then go back into role.
The boy: You should have seen it! Lights, big dipper, toffee apples. Oh! the smell of the toffee apples … and all free. He was standing at the entrance shouting ‘It’s all free. Help yourself. Any ride, any food, anything you want you can have.’ It’s just not fair!
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.
Teaching from within
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.
OoR is very important as a way of negotiating the intent and meaning of the role and is the way the teacher can best control and manage learning. It is very important to get the participants to look at and interpret what is going on, frequently by stepping out of the drama. Depth in drama depends on the very clear and regular use of OoR negotiation so that the awareness of the co-existence of two worlds is effective at all times. Children commit to the fictional world of the drama but need always to be aware that it is fiction and to step outside it often to look at what they are doing.
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 requirements of working in role
The teacher, working in this way, is an important stimulus for the learning. It is not necessary to use role throughout the piece of work. It can be used judiciously to focus work at strategic points or to challenge particular aspects of the children’s perceptions whilst other techniques and conventions are used to support the work and develop it. 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.
Here are two responses to considering the ‘audience’ position.
Audiences are people who make sense of what they see in front of them.
(Year One drama student)
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. It could be that they find this difficult or, my hunch is, they’re very good at it. (Experienced teacher watching a video of a class in a drama)
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.
Disturbing the class productively
Discovery/uncovering – challenge and focus
The ownership also arises out of the way the teacher operates. 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.
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
The class working as a community is the key to the use of drama as a teaching method. This community is made most effective by the teacher participating in role. The art of teaching and learning should be a synthesis from a dialectical approach. 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.
As the class feed back their responses and make possible development of the role’s importance the teacher must respond appropriately and therein lies the skill of the ‘subtle tongue’ and the possibility for authentic dialogue. The teacher must respond to these responses in an authentic way, honouring how the class see the role.
At other times the class can be given more input to developing the idea of the TiR themselves directly. The class must be made to work to achieve the aim they have been given in the drama.
The teacher–taught relationship
In all teaching situations there exists a power relationship between the learners and the teacher. The learners are bound together as a group merely by being the learners and, of course, as there are more of them than there are of you, they hold the power. If the class decide as a group they do not want to learn and they wish to make your attempts to teach them impracticable, they can do it. The power in the classroom lies with the class.
There are five basic types of role and mostly can be illustrated from the ‘The Dream’ drama.
The authority role
The opposer role
The intermediate role
The needing help role
The ordinary person
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