Revisiting Heathcote’s Rolling Role model through The Water-Reckoning project - Pre-texts, dramatic materials and digital mediation (original) (raw)
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Transformative learning: Revisiting Heathcote and Vygotsky for the digital age
In seeking to embrace new opportunities for learning in a digital age, what can be learnt from what has gone on before? Ideas about learning as proposed by revolutionary thinkers Dorothy Heathcote and Lev Vygotsky emerged from different eras and discipline areas. However, there are similar concerns identifiable in the writings of both. The question may be asked; does this work still offer insights for supporting learning in another revolutionary age -that of the digital revolution? This paper argues that a consideration of key concepts from Heathcote and Vygotsky's work does provide the means for understanding why drama is still a powerful learning medium and highly relevant for the digital age. A recent project entitled the Water Reckoning is used as an example to demonstrate some key principles about learning processes in practice. Further consideration is given to the role of the teacher/facilitator in the context of contemporary learning settings and how the role of the teacher as designer and curator has become increasingly important.
‘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.
(2014) The Water Reckoning - Learnings from the international Rolling Role project
The Water Reckoning project was initiated to involve young people, teachers and academics in a creative project, which drew on Dorothy Heathcote's philosophy and strategies, in particular that of Rolling Role. The idea for the project began at IDIERI 7 when Pam Bowell proposed the initiation of an international collaboration that would focus on revisiting Rolling Role through the use of digital communications and platforms. The goal was to have the project culminate at the Heathcote Reconsidered conference in London. The project resulted in five educational and research sites being involved from Australia, Greece, Singapore, and the USA. This paper will provide an overview of the project and the Rolling Role concept and how it was applied to the development of the Water Reckoning project. It will also explore initial learnings that have emerged from the project at each site. It concludes with some implications for creating Rolling Role work within contemporary school systems and possibilities for the future.
The Water Reckoning - Learnings from the international Rolling Role project
Heathcote Reconsidered - Conference Echoes (ebook), London: National Drama, pp.89-112., 2014
The Water Reckoning project was initiated to involve young people, teachers and academics in a creative project, which drew on Dorothy Heathcote’s philosophy and strategies, in particular that of Rolling Role. The idea for the project began at IDIERI 7 when Pam Bowell proposed the initiation of an international collaboration that would focus on revisiting Rolling Role through the use of digital communications and platforms. The goal was to have the project culminate at the Heathcote Reconsidered conference in London. The project resulted in five educational and research sites being involved from Australia, Greece, Singapore, and the USA. This paper will provide an overview of the project and the Rolling Role concept and how it was applied to the development of the Water Reckoning project. It will also explore initial learnings that have emerged from the project at each site. It concludes with some implications for creating Rolling Role work within contemporary school systems and possibilities for the future.
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.
NJ 37 | Drama Australia, 2014
This is an autoethnographic narrative that describes how John Carroll influenced Dorothy Heathcote’s thinking about her practice of drama in education. The analysis focuses on the ways in which concepts derived from the work of Douglas Barnes (1975) and Erving Goffman (1974) played an important role in clarifying their evolving ideas about the ways in which role and role distance function as framing devices that fundamentally alter normative power relationships and communication interactions between students and teachers.
In the twenty-first century European citizens feel they have to study languages to be able to participate in the European community. So more and more adults study English. Yet societies are confronted with a lack of resources to pay for this continuous education. That is why this Grundtvig project is developing a manual in which adult learners become autonomous learners: Learning to Learn by Teaching (L2LByTe).Italian, Romanian, Latvian, English, Portugese and Belgian teachers meet on a regular basis to experience this way of learning while devising it. In this paper we discuss this double learning trajectory. We first describe how the teachers learnt by teaching. Next we discuss how they translate this experience in the activities they create to accompany the knowledge clips. To highlight the differences in approach we use Carrington's padagogy wheel.
Leaps of experience: building digital storyworlds for contemporary tertiary learners
2018
Leaps of Experience: Building Digital Storyworlds for Tertiary Learners The two interlocking research questions for this thesis are: • To what extent has current experiential learning pedagogy applied Deweyan educational philosophy to tertiary learners? • What is it about the nature of digital storyworlds that may enable transformative experiential learning for tertiary learners? This thesis, composed of a portfolio and dissertation, critically investigates what is involved in creatively engaging tertiary students at both undergraduate and postgraduate coursework levels through digital environments. The folio contains several interlinked digital storyworlds, starting with a Pacific island called Newlandia and the country town of Bilby. These two storyworlds provide relevant ongoing situations, characters and events, and a setting within which to develop social advocacy skills and the capacity to assume different perspectives. These initial digital environments were then linked to the virtual organization Kaleidoscope Consulting. This storyworld is accessed through central Deakinopolis which is both the navigational starting point and imaginative framework for an almost infinite capacity to extend the digital storyworlds. The threads emerging from the folio, explored within the dissertation, focus on contemporary experiential learning experiences which are immersive and imaginatively engaging. The dissertation includes an interrogation of the Deweyan pragmatic philosophy of experiential learning, exploring Quay's (2013) juxtaposition (and synthesis) of Dewey's consideration (1916, 1938) of how to fix or capture the transformative point of knowing with Heidegger's (1927) discussion of poiesis and praxis as a way of 'be-ing, doing and knowing' (Quay 2013). The contemporary context for this model challenges modes of knowledge transfer in universities by positioning the learning within social drivers of uncertainty, interruption and constant change.