Transformative learning: Revisiting Heathcote and Vygotsky for the digital age (original) (raw)
Related papers
Drama Research, 2014
Dorothy Heathcote’s work was centred on using drama to make learning meaningful and important. She developed models and approaches that encouraged teachers to structure purposeful and relevant learning experiences through careful planning, framing, enactment and reflection. One such strategy was that of Rolling Role. This model is less well known than others but Heathcote herself believed that it had great potential to be utilized through something like a website. The Water Reckoning project was therefore initiated to revisit and reconceptualise the Rolling Role model in the lead up to the Heathcote Reconsidered conference. The project aimed to explore the potential of Rolling Role for international collaboration using digital platforms. The resulting project involved five different student groups, their teachers and researchers responding to a common pre-text. This paper will focus on the development of the dramatic frame and pre-text. It will identify key factors and considerations for planning and working with the Rolling Role model including decisions regarding the online and digital technology used.
The digital navigator: Teacher as dramatic curator of aesthetic encounters
Schonmann, S. (ed) The Wisdom of Many: Key Issues in Arts Education, International Yearbook for Research in Arts Education, 2015
The proliferation of learning opportunities in an increasingly competitive landscape populated by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), billions of websites and rich interactive digital content mean people can learn ‘virtually’ anything they like, wherever and whenever they like. This raises questions about the nature of the teacher’s role in the contemporary classroom and specifically within the drama classroom. The role of teacher as dramatic curator is therefore proposed as one that is essential for the contemporary educator, especially for those working in the field of drama education but also for others whose activity is concerned with human interactions and experience. This teacher is a knowledgeable and nimble curator with a nuanced understanding of the power and purpose of the tools available, including the digital and technological, but also the physical and embodied. Their role involves exercising high selectivity, crafting aesthetic encounters, and taking an active role as a digital documentor and creator, weaving together the threads of experience and interpretation to support participant meaning making.
‘If this was real … ’: researching student meaning making in a digital rolling role drama
Ethnography and Education, 2018
This article explores the interplay of the 'live' experience of drama learning in the classroom and curated digital content on learner meaning making, collaborative creation and subjectivities. It examines a case study conducted in an inner-city secondary school in Sydney, Australia, as part of a larger innovative international collaborative drama exercise entitled 'The Water Reckoning Project' (http://www.water-reckoning.net) which focussed on sustainability education. Data collected and analysed included ethnographic observations, video documentation and digital curation of students' creative work, focus groups, and preand post-surveys. Findings of this study reveal the importance of the aesthetically charged, embodied experience of drama as the key driver of learning when integrating drama with digital technologies. This unique project enabled students to critically and creatively engage with significant real and fictional contexts, as well as issues of local and global relevance.
2019
In the 1980s, Prof. Dorothy Heathcote MBE (1926-2011) developed the 'Mantle of the Expert' approach (MoE) during her work at the University of Newcastle. The basic concept of MoE is that children study the school curriculum as if they were a group of experts: they can be scientists in a laboratory, archaeologists digging out a tomb, a rescue team during a natural disaster, and so on. Together with the teacher they create a fictional world in which they are cast as a team of experts working for an (imaginary) client who gives them a commission. In addition to a strong sense of ownership and intrinsic motivation, Bob Selderslaghs proved during research at the Royal Conservatoire (AP University College) in Antwerp, that MoE also develops artistic competencies in children. During a PhD project, he is currently investigating how MoE can be used not only as a drama in education-tool, but also as an education in drama-method, in order to create a healthier balance between process and product in arts education. Selderslaghs also participates in the research project ART4DEM in which MoE is used in primary and secondary schools to educate citizenship. Because of the different points of view, and because of Heathcote's ingenious system in which every action can be brought back to the value system of the person involved, there are strong indications that MoE can not only develop knowledge and skills, but also important attitudes children so desperately need now in order to be able to reclaim their future.
"Brave New World" Revisited: Drama Education in a Virtual Landscape
Curriculum studies in times of crisis, 2023
In “Brave New World: Decolonising Shakespeare in the Drama Education Curriculum”, which dealt with curriculum pre-COVID-19, we gave an account of an extra-curricular drama education project using interactive workshopping and syncretic theatre, and recommended teacher agency as a powerful mechanism for transforming university curricula from within. It is our view that curriculum is a lived experience for both lecturers teachers and students, and involves the community as well as the university; we have personally experienced, in curricular research and practice, the fact that the context determines the form which will be taken for instruction, assessment and eventual real-world application of the competences learned. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the context overnight, and we now have two years’ experience of the shock and dismay with which university educators have greeted and addressed the changed circumstances. Not only Drama Education, but the real-world phenomenon of drama itself has been affected, with many theatres closing down. We critique the approach described in our earlier chapter from the point of view of its feasibility in the virtual landscape to which we have been forcibly exiled by the exigencies of the pandemic. It is a landscape, we believe, which is devoid of the very characteristics which make Drama Education viable, in particular, a sense of personal presence and care, as well as the intense group bonding which characterises amateur and professional dramatic productions. We then look at the drama curriculum situation as reflected in the experiences of those drama educators who have lived through the last two years in order to ascertain what, if any, strategies they have found to work in practice, and what implications these have for Drama Education curricula as well as curriculum theory in general. These strategies are critiqued with reference to curriculum studies dealing with interactive teaching and learning, as well as studies on virtual learning. A framework for the discussion in this chapter is provided by a systemic model of teaching and learning which suggests how input in the form of contextual factors can materially affect the carrying out of various activities, as well as the overall effectiveness of the teaching/learning process. It is hoped that an explication of the model will provide insight into how curriculum theory and practice are related in Drama Education, the difference between theory and practice, and the main points of difference in curriculum theories and models of virtual learning currently available.
Drama in Education reaching beyond Art Form or Teaching Tool Dichotomy
European Journal of Social Science Education and Research, 2018
Abstract In the following article we try to re-evaluate, the place drama occupies in contemporary elementary education. By limiting the role of drama to literature studies and theatre productions, we lose a greater potential Theatre Pedagogy has to offer to a much broader educational spectrum. The participatory practices of Theatre and Drama in Education (TiE, DiE) promote active learning, based on a most organic children’s activity – play. While students co-create the fictional world of drama, teacher's guidance is crucial in setting new challenges, encouraging students to find creative solutions and reflect on often-complex social issues. Because of its art component, drama challenges the participants on a cognitive as well as emotional level, becoming a truly transformational experience. As such, Drama in Education is especially useful when approaching sensitive and controversial topics. This thesis is presented on a case study observing Year 6 students at St’ Michael’s CE Academy in Birmingham, UK, using Drama in Education method as part of History curriculum. Key words:: drama in education, theatre pedagogy, participatory practices, holistic teaching, sensitive topics.
Connections Between Drama Education and the Digital Education Revolution
Drama Education has long been regarded one of the most innovative andcritically aware areas of contemporary pedagogy. With the increasing emphasis on the role of technology in education and the tremendous injection of funds towards deploying technology within the K-12 sector, Drama is charged with considering the ways in which it will embrace the challenges of the net generation.
Digital technologies and performative pedagogies: Repositioning the visual
Images are becoming a primary means of information presentation in the digitized global media and digital technologies have emancipated and democratized the image. This allows for the reproduction and manipulation of images on a scale never seen before and opens new possibilities for teachers schooled in critical visuality. This paper reports on an innovative pre-service teacher training course in which a crosscurricula cohort of secondary teachers employed visual performative competencies to produce a series of learning objects on a digital platform. The resulting intertextual narratives demonstrate that the manipulation of image and text offered by digital technologies create a powerful vehicle for investigating knowledge and understandings, evolving new meaning and awakening latent creativity in the use of images for meaning making. This research informs the New Literacies and multimodal fields of enquiry and argues that visuality is integral to any pedagogy that purports to be relevant to the contemporary learner. It argues that the visual has been significantly under-valued as a conduit for knowledge acquisition and meaning making in the digital environment and supports the claim that critical literacy, interactivity, experimentation and production are vital to attaining the tenets of transformative education (Buckingham, 2007; Walsh, 2007; Cope & Kalantzis, 2008).
In Blessinger, P. and Sengupta, E., eds. (2022) Changing the Conventional Classroom (Bingley: Emerald), pp. 117-31., 2022
By introducing readers to the educational turn in contemporary art, this chapter shows how contemporary artworks and exhibitions can offer educational experiences in themselves. Furthermore, that such artworks constitute a radically expanded or situated form of art teaching. The author argues that educational turn art issues an important challenge to conventional methods of education which are still rooted in the classroom. The first section of this chapter surveys the art of the educational turn, demonstrating its pedagogic effects and innovations. The second section of this chapter draws on some of the lessons of these artworks, alongside some of the ideas from critical pedagogy.
Blessinger, P. and Sengupta, E., eds. (2022) Changing the Conventional Classroom (Bingley: Emerald), pp. 117-31., 2022
By introducing readers to the educational turn in contemporary art, this chapter shows how contemporary artworks and exhibitions can offer educational experiences in themselves. Furthermore, that such artworks constitute a radically expanded or situated form of art teaching. The author argues that educational turn art issues an important challenge to conventional methods of education which are still rooted in the classroom. The first section of this chapter surveys the art of the educational turn, demonstrating its pedagogic effects and innovations. The second section of this chapter draws on some of the lessons of these artworks, alongside some of the ideas from critical pedagogy (