The Drama Curriculum
The drama curriculum comprises of interrelated activities which explore
feelings, knowledge and ideas, leading to understanding. It explores
themes and issues, creates a safe context in which to do so, and provides
for opportunities to reflect on the insights gained in the process. It draws
on the knowledge, interests and enthusiasm of the child. In drama, the
child explores the motivations and the relationships between people that
exist in a real, imagined or historical context, to help him/her understand
the world. The child is encouraged to make decisions and to take
responsibility for those decisions within the safe context of the drama.
There are strong elements of make-believe in all children’s play. This
make-believe helps the child to test out his/her hypotheses about what
the world is like and how it might feel to have certain experiences. It is
fuelled by inquisitiveness and a desire to think about possibilities and
concepts through the medium of action. The process by which this is
done is the same process as that by which drama is made for all levels
and ages. The primary task of the teacher of drama, therefore, is to
preserve and encourage this desire to make-believe while at the same time
extending it to other areas of life and knowledge. In this way drama can
assist in the fulfilment of the child’s current cognitive and affective needs
and in providing for his/her future personal, social, emotional and
intellectual development .
We meet drama most frequently in the theatre, on television or in the
cinema, and we associate it with performance, costumes , setting and
stages. Similarly, in school we often associate drama with script, rehearsal,
voice production and the display of acting talent. This type of drama has
certain benefits in that it increases children’s self-confidence, gives them
the opportunity to express themselves in public and allows them the
opportunity of appearing on stage. However, it represents only a part of
the rich learning and developmental experience that drama has to offer.
Our curriculum will not dwell on the display element of drama but will,
rather, emphasise the benefits to be gained from the process of exploring
life through the creation of plot, theme, fiction and make-believe. Drama
used in this way is called classroom drama or process drama.
The field that drama can explore is as wide as life itself, and the areas of
the exploration can be derived from the content of other curricula or
from any other aspect of life that interests and concerns the children or
the teacher. Examining these topics through drama will involve children in
such activities as:
- The spontaneous making of drama scenes (sometimes called
improvisation )
- Entering into other lives and situations
- Engaging with life issues, knowledge and themes through drama
- Honing and shaping drama scenes for the purpose of communicating
them to others
- Living through a story, making it up as they go along, solving problems
in the real and fictional worlds, cooperating with others, and pooling
ideas
- Thinking about and discussing the patterns in life so that the outcome
of encounters and plots will reflect their perception of how life is or
might be.
All of this can take place at a level suitable to the age of the child.
However complex the material may seem, the child, at any level, will find
his/her own understanding and ways of dealing with it.
Because drama is a holistic activity it is difficult to separate the form from
the content, the effective from the cognitive, the social development from
the personal. Nevertheless, it can be said that its educational outcomes
derive from two sources:
- The knowledge and insights gained from bringing the child’s experience
to bear on the examination of a particular aspect of life through drama
- The personal skills, social skills and drama skills that must be
encouraged if the class is to enter effectively into and create the world
of the drama.
These skills are as natural to the younger child as playing and need only
careful support and nurturing to extend them into continuing to serve the
child’s education. It requires primarily that the teacher adopts the role of
facilitator and acts like a good guide in the forest, pointing out the
possibilities of certain directions and delights but leaving much of the
responsibility for the exploration, and its enjoyment, to the child.
The subject matter of drama
The learning objectives in the curriculum are all drama-related. Drama,
however, cannot exist without exploring some content, whether simple or
sophisticated. The subject matter, whether taken from other curriculum areas or from life in general, will reflect the needs, concerns and interests appropriate to
the ages and abilities of the individual children in any particular class.
The drama curriculum and teacher guidelines
The learning benefits of drama in the classroom spring from the process
of children making drama. The product of the drama lesson is, indeed, the
learning that accrues to the child through that process, as well as the
actual drama that results from it. This gives a special importance to
teacher guidelines for drama. They should be seen as complementary to the
curriculum and the means through which the teacher can maximise its
educational potential. Teachers, therefore, are urged to use the
curriculum and the guidelines side by side as interdependent teaching
resources.
Broad objectives
When due account is taken of intrinsic abilities and varying
circumstances, the drama curriculum should enable the child to:
- Develop the ability to enter physically, mentally and emotionally into the
fictional drama context and discover its possibilities through co-
operation with others
- Develop empathy with and understanding of others and the confidence
needed to assume a role or character
- Experience and create an atmosphere where ideas, feelings and
experiences can be expressed, where conflict can be handled positively,
and life situations explored openly and honestly
- Develop personal adaptability, spontaneity, the ability to cooperate,
verbal and non-verbal skills, and imagination and creativity, in order to
ensure that the drama text reflects real life in a fresh and valid way
- Develop the ability to decide what course is likely to lead to significant
drama action
- Develop the ability to steer the drama towards areas that are likely to
lead, through whatever genre, to insights into the subject matter to be
explored
- Develop the ability to cooperate with others in solving, out of role, the
problems that are presented in making the drama
- Develop the ability to cooperate with others, in role, in keeping the
drama alive, in creating context, and in exploring the problems that are
presented in making the drama
- Develop the ability to use drama to promote or express a view on a
subject on which he/she may have strong views or feelings
- Develop the ability to use drama to examine and explore unfamiliar
material so as to reach an understanding of the patterns, meanings and
concepts contained in it
- Develop concern, curiosity and understanding of the increasingly
sophisticated patterns that comprise drama content and of the
increasingly refined insights that can flow from it
- Use drama to explore actively the human aspect of all learning as a
means of curricular integration
- Become aware of subtexts, which manifest themselves involuntarily, in
drama and in life
- Begin to develop, through active story-making in drama, an appreciation
of plot and theme so that these can form the basis of an understanding
of drama literature and how it relates to text-making in a specific time
and place
- Begin to be able to discern the covert or overt messages in drama texts,
ranging from advertising to Shakespeare, through becoming aware of
how values and attitudes are woven into drama
- Begin to develop the ability to assess critically the validity of the
meanings hidden in drama texts and what can be learned from them.