Of Mermen and Monsters: A Slippery Story of Drama in Education and Related Classroom Practices

Abstract

The account of the evolution of a classroom teacher (me) that follows is suggestive of a degree of agency and creativity that is rarely acknowledged. Teachers are currently positioned in ways that underline their instrumental role – their duty to students, parents, school and government to ensure that students achieve. A lack of faith in teachers’ capacity to innovate on their own terms means that creative practice in schools is routinely overlooked or mistrusted. My own history serves to illustrate the complex ways in which teachers develop their practice, and the cultural and political influences that play their part in the process. This article ends with some comparison between my own experience and that of my student teachers as they embark on their teaching careers nearly 30 years later.

Keywords:

• Drama in education
• role
• community
• filmmaking
• agency
• creativity
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the student teachers (now teachers) who so willingly engaged with the Beowulf project and with this research, particularly Samantha Coady, Lauren Cowan, Elanor Harmsworth, Alex Nicholls and Laura Scott. Thank you to my colleagues, Jane Coles, Andrew Burn, John Yandell and Anne Turvey. This article is dedicated to the memory of my very dear colleague and friend, Morlette Lindsay (1958–2016), from whom I learnt so much.

Notes

1. For two years (2014–2016) I was involved in a research project called ‘Playing Beowulf: Gaming the Library’ led by Professor Andrew Burn at the University College London (UCL) Knowledge Lab, part of the Institute of Education. The focus of the project was an exploration of the Old English poem Beowulf through different approaches including digital game-making, drama, filmmaking, activities around language, and reference to the many translations and adaptations of the text in different media. In 2014/15 we ran a pilot project, establishing an open and collaborative way of working that involved Beowulf experts, Richard North and Simon Thomson from UCL and our student teachers as partners in the research. In 2015/16 we re-ran an expanded series of research activities as a Digital Transformations project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (see http://darecollaborative.net/2015/03/11/playing-beowulf-gaming-the-library). I was involved with Janes Coles and Morlette Lindsay from the English and English with drama PGCE course at the Institute of Education (IOE), teachers and students from five of our partnership schools, academics from the IOE London Knowledge Lab and the UCL English department, Michael Anderson and David Cameron from Sydney University, and staff involved in education and the digital archive from the British Library. My colleagues and I engaged in school-based research and also ran a two-day workshop with our student teachers. The second day involved exploration of the possibilities offered by a computer game authoring tool. I have conflated some of the activities that we initiated as part of the pilot and the final project here.

2. In referring to filmmaking I reference cultural practices historically associated with the medium of film, although in all the instances cited here we were working with digital video and editing software.