Editorial
Welcome to the fourteenth issue of Drama Research! This is the second issue in our new format, and it has a truly international dynamic, featuring articles from Colombia, Greece, Norway and the USA as well as the UK.
One thing that all these countries have in common through recent experience is, of course, the global pandemic, and two of the research projects featured in this issue were conducted through this period of threat and social disruption.
In his article, Speech Bubbles and the Teaching Assistant: investigating the impact of a drama intervention on school support staff, Jonathan Barnes reports on a highly unusual research project, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, into the way that a Speech Bubbles drama project impacted on the life and work of Teaching Assistants (TAs) in Primary schools in the UK. Speech Bubbles (SB), now an independent charity, grew out of Speak Out at London Bubble theatre, based in South London and, as its name indicates, its mission is to enable young children to find, use and celebrate their voices through drama. As Barnes observes in his introduction:
Happiness matters and it matters hugely to learning.
In this project the focus was on the people who work with the children every day: their TAs, who have an important role to play in this respect:
We also know from health research, that unhappiness in early life results in poorer general health as well as poor educational outcomes (Marmot 2020). TAs have an important potential role in addressing these issues.
Despite their importance TAs are poorly rewarded, financially and professionally:
Despite training and qualification opportunities, most are relatively poorly paid, often untrained, and high percentages admit to reluctantly seeking better paid work (Unison 2021).
However, the pandemic posed the inevitable restrictions on sourcing evidence:
As a result of continuing restrictions and difficulties presented by the Covid 19 pandemic through 2020 and 2021, the research was based on 3, 30 – 40-minute phone calls to each of seven volunteer TAs from schools in London, Greater Manchester, and Kent.
The article provides a very clear insight into the way the drama activities, despite the restrictions, made a very positive impact, not only on the children and their work, but also on their personal lives:
The children are all heading in the same direction – improvement in confidence, questioning, answering questions, speaking in role…at first, they weren’t able to but now they can speak in character, put themselves in other people’s shoes. Back in class and playground they now work together collaboratively and imaginatively (TA 5.2).
It’s given me more confidence to express myself with children and with the teaching. What pushes me to get out of my shell is that I know some children will really benefit if I show confidence and take the lead and show them. Lack of confidence has definitely held me back and I don’t want that for them (TA 1.2).
This is a fascinating, well researched study into a very neglected area of everyday school life in the UK, conducted under the most difficult conditions.
Nancy Franco’s article, From a Theatrical Play to the Play of Life, focuses on the value of Youth Theatrein young people’s lives and on the ways that their involvement in it has enhanced their personal and professional lives. Part of her study was also conducted during the pandemic. Her research questions are:
Is there an existential relation between the childhood events around the theatre experience that enriches the biographical and professional experience as adults? How much of those earlier life experiences are constituents of their formative memories?
She takes as her focus the Festival Estudiantil de Teatro de Bogotá (Bogota Student Theatre Festival) which brings together school theatre groups from various regions of the country. During the pandemic, instead of cancelling, it moved to an online format:
In 2021, during the quarantine at The Victoria School due to the pandemic, I did the project Encontrando las Raíces Perdidas (Finding the Lost Roots). In it, the students assumed the role of executive producers. They managed to hold an online concert with 41 artists from various regions of the country and the world to raise funds for the children affected by Hurricane Iota in the islands of Providencia and Santa Catalina, part of the Colombian territory.
As with the TAs in the previous study, the impact has been quite remarkable. Typical responses to her research amongst her former students were:
The musicals at school were my whole life … They helped me realize who I was, and what I was truly passionate about, and it is because of them that I am where I am (Student 13, October 2021).
The importance of that space is that it allowed me to become what I wanted to be. For me, they were sacred spaces… (Student 16, November 19, 2021
This is a rare and welcome tribute to that rarely researched genre of drama, Youth Theatre, and Franco reminds us of its value, not only as an art form, but also as a humanising experience:
Theatre with children should be a space filled with growing creative desire, trust, and commitment, where everyone involved feels that they can push their limits. The limitation of resources propels clever solutions, as the ideas transformed by intelligent narrative and poiesis are catapulted by the longing desire to move others.
I think all of us who have led or have experienced participating in Youth Theatre will recognise the truth of this.
Also focusing on an aspect of Youth Theatre, James Chrismon and Maggie Marlin-Hess, theatre professors at a university in the United States, alert us to understandings and practices which support physical and emotional safeguarding for the young participants. Their article, Intimacy Direction Best Practices for School Theatre, focuses on
the current best practices in intimacy direction and consent-based work when working with minors in a secondary school setting.
For those unfamiliar with the process the authors explain:
Intimacy direction finds its roots in stage combat. While the two disciplines are very different, they both focus on physical boundaries, and intimacy direction extends that care to internal boundaries (Kamminga-Peck 2020).
The authors provide a comprehensive review of Safe, Brave and Negotiated spaces, the comparative advantages and limitations of each kind and alert us to the problem of ‘boundary blurring’:
Boundary blurring is when the separation between an actor and the character they are playing disappears and affects their everyday life off the stage.
They make a strong argument for teachers to develop Intimacy Direction practices, because of the dangers to the mental and emotional health of the young people:
Without proper tools to help students with challenging roles and navigating boundaries, they may experience being triggered or re-traumatised, which is an involuntary physical reaction to a real or perceived threat. This may manifest in dissociation, emotional numbing, panic attacks, suicidal tendencies, sleep disorders, eating disorders, uncontrolled crying, and angry outbursts (Vorbeck 2019).
At the heart of these safeguarding practices is the concept of consent:
In communicating consent, boundary management, and student self-advocacy in a negotiated space of creativity, secondary theatre teachers can help protect their students from re-traumatisation and mitigate autonomy in the theatre class and rehearsal space.
This is an important exploration of an issue that all Drama teachers and Youth Theatre leaders should become aware of and educate themselves about.
At the other end of the educational spectrum, Nick Mavroudis’s and Alkistis Kondoyianni’s article, Exploring National Identity Through Drama in Education, reports on a drama research project that they conducted with primary school children in Athens, Greece. Their research question was: Can drama in education contribute to the respect and acceptance of different national identities among students with different ethnic backgrounds?
In times like these, when questions of national sovereignty and identity are part of the mainstream political conversations of many countries, including the UK, very often with a divisive character, the focus of this study is very relevant and topical. As the authors observe:
Thus, the members of a national group identify themselves only in comparison or confrontation with another nation, with other national identities (Triantafyllidou 1998) and often through the process of identifying differences from other nationalities, emphasising differences rather than on similarities (Avdela 1997). Therefore, there is a strong political dimension in the national identity.
Using research tools including interviews, participatory observation, a researcher’s diary and children’s evaluation of the research
The purpose of the research was to investigate the effectiveness that a drama in education programme may have upon ensuring respect and acceptance of different national identities among children of different ethnic backgrounds.
The researchers found, at the start of the project that the students held reasonably positive attitudes towards the difference in nationality amongst their classmates, who came from vulnerable social backgrounds (refugees, immigrants, minorities, Roma) and have different ethnic, religious, linguistic and racial backgrounds:
Nine students are from the Muslim minority of Thrace origin, seven are of Albanian, one of Syrian, one of Afghani, one of Bulgarian and two of Greek origins. Five students are Roma of Albanian origin, and one from Thrace of Greek origin.
At the start of the project the students already held a reasonably positive attitude towards their classmates:
… I do not care that they (the students) are from different countries, I care that they are students and about their character.
The drama work was based mainly on the work of Augusto Boal:
As the activities of the Theatre of the Oppressed provide opportunities for participants to explore and transform their social environment they formed the core of the programme.
Engaging with these activities the group came to explore a particular imagined situation which focused on immigrants, who leave their homeland and arrive in their neighbourhood. During this session some in the group had the role of ‘locals’ who then termed the immigrants ‘foreigners’ and adopted attitudes of which they may have become recipients themselves at times:
At the moment when the foreigners appear, as the participants call the immigrants, the students declare: ‘they will take our jobs’, ‘they will beat us’, ‘they will spread dirty’, ‘they will kill us’, ‘they will steal from us’, while the emotions experienced during their reports were: ‘anxiety’, ‘panic’, ‘fear’.
One participant, in reflecting on this, provided the insight:
Local people are afraid of foreigners not because they are from a different country or because they will take their neighbourhood, but because foreigners are poor.
The net result of the project appeared to reinforce with the students that
… any activity of others affects their own lives, in the same way that their own actions have an impact on the lives of others. Thus, it is necessary to work for a society with social justice where there is no place for national (and not only) discrimination, a society of solidarity, understanding and empathy.
I think we can all agree with this.
The other contribution in this issue is made by Stig A. Eriksson whose essay, Reflections on ‘living through’ and ‘distancing’: a critical essay related to Heathcote’s and Brecht’s poetics, makes a well-researched defence of the work of the great educator, Dorothy Heathcote, in relation to that of the playwright, Bertolt Brecht.
The nub of the issue discussed is the use of the term ‘living through drama’
and addresses particularly understandings of the term initiated by the UK drama education pioneer David Davis in his publications (2005, 2014) and continued by his doctoral student Ádám Bethlenfalvy from Hungary in the book version of his Ph.D. dissertation (2020).
Eriksson frames his essay through two exploratory questions:
- • How is the term living through conceptionalised in Heathcote’s praxis?
- • Is living through drama an antithesis to the epic theatre style of Brecht and his use of distancing devises (Verfremdungen)?
Key to Eriksson’s argument is:
A problem raised by Davis and Bethlenfalvy is that a shift seems to have occurred in Heathcote’s work by which the gut-level-qualities of the early years have given way to more curriculum-based orientations.
Eriksson posits that they regret this ‘shift’ and attribute it to
a growing Brechtian orientation emphasising more rational learning experiences,
implying, in their terms, a cold rationality incapable of generating emotion and thereby worthwhile educational experiences, and which orientate young people away from
drama forms that allow young people to experience and deal with fictional crises relevant to their lives – and with a readiness to build the drama on extreme situations.
This kind of orientation is
more likely to be found in educational drama work inspired by Edward Bond’s theory and practice, than in, say, theory and practice inspired by Brecht.
Eriksson proceeds to explore these assumptions made by Davis and Bethlenfalvy through an examination of ‘distancing’ and ‘living through’, and the perceived tension between these two concepts, through comparing the work of Brecht and Heathcote. He does so by incorporating some remarkable video clips of each practitioner’s work, featured most effectively in our online journal, and an array of statements and theoretical understandings made in their writings by each of them.
This is a remarkable, dense, well researched and well-illustrated essay, like a journey through the very heart and history of Drama-in-Education itself, bringing a rich source of information and perception about these two great practitioners, each in their own field, and bringing great insight into our understanding of both of them.
Eriksson’s stated purpose in doing so is to provide teachers and interested others a route through to further enable the drama practice in the tradition of Dorothy Heathcote:
I maintain that understanding epic theatre poetics and enactment styles, as well as uses of distancing as a poetic and pedagogic device, offer main means to designing process dramas and teaching in role in the tradition of Heathcote.
This essay is a major contribution to that process and we are proud and delighted to be able to publish it in this issue of Drama Research.
Chris Lawrence
