Experiencing drama in a Swiss context: a tale of two student teachers

ABSTRACT

In this article I examine the potential of including embodied teaching and learning through drama in teacher training in Switzerland, a concept which is novel in that context. In particular, I focus on two student teachers at the University of Teacher Education Zug, who volunteered to explore drama as a tool for teaching and learning across the primary curriculum. After working with drama intensely over three semesters, the novice teachers reported increased confidence and reduced anxiety regarding their first year of teaching. Additionally, they reported feeling an increased sense of empathy, flexibility, and spontaneity in the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Drama in teacher education
• flexibility
• courage
• empathy
• narrative inquiry

Setting the stage

Drama in education (DiE), is a well-recognised pedagogy in many educational systems in the Anglo-Saxon world, as it notably stems from the work of British pioneers Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin Bolton (1995). However, DiE has yet to find its way into teaching and learning in Switzerland, where drama is neither integrated in teacher training,¹ nor a school subject in its own right.² Thus, applying drama as a teaching and learning tool is new at the particular university discussed in this article, as well as in the overall Swiss context (cf. Göksel 2019). Having arrived in Switzerland from Canada, where DiE is part of the teacher training landscape, I was inspired to introduce DiE at my workplace, the University of Teacher Education Zug (PH Zug) in Zug, Switzerland. As time was a limited resource, I focused on drama specifically as a tool for teaching and learning and that is how I will define DiE in this article. Furthermore, I will examine the self-reported experiences of two Swiss student teachers, herein named Tanja and Karin for anonymity, as they develop and expand their personal drama repertoire in order to teach various school subjects at the primary level. The work shared here is part of my doctoral research. I use narrative inquiry (Riessman 2008) to capture Karin and Tanja’s experiences in order to examine the potential of applying drama in teacher education in the Swiss context.

A glimpse behind the curtain

My doctoral project, which began in 2016, uses qualitative methods to follow four student teachers from their first contact with DiE in 2017, through to their graduation in June 2018, and into their first year of teaching in 2019, with the aim of documenting their professional learning journeys with drama during this time. My participants, all volunteers, all women under 30, all theatre enthusiasts (all had, for example, participated in a high school drama production) were completing their bachelors’ degrees in primary school education at PH Zug when I recruited them for my study. To briefly outline my research design, a small group of volunteer student teachers regularly attended an extracurricular drama course afterhours at PH Zug in spring 2017. The course was held every two weeks and taught by Marcel Felder, a trained actor and drama and theatre pedagogue. Marcel introduced the group to drama conventions (Neelands and Goode 2015), the basics of improvisation (Johnstone 2016), and some process drama (O’Neill 1995) as tools for teaching in the primary classroom. The focus was on first experiencing and then applying what Manfred Schewe defines as small-scale forms of drama: ‘Performative activities which can be realised within the framework of a single class or a shorter teaching unit’ (2013, 12). I attended the course as a participant-researcher, observing and documenting the process with video recordings.

Four of the participants, including Karin and Tanja, agreed to be the focus of my study: They designed original 90-minute DiE lessons, which they voluntarily chose to facilitate in a practicum. I filmed and observed these classes at various local elementary schools, and I followed up with each student teacher with an unstructured interview immediately after each lesson. The lessons were designed for primary school students in grades three to six (ages 8–12) for the subjects of History, Ethics, Philosophy, and English. One participant, Tanja, was not initially part of the training group, as she was on exchange in Austria for a semester. However, Tanja took several DiE courses while abroad, as well as working closely online with another participant, Karin, to jointly plan several DiE lessons. Tanja later joined the group for the final part of the course at PH Zug. In spring 2018, just prior to their graduation in June, I conducted additional narrative interviews separately with each of the four student teachers. It is from two of these narrative interviews that I draw the student teacher citations used in this article. I have chosen to focus on Tanja and Karin because they worked closely together to design and facilitate three 90-minute DiE lessons for their bachelor’s thesis, which they wrote in English and under my supervision. In addition, at the end of their first year of teaching, I followed-up with all four participants with a second round of narrative interviews, these will, however, not be the focus of this work.

Thought-tracking the student teachers

The semester-long, non-credit drama training course at PH Zug offered participants an embodied learning experience (Piazzoli 2018) which immersed them in the drama work, giving them an opportunity to ‘learn by doing’. Looking back, Tanja felt that having first been a participant was an important step to becoming a drama facilitator: ‘You have to experience it first. [You have] to say, “that’s something I want to try”. And you can also remember it better when you experience it yourself’.³ There are certainly parallels in the move from being a student teacher to being a novice teacher, and the move from being a participant in a drama training course to being a drama facilitator; both have their fair share of challenges. Teaching and facilitating are complex tasks. As Michael Balfour reminds us, although the etymology of the term facilitator comes from the French ‘facile’ (easy),

there is nothing easy about the process. […] The art of facilitation is about acknowledging the complexities of the social dynamics of a group while managing a process that supports the group to invest in itself or a common goal. (2016, 152)

Indeed, Tanja and Karin experienced this first-hand in the process of facilitating their DiE lessons, which they taught to students in grades four, five, and six. The two student teachers were successful in getting the students to invest in the drama, both during a trip to the stone age, as well as during a lesson set in the middle ages. Thus, after having facilitated multiple process dramas in various practicums, both Karin and Tanja expressed having gained confidence in their teaching. Tanja adds that in her experience, a facilitator has to feel comfortable using drama: ‘If you don’t like the method, then don’t use it. Because then the kids won’t like it. If you do something you don’t like, they feel it’. Tanja, as previously mentioned, was very passionate about integrating drama in her teaching, and this enthusiasm is apparent in the way she talks about her work with drama during her studies at PH Zug.

Karin describes her overall experience with DiE at PH Zug as being holistic: ‘Every sense is activated. Every person is thinking and is there, present’, adding that student teachers are still very playful at heart. Indeed, during the course of the narrative interviews, it emerged that it was this playful approach that engaged the student teachers so deeply in their own learning: Through their drama and improv work, they had a chance to experiment with what David Davis (2014) calls the components of the art form of drama, including: Dramatic tension, roles, attitudes, and time, as well as pre-text and context. The student teachers also engaged with all four of Mary Ann Hunter’s (2008) dimensions of the drama space as a safe space: A space that is physically, and metaphorically, safe from danger. A space that is both comfortable and familiar, and a space which is open for experimentation and innovation.

The possibilities of the safe space were demonstrated during the drama training, as Marcel modelled a facilitator willing to participate in the drama work as a member of the group. In addition, he created a safe space in which mistakes, in the true spirit of improv work, were celebrated. I argue that these first-hand examples encouraged the student teachers to emulate both the facilitation style and the use of the safe space. For example, Karin and Tanja were inspired to design drama lessons in which they participated in various roles, sometimes as supporting characters and sometimes as teachers in role.

While testing these various drama tools, the student teachers engaged kinaesthetically, emotionally, and cognitively with their drama work. The drama practice encouraged them to try out not only new ideas, but to experiment with various personas, both as teachers and as actors. They did so in the safe space of the drama training course, and later in the classroom with enthusiastic students. Tanja explains that ‘it’s more than just getting to know a new method. It’s about getting to know how you really want to teach’. In Tanja’s case, it was also about discovering her teaching persona: Tanja’s narrative reveals a shy student, who in the course of her studies, discovers a passion for both performing and teaching. Tanja feels that her teaching philosophy was strongly influenced by the playful nature of drama. She had fun designing and facilitating DiE content, which in turn made her want to ‘give the kids the motivation to learn’. Her advice for novice teachers is to first experience drama before attempting to use it in their own teaching.

Have no fear, drama is here

Three points emerge clearly from the data collected for this study: After three semesters of experiencing, designing, and facilitating drama content, the student teachers reported a heightened sense of empathy, feeling more flexible in terms of adapting to unexpected circumstances in the classroom, and generally feeling braver about teaching. Tanja, for example, felt that working with drama helped her to be open to new ideas, and that working in role made her aware of other perspectives: ‘you can, just for a moment, be someone else and do something you normally wouldn’t do’. I argue that these experiences paved the way for a heightened sense of empathy towards students and peers. Tanja even began to explore empathy as a teaching tool, staging an ‘argument’ with another student teacher during one of their practicums as a pre-text to hook the students into a lesson on reported speech.

Karin and Tanja both began fulltime teaching positions in August 2018. Both expressed excitement about beginning their new positions, and both felt that working intensely with drama had lessened their overall anxiety about being responsible for their own classes in the coming year. In addition, they both felt that their cross-disciplinary use of drama had empowered them as newly fledged teachers and that it had expanded their teaching horizon. They had become familiar with a set of drama conventions and had developed an understanding of the artistry involved in drama work (such as pacing, building up dramatic tension, and using a pre-text (O’Neill 1995) to ‘hook’ the participants). Moreover, the student teachers had to weave these new skills seamlessly in with other pedagogical know-how acquired during their course of study at the university. And, most interesting of all, the student teachers reported acquiring a set of soft skills that I had not anticipated: Both Tanja and Karin felt that they had gained a new level of flexibility in their role as teachers. They thus felt able to improvise in class – they felt that they could let go of a lesson plan and adapt it on the spot, as circumstances required. In addition, they reported feeling less anxious about their first year of teaching. In short, they had lost their fear of not knowing what to expect in the new circumstances that awaited them. Karin described the drama training as an experience in which ‘there was laughing, there was learning, and there was feeling free’. She felt that this was a recipe for success, boosting self-confidence both for the teachers in training and for their students, adding that ‘smart students feel like they achieved something and also the student that might not have the best grades can shine’. The once shy Tanja felt that working intensely with drama enabled her to be spontaneous in class. She additionally emphasised that in her experience, a certain degree of openness is required to experiment with drama, pointing out the chicken and egg dilemma that working with drama ‘helps you to be more open, and not to be scared about the things we teach’.

In addition to the findings mentioned above, analysis of the narrative interviews shows that since engaging in drama work, the two student teachers included drama in their teaching beyond the lessons that I observed. As a result – and as can be seen in the videos of their teaching, which inform the data analysis of the doctoral study – the student teachers were fully engaged with their students, both physically (moving around the room freely and interacting with students both as the facilitator and in role) and intellectually (engaging in and facilitating discussions post-drama). Reflecting on her experience of using teacher-in-role, Tanja again pinpoints her newfound flexibility: ‘I was able to change from being this person, to being that person, so I can also be really spontaneous in class’. Karin emphasised drama’s power to teach empathy and foster bravery, stating that using drama changed her understanding of her role as a teacher by giving her the courage to ‘do things differently’. Her story reflects a path that led her from feeling insecure in educational settings during her own schooling, to finding a new sense of bravery as a novice teacher. In the course of this research, Karin shares a narrative in which she feels validated in her role as facilitator and feels confident and comfortable guiding work in fictional contexts.

After three semesters experimenting with the design and facilitation of drama, both student teachers reported feeling a heightened sense of empathy, bravery, and flexibility. They felt that they had gained the courage to try new ideas in their own pedagogy. They felt able to re-plan and improvise elements of a lesson spontaneously and said that they were thus less afraid of facing the unknown of their new positions as primary school teachers. Additionally, the narratives shared by the two student teachers indicated that both of them have used drama to carve out their own safe space in the educational world. This safe space afforded me first-hand insight into the experiences of two novice teachers beginning to work with drama. The reoccurring theme of professional growth through drama calls for further exploration and I hope to continue this line of research in various pedagogical settings.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the student teachers who gave me access to their thoughts, hopes, and classrooms. My thanks also to Marcel Felder for his unwavering support, boundless energy, and constructive conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eva Göksel

Eva Göksel is a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with a master’s in education from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Between 2014 and 2020, Eva was a research assistant at the Centre for Oral Communication, PH Zug, Switzerland, where she introduced DiE to students and staff.

Notes

1 There is growing interest in DiE in Switzerland: For example, the University of Teacher Education Zurich (PH Zurich) is developing a regular drama in education module for some of their cohorts, scheduled to begin in 2021.

2 It should be noted that as opposed to drama education, theatre education does have a strong tradition in the German speaking part of Switzerland: external theatre pedagogues are often hired by classroom teachers to run theatre projects in schools.

3 The student quotes have been slightly adjusted to facilitate understanding.