1. Drama as Education
Susan Hillyard B. Ed.(Hons)

2. Abstract
 Educational Drama: a discipline for all in the regular
curriculum
 Drama is education: language teaching can be
enhanced by good educational practice
 English language: the big E of EDUCATION through
a language rather than the small e of just teaching a
language as a system
 Educational drama: a means to developing true
communication using role play and improvisation as the
nearest form of real-life human interaction

3. Drama as Education
Questions for Today
What is a teacher?
What is education?
What is drama?
What is theatre?

4. Education
The moment whereby all the
understanding you had before is
sharpened into a new
juxtaposition.

5. Teacher
One who creates learning
situations for others. A person
whose energies and skills are
at the service, during the
professional situation, of the
pupils.

6. Drama
Anything which involves people in active role-taking
situations in which attitudes, not characters, are the chief
concern, lived at life-rate (that is discovery at this
moment, not memory-based) and obeying the natural
laws of the medium:
· a willing suspension of disbelief
· agreement to pretence
· employing all past experiences
· employing any conjecture of
imagination
to create a living, moving picture of life which aims at
surprise and discovery for the participants rather than for
any onlookers.

7. Theatre
The work of writing, producing
and acting in plays where specialist
actors rehearse a script for a given
period of time, following the
director’s instructions with the aim
of pleasing and entertaining or
educating an audience. It is a pure
art form.

8. Quotes from Dorothy Heathcote
“So we need to train our teachers to structure for a
learning situation to happen rather than a
sharing of information in a ‘final’ way to take
place. We have to train them to withhold their
expertise to give their students opportunity for
struggling with problems, before they come to
the teacher’s knowledge, and to reach an answer
because of the work they do rather than the
listening they have done”

9.  “We have mistaken casualness for the ability to
get on with people. Casualness gets you nowhere
in teaching….unselective casualness is death to
the teacher”
 “I really think it’s a shame that we’ve set up our
schools so that children don’t feel they can take
power”

10. “One of the most rejuvenating things is to give
everyone a fresh start each morning. The ability
to do this is part of the condition of innocence. I
think innocence has a chance of bringing with it
enormous gaiety and trust, so that you walk into
the classroom clean every morning, however
mucky you are at the end of the day.”

12. “The child laws passed to save children from
exploitation in mines, sweat shops and up
chimneys, have reaped a whirlwind which any
adolescent recognizes at least by instinct if not
by cognition, that we have successfully also
‘protected’ our young from influencing society
in any way which seems to matter. We have
made them toys of society when small, and
exploited them shamelessly as consumers when
large.”

13. Questions I consider
1. The skill
2. My voice
3. My knowledge
4. Authenticity
5. Divisions
6. Symbols
7. Group Talk
8. Back Seat Teaching

14. Types of Drama
 Roles: where a person is the challenge
n Mantle of the expert: where the class is set upon a task
in such a way that they function as experts
n Analogy: where one problem, a real one, is revealed by
an exact parallel to it.
n Text: where interpretation of someone else’s work is the
means of learning
n Dance forms: where emphasis on non-verbal signals,
experiences, and explanations are the means of
discovery.
n Simulation: where the simulation of life is made.
n Games: where the rules lead and control the play

15. THEATRE VERSUS DRAMA
FRAGMENTATION VERSUS HOLISM
THEATRE DRAMA
Centred on the script Centred on the student
Words of the playwright Student’s own language
Directed by the teacher Directed by the group
Repeated rehearsals Spontaneous/improvised
Chosen by the teacher Negotiated by the group
Related to art Related to life itself
Emphasizes the product Emphasizes the process
Externally directed Internally directed
Inactive except for the performers Active for all
External meaning Internal meaning
Teacher as interpreter Active construction from knowledge
Competitive Egalitarian
Fixed parameters Based on experience/experimentation
Fixed timetable Natural timetable/rhythm

16. QUALITY EDUCATION
Brings three things together:
1. The matter of the mind of the people
3. The matter of the being of the people
5. The matter of the doing of the people

17. Life Skills
Key: “…………..” means “drama is education because”
1) People have to work out the lives they are pretending to live
in a together way.
So……… drama depends on co-operation.
2) People have to employ what they already know, about the life
they are trying to live
So……… drama puts life experience to use.
So……… drama makes factual experiences (information)
come into active employment.

18. 3) People have to be able to live in two worlds at once and not
get them mixed up
So……… drama uses fiction and fantasy but makes
people more aware of reality.
4) People have to agree to sustain a common understanding of
what they are making together no matter how separately they
may appear to be thinking. Footballers have to do this too –
they don’t end up all playing different games either!
So……… drama stresses agreeing to all trying to sustain
mutual support for each other while allowing people a
chance to work differently – to bring personal ideas to a
whole.

19. 5) People have to express thinking, feeling, actions to each
other. If they don’t then no one in the group knows what is
going on.
So……… drama makes people find precision in
communication
6) Drama uses objects but often in a symbolic way. Chairs have
to become thrones, but also these ‘thrones’ become the symbol
of the king when he is absent.
So ……… drama stresses the use of reflection. Symbols
become ordinary, but the ordinary also is seen to be
symbolic.

20. 7) People have to interpret the actions of others but often
in unfamiliar circumstances. You don’t meet dragons
everyday; you don’t have to be skilled goldsmiths; you
don’t have to battle with kings – or hospital matrons!
You don’t have to argue with warlocks; you don-t have
to face the rigours of great journeys nor cope with
enemies who seek to take your life.
So ……… drama introduces you to living out crisis in a
testing kind of way. It tests your attitudes and your
present capacities.

21. What is the ‘new’ trunk of the
Tree of Knowledge
1. A personal monitoring system.
2. The ability to see there are many faces to ‘truth’.
3. The understanding of the difference between the
outer form and inner form of things so we are not
fooled.

22. 1. The understanding of the 4 faces of time
i. Clock time which rules us in a community
ii. The great time that is our feeling of time
iii. How the world is speeding up time
iv. Body time
2. The skill of observation – to look, to read, to
understand what you see.
3. Perceptual skill – how you learn.
4. Responsibility.
5. Energy and understanding of your own energy
rhythm.

23. Creative Practice in Teaching
Requisites:
• The drive to want to do it
• The feedback to satisfy the having done it
• The content of the doing of it
• Signals to communicate the doing
• The rituals of going about it
Considerations:
• Social Learning
• Factual Learning
• Reflective Learning
• Curriculum Pressures

24. I Pledge Myself to:
1. Avoid withholding information in order to ‘spin out’
my knowledge.
2. Allow students to take decisions and to test them in
action.
3. Allow students to prove to themselves that they
understand the nature of their own functioning as
teachers, thus starting a lifelong process.
4. Allow the students to prove to me and themselves that
they will still be, however experienced, student of
teaching.
5. Constantly review my own priorities in teaching.

25. 1. Prove that my ideas are open to review by the
students.
2. Give evidence of my ability and readiness to listen.
3. Give evidence of having patience, positive and
unfailing, so long as students give evidence of
working.
4. Be honest at all levels of praising and criticizing work
– my own and others.
5. Be a ‘restless spirit’, understanding when to move
forward, press for more effort, or be content with
present achievement, yet give each moment of
achievement its due.

26. 1. Be interesting.
2. To be professional always. By this I mean to
remember why I am doing the job; to be task-oriented,
not coming between the student and the task in false
self-interested ways.
3. Never to permit myself to be bored.
4. Ensure that the students understand that I am
concerned with training to teach in school – with
realistic knowledge of the problems of teaching in
ordinary school circumstances.
D. Heathcote, “Training Needs for the future”, 1972

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28. WISDOM
The high quality culture at the
top of this tree contains what
we know illuminated from
below by what we are
1. how I observe and use what is
1. what kind of worker am I?
kindled by observation
2. the many faces of truth
THE 2. perception and imagination
3. outer romantic form and inner
SUPPORT 3. attitudes to responsibility
classic form
SYSTEM 4. energy to carry through things
4. the four faces of time
(THE TRUNK) begun
*how we accept
*attitudes from and are accepted
culture and family by others
*trying and failing *skills of reading, *the way we look at
*how we care *quality of
and succeeding numbering already people and things,
about what we do already established started, well or ill our perceptions what we do
THE ROOT SYSTEM

29. Drama is Life
 Life is Drama
English is becoming Life