Articles

Artistic and Educational Objectives in Schools

What Does Theatre in Education (TIE) Set Out To Do?

How a child’s imaginative insight becomes a tool for conceptual learning

It is early in the school day. The children are studying a portrait of The King.

An actor teacher sits in a life-sized frame. He wears a robe, a crown, on his hand the leather glove that will tether his hunting hawk. At his feet a loaf of bread.

An actor teacher invites the children to project themselves imaginatively into the viewpoint of the king.

As the King looks out across his land, what can he see, smell, touch and taste of his Kingdom?
 
A child offers:

“He sees an old bridge across the river between his castle and the town with the market place. There are many people on the bridge.... farmers going to the market and servants running… on their day off from working in The King’s kitchens...“ 

The actor teacher continues...What is the name of this bridge?

And another child offers: “Castle Bridge”.

The children learn through theatre presentation that the King has retired to his bed and remained there for seven long years.  His people feel that he is failing in his responsibility as King.  Further more, disgusted by his own image, the King has decreed that every mirror in the Kingdom be broken.

Later in the morning, the children are gathered around a small mound of stones. They know that this place is of enormous significance to a child who lives in the kingdom. This child is grieving for her mother who died shortly after the time of the breaking of the mirrors. As the children gently lift the stones they find a hair ribbon, a music box and a hand held mirror. The children are certain that the mirror is a gift from the mother and that it is the last mirror in the kingdom. When the child listens to the music box she can hear her mothers voice. When she looks into the mirror she can see her mothers face reflected in her own.

The actor teachers offer an image of the young girl sat by the stones and invite the children to place the objects in the picture. The hair ribbon is placed like a connecting thread between the child’s hand, the music box and the mirror, which is resting between the stones like a reflecting pool of water.

An actor teacher says: “It is like a bridge... .I wonder what this bridge might be called?”

And another child offers: “The ribbon bridge of memory”.

“I wonder whether this ribbon bridge of memory is as strong as castle bridge?”

A child: “No, if The King discovers she has a mirror then this bridge will be destroyed.”

Later in the afternoon the children and the actor teachers are role-playing.  Participants in a public meeting, they reflect on the state of the kingdom and the continuing implications of there being no mirrors.

A child offers: “The mirrors are important because we can see where we have come from and remember what is important to us”

An actor teacher in role, passionately agrees and continues:  Yes, everyone needs a bridge from where they are now to the past and what has made them!  If those bridges are destroyed then we have no idea where we are going!

At the end of the day the children are creating a mirror.  They employ objects from the experience of the day; placed in the stones of the ribbon bridge of memory.  They wish to reflect for the King the state of his kingdom and their sense of the current being of his people. The children offer: A placing of school books, representing the bridge between ignorance and learning. (This bridge is not strong and needs repair). The ribbon bridge remains but the King’s great glove obscures it and weighs heavily upon it. A wooden walking stick connects many of the stones and objects... The old people in the kingdom remember where all of the bridges are...

Developing Concepts

Putting tools in children’s hands…then requiring they use them

In the above example the actor teachers were able to draw through one imaginative insight:
The existence of a bridge separating a castle and a king from the life activity of his people in the fictional kingdom... and re-apply the concrete meaning of bridge at a more metaphorical (universal) level at a later point.

For the children, the notion of the ribbon bridge apparently relates to the individual young girl, her situation and her individual psychology. In actuality they were being furnished with the concepts that help explain all experience…. .all human being. The conceptual notion of bridge and bridging was gradually developed as a socially held tool for all of the children to deepen their understandings of the fictional (real) world.

The Real World and the Drama World

How TIE makes life tangible

The elements of a participatory TIE programme: text, story, dramatic action, role, carefully selected settings, objects, perhaps music; are combined to create the fictional world for the participants to enter and explore alongside the actor teachers.

To be a rich fictional world, two essential elements are required:

1. It will need to make concrete the particularity of the human struggle for life and growth in particular situations.

2.  It will need to make concrete the conditions in which this struggle is occurring. Allowing a sense of state, economy, law, belief systems; those forces outside of the individuals that have a role in governing and shaping their behaviour.

The combining of all of these elements of stimulus and the careful use of drama conventions that facilitate the exploration are designed to make sensuously tangible the complex inter¬relationships between the individual life situation and the objective conditions within the fictional world. When sensuously tangible, they are available for exploration and the journey from imaginative insight and curiosity to understanding can begin.

In theatre in education then, Theatr Powys tries to make available what is so often mystifying, obscured or distorted in the real life of the child. The TIE programme operates with the actor teachers being a living, breathing, bridge between:

The us in the real world and the us in the world of the drama.

The mind develops through interaction with the world and the reflection and processing that can accompany that interaction. The fictional context of the TIE programme is what the children interact with. The interaction, the reflection and the processing is assisted by the actor teacher. The job of the actor teacher is to mediate; intervening between the child and the material in its context; helping to focus and concretise the way in which the children, individually and socially come to perceive the situation.

The Actor Teacher allows things to be seen; allows the child to really choose a word; allows the child to really demonstrate the action; allows the child to be precise in all decision making; to be selective.

More, the actor teacher demands that the entirety of this activity is a social one. 

The child’s experience of the story, the roles and the design elements of the TIE programme has much in common with the free imaginative play of children. In play children are utter masters of their universe:

• They leap through time and space at will so that “goodnight” becomes “morning” in the blink of an eye.
• They manipulate objects so that the stick can be a horse, a gun, a wand, a sword - as and when required. The upturned table is a boat on a sea of carpet. The sheets suspended between items of furniture become hospital, prison, hide-away, dependent on the story to be explored.
• They rehearse the coded language of adults: “I just don’t know what I am going to do with you”. . .or. . .Well that’s not very clever is it?”
• They refine their understandings of gesture and physical signing: making the cake, feeding the baby, performing the operation, executing the traitor...

All the time as they explore the functioning of the world in this way, they know it is imaginary…but they absolutely commit to the reality of the situation. It matters greatly that the game is played truthfully to what is being explored.

And as in imaginative play the TIE programme demands action.

Freedom in Action

A Demand for Collective Reasoning and Resolution.

A further, significant defining feature of theatre in education method is that having rendered the complexity of the world and our place in it tangible and available for exploration; the TIE programme then requires that children and young people take action. In requiring the active intervention of the participants, the programme demands that new knowledge; ideas and intuitions are tested in practice. The action required in TIE is social action: the children work together. They work collectively and are aware that their actions have implications attached to them. They take action consciously and transform the fictional world they are exploring. They are free to exercise power: and this exercising of power demands listening, communicating, negotiating, challenging and supporting one another.

In life we know that each action we take leads to a developed situation, further questions and the requirement for further action. The same is true in the experience of the TIE programme. Children know that the fictional problems and concerns they have encountered are not resolved in completeness. But they also feel that they have achieved some development. . .some expression of what they have come to know... .a resolution for this moment in time.

Theatre in Education allows the child to be a participant experiencing a collective act of the imagination in action.

Theatre in Education and the Curriculum

Not Just “Suitable for Key Stage 2 of the National Curriculum...”

The benefits to young people of a carefully constructed and well executed Theatre in Education programme therefore, go well beyond the amusing transmission of pockets of knowledge contained within the curriculum.  The work Theatr Powys has developed over recent years and will continue to develop with young people, has been underpinned by key educational and cultural concerns such as:

The Imagination, Story and Ideology
Cultural Identity and Difference
The Natural Environment in which we Live and which Sustains Us
Learning and Teaching
What is History?
The Creation of Conditions for the Development and Maintenance of Social Responsibility

These cultural concerns underpin many of the curriculum areas that teachers are engaging children with on a day-to-day basis in the school. However, Theatr Powys doesn’t want to develop work that will simply assist in the delivery of fixed categories of knowledge related to curriculum areas defined in Key Stages. We do not wish to be an illustrated lesson attached to an attainment target. Rather, the work can support teachers in engaging the critical imagination of their students in exploring fundamental questions affecting all areas of human experience. We hope that the child’s experience of our work can illuminate (and is transferable) to all other aspects of their educational experience. Responses to the work suggest that we are right to maintain this approach.

There are increasing numbers of companies who now design work specifically to meet the limited demands of specific curriculum areas in the knowledge that it will be more easily slotted in. Constraints have sometimes been imposed by Education Authorities in the drive that work should “meet the needs of schools”. Sometimes they have developed as a result of financial pressures and the demand to successfully sell the work to schools. In some cases, opportunists (as opposed to artists and educators) have simply identified a gap in a new market and are only too happy to supply a product to clients with little knowledge of what else is potential.

This Curriculum led emphasis poses a line of development that Theatr Powys wishes to resist at all costs.  We are aware this is not a particularly fashionable position to inhabit. Our work places a high demand on schools. A daylong experience for a limited number of students is clearly more difficult to accommodate today than it was ten years ago.  Many schools are under requirement to allocate much needed resources to buy in an experience of live theatre. They are obviously concerned that as many students as possible experience the product of that expenditure.  We insist on working with a high actor/teacher-child ratio. We are trying to create work that meets the needs of children and young people: Developing human beings, who exist within the context of their schools, their families, their wider communities and the world in its totality.

For a number of years we have witnessed everywhere the attempt to define and re-define terms - and to conduct the audit of the provision of professional theatre for young people. Note the references to The Needs of Schools and The Requirements of the National Curriculum; References to the Necessity for Best Value and to the Importance of Issues Surrounding the Combating of Social Exclusion….

Where in a discussion hemmed in by these considerations lie the central concerns of the work of Theatr Powys with young people?

What of the underlying educational and cultural questions we are attempting to raise? What are the needs of children? Are the needs of children, the needs of schools and the requirements of a national curriculum the same thing? Who is asking these questions?

Theatr Powys believes these questions to be vital.  We seek to locate and work with others who are asking them.  We believe that a consistent, theoretical consideration of the function of the work is a central requirement of any strategy for future development.  Our determination to continue to meet that requirement will determine the real richness of our practice with young people and the survival of the body of knowledge that theoretically and practically underpins it.