Drama at the heart of English: transforming practice in the secondary classroom

At the start of their book, Drama at the Heart of English: Transforming Practice in the Secondary Classroom (2023), Theo Bryer, Jane Coles and Maggie Pitfield ask the reader to imagine their school days and what sort of English lessons were memorable. What is wonderful in the way the writers write is their readiness to enter into a dialogue with their reader about what mattered to them, both as students and as practitioners. I hope that this invitation allows for my telling of a story.

Last summer, I met with my English teachers. Amongst the discussion of books, and a deep sadness for our school that had been forced to close during the austerity years, there was also Miss Roberts’ lament for what confronted her daughters as they undertook their GCSEs – a version of English in which teachers are expected to be ‘deliverers of a universal curriculum content’, not curriculum makers or intellectual workers (Bryer et al. 2023, 11). It was an English that she no longer recognised, where there was such little time given over to creativity, and instead a fetishisation of how many verbs or metaphors could be spotted in a text and how many quotations could be memorised. It was a world away from the English classroom that Miss Roberts had created for us, one that was inseparable from the drama studio, with its musty furs and relics of past school productions. My desire to rush ahead and read the entire text (and then attempt to spoil it for my peers) was funnelled into the task of adapting texts into playscripts and then spending lesson time acting out these adaptations. When I think of a memorable English lesson, one that I remember is the discussion that emerged after I updated a story in which a family member dies. Instead of the family receiving a letter, I had changed it to an email (it was the heady days of dial-up internet and I was obsessed with my new Hotmail email address). ‘No, a letter has more emotional impact than an email’, one of my friends had asserted whilst reflecting on the script that confronted her. We entered into a class discussion, with very little intervention from Miss Roberts, about form and emotional resonance. We attempted to weigh all this up because the act of dramatic interpretation demanded it. At a time when the curriculum I was experienced was entirely white, where the world was adjusting to what it meant to exist post-9/11, it allowed me, as a Pakistani heritage, Muslim young woman to have my voice taken seriously. I had the space to be a sign maker, not merely a sign reader.

Now, on the brink of a national election in the UK, the major parties are happy to talk breezily about the significance of oracy and the arts, but there’s little explicit acknowledgement of drama. Bryer, Coles and Pitfield trace how the space for drama in English classrooms has been eroded. While classrooms remain contested spaces, they remind us that the contestation of drama within English lessons has become anathema to policy-makers and school leaders. Key moments in the educational landscape are marked out: the Newbolt Report (BoE 1921); the Dartmouth Seminar (1966) and others. Whilst acknowledging the difficulties that confront teachers today, they are able to signpost readings for teachers to return to, to find hope and inspiration for more diverse and creative forms of practice. If there is any criticism to be had of the text, it is that at times, the references to what other people have written feels dense. The book is at its most effective when the authors allow themselves the space to write about their own work in schools, such as the Beowulf projects. What the writers demonstrate in these moments is a deeply attentive writing of what learning looks like. The account they provide of students like Sumaya and Ricky are a reminder to their reader of the real-life implications of teaching: a reality that so often is lost in the turgid prose of policy documents.

And the central argument offered by Bryer et al. is a vitally important one for English teachers. They challenge the idea that drama is merely some peripheral activity, to be indulged in when time allows, remote from the everyday practice of reading texts in classrooms. Instead they argue that drama is a natural outcome of reading and that ‘drama-based pedagogies promote learner agency and supports students’ navigation of meaning-making in the English classroom’ (Bryer et al. 2023, 9).

The accumulation of political work that Coles, Bryer and Pittfield have engaged in as teachers and teacher educators (from the successful SATs boycott on) is palpable in the writing of this book. Yes, it’s about English and where drama fits into processes of reading, but it is also about the transformative effect that such opportunities have on the lives of learners.

And drama, understood in these terms, has a particular political significance for teachers, intertwined with progressive approaches to teaching and with an understanding of cultural practice as both universal and everyday that stretches back to Raymond Williams. The authors map out their opposition to the reductive policies introduced by government and policed by bodies such as Ofsted. It would be easy to shy away from these matters and to construct a sanitised version of what drama might look like or at least one that might feel less controversial. Instead, the geopolitical power of drama is acknowledged in the writers’ reference to Monica Brady’s ‘On being (and not being) Mrs Curley’s wife’, in which Brady writes about her experiences of teaching in Ramallah, Palestine, and the power of role play. Brady writes about one of her students, Meriam, and how this dramatic space allowed her to act out what struggle is for her, ‘not just against the occupation, but also against the inequalities in her own society’ (Brady 2014, 339). The dramatic space within the English lesson offers a safe space for students to critique and challenge power through the guise of an adopted identity. Bryer, Coles and Pitfield understand and illuminate these moments as forms of rebellion. At the book’s launch being in October 2023, it felt like a timely reminder of what stands to be lost, if teachers were to stop placing drama at the heart of English lessons.

The end of the book is concerned with the formation of English teachers: whilst the text is the product of a great deal of reading, there is a constant return to the centrality of teachers in classrooms and what this text might offer them. The writers are generous in acknowledging the developmental work of the London Association for the Teachers of English (LATE), an organisation that all three have contributed to and supported. Their nurturing voices were instrumental in guiding LATE’s direction.

It is also a testament to their commitment to teacher education that their experiences of teaching teachers, both pre- and in-service, on a range of different university-based programmes, are drawn upon. Here is Lewis Goodacre, an MA student, remembering what English lessons meant to him:

Thinking back to my own time as a secondary school student, I can remember plenty of occasions in English and Drama lessons that called for exaggerated performances of gender for the purposes of both education and entertainment. Some standout memories include being persuaded by my English teacher into hot-seating in role as an egregiously camp Mr Birling during our study of An Inspector Calls, and being used as an exemplar by my Drama teacher in a gender-switching performance of John Godber’s Bouncers: ‘This is how you act like a woman getting ready for a night out, boys’, she told the rest of my group.

Much of my gender role-playing at school was done under the guise of comedy for friends, but it was also a tool for me to explore and make sense of my own queerness. (Goodacre 2024, 131)

Central to what Bryer, Coles and Pitfield put forward is an argument for a diversity of voices and for inclusive spaces for that diversity to be realised. What the writers understand is that dramatic spaces are spaces where identity is made and unmade and shaped again. The opportunity that drama offers to work through questions of gendered identity is something that they touch upon, as, for example, in noting that the Beowulf project meant that there were ‘particular opportunities to challenge gender expectations within the heroic genre’ (Bryer et al. 2023, 62). In a time where the discourse around gendered identity in classrooms is regarded as taboo, the authors remind their readers that these spaces must be protected and allowed to flourish for students to explore who they might be or want to be.

It is a text that manages to be accessible for early career teachers, as well as offering a much needed reminder, to those of us who may be more wizened, that the possibilities of dramatic spaces are not simply a fun thing to do when there’s time to push the tables back, but a serious intellectual endeavour that stretches and changes how meaning is made of texts. I’d like to think that this is in part due to the fondness the writers show towards the late Morlette Lindsay and the effect of her collaboration with them.

At a time when the politics of education and geopolitics seems bleak (even with the promise of a change of government here in the UK), this text is a timely intervention into a debate, offering a picture of hope for the future of students and their teachers. It is a clear reminder of the Vygotskian notion that ‘art, literature and the fostering of imagination should be regarded as absolutely fundamental to the well-being of society as a whole’ (Bryer et al. 2023, 139). Perhaps, once the electoral dust settles, we might send a copy of this text to the new secretary of state for education as required reading.