The aim of this section of the guidelines is to furnish teachers with a practical approach to the teaching of drama in the classroom. It will involve a consideration of the essential components of process drama and of the means by which these can be incorporated in practical drama activities.

The section starts with an outline of the principle that should inform all process drama activity in the school: the fostering of the child’s spontaneous impulse for make-believe play and its preservation in a fulfilled experience of drama activity throughout the primary school.

The essential components of process drama are then considered. These are:

• the strand units of the curriculum (already outlined in Section 2, pp. 9–13)
• the three prerequisites for making process drama
• the eight elements of drama.

How each of these contributes to both the structure and the dynamic of practical drama is discussed in detail and then exemplified in

• a basic practical approach to drama in the classroom
• descriptions of five drama activities that were successful with different groups of children.

Teachers should find these descriptions of drama activities particularly useful. They are not only described in detail, with a commentary on their structure, learning goals and teaching methods, but are analysed for their relevance to the content objectives of the curriculum. This entire section of teacher guidelines, therefore, takes the structure indicated below:

Make-believe play to process drama

The simplest drama text is seen in the child’s make-believe play, and its relationship with education can be seen in the following example.

Two children are playing house. Together they have transformed the environment into a symbolic area: the environment has become something that stands for something else. It provides them with a symbolic context for trying out symbolic actions and reaching conclusions about reality and its meaning. Reality—the real context, its real people and their real actions— they can understand only partially and cannot control, so they create a makebelieve world whose circumstances, people and events are manageable. In this way, through the symbolic world they can explore and try to understand the real world. This is the pre-school child’s way of understanding and making sense of experience, the environment and the world.

This drama text is not ‘presented’ to any external audience, nor does the learning gained from it depend on its being presented. The children’s own response to what is happening in the drama, even as it proceeds, is in itself the learning activity and forms a step to other learning outcomes.

The most obvious characteristics of make-believe play are:

• a willingness to believe that the symbol is ‘real’
• sincerity in adopting roles and playing the characters
• an acceptance of the fictional consequences of the play
• an impulse to explore.

Young children will, of course, play without any consciousness of these factors, but they constitute some of the essential features of learning through drama.

The ability to play in this way is strongest in the pre-school child and may begin to fade gradually at about five years of age, although the impulse can be readily observed in older children in the playground and on the street when, for example, they ‘play out’ fictions based on film and television characters. Educational drama is a more conscious and sophisticated form of make-believe play. Its essential characteristics are the same as those mentioned above. The first content objective at each of the four levels in the curriculum is, indeed, concerned with establishing the continuum from make-believe play to drama and in preserving the characteristics and learning benefits of make-believe play in the child’s experience of educational drama throughout the primary school.

Because the natural impulse for makebelieve play does begin to wane it is crucial that a consistent approach to drama in the curriculum affords children the opportunity to use its essential characteristics in order to avail of the educational benefits it can bring. In its simplest form this might consist of the teacher suggesting a situation and certain characters to the children and encouraging them to explore, by playing the characters, what might happen. The teacher might say, ‘The princess is being held in the castle and you want to save her. Try out different ways you might persuade the sentry to let you pass.’ The essence of the activity would consist in the children accepting the fiction and in following the consequences of whatever direction the drama might take. This concept of accepting the consequences of the fiction and of the actions and reactions of the characters is very important, as will be seen later. The key features of the activity are, therefore,

• a situation in which particular characters are placed
• creating a drama, through language and action, in which children explore possible solutions and outcomes that are inherent in the situation.

This constitutes the basic unit, the building block of drama experience, and its efficacy depends on the interest and the commitment of the children. If the children accept the fiction and are willing to follow its consequences in the actions and reactions of the characters, then not only can it be enjoyable but it can prove a valuable learning experience. Its potential for learning, however, is only fully realised if the teacher knows how to build scene on scene so as to achieve desirable learning outcomes. In order to do this, the teacher must be continually aware that all drama, from classroom to theatre, is based on exploring life (what would happen if ...?). As in all creative activity, the choice of which explorations to conduct is dictated by curiosity, intuition or logic, and the truth or the appropriateness of the conclusions is often felt to be aesthetically correct, even before it can be logically assimilated.

Throughout the entire spectrum of drama, texts can range in scale and complexity of content from a simple classroom improvisation to a Shakespeare play, and the entertainment value of a text is an important element in provoking and shaping the response. In the process of classroom drama the making of ‘a play’ is done for the benefit of the participants, and the entertainment element comes from the pleasure of participating—the same pleasure that the child gets from his/her makebelieve play.

The prerequisites for making drama

The above description of the basic unit, the building block, of drama experience incorporates the three prerequisites for making process drama in the classroom. These are:

• content
• the fictional lens
• the creation of a safe classroom environment.

The first two, content and the fictional lens, provide the approach, the gateway, into a drama activity in the classroom. The third, a safe environment, is absolutely essential if the drama is to be successful.

Content

The content of drama is always some aspect of life. Its source is a combination of

• material experienced, imagined or read about
• aspects of life from the past, present or possible future that will arouse the pupils’ curiosity
• the needs, concerns and preoccupations of the children
• issues such as relationships that the teacher may wish to explore through drama
• curriculum material, whose codes drama can crack and the human aspects of which may need to be explored actively.

The teacher will direct the pupils to the content, which will lead to issues, themes and knowledge considered important for the pupils at their particular stage of development. This content should, initially, help young children to come to terms with and understand their fears, worries and excitements in a big, dangerous and wonderful new world. It will involve helping the child to cope with the immediate world of home and school and to develop relationships within it. The content should also help to extend the child’s knowledge into an understanding of the wider community and the bigger world and to develop the skills he/she will need in order to assimilate and accommodate that world.

As the child grows, the teacher will be aware of his/her particular developing personal and social needs. Drama themes, activities and issues to be explored should reflect this and assist the child in dealing, at a distance, with any personal and social difficulties before they become habitual. The content of drama will also be used to accommodate and to motivate the learning of appropriate curriculum material.

As the child matures he/she develops some concept of the difference time has made to the world. The content of drama can then help him/her to see history as a continuum of lived-through human activity and to see present events as thrusting towards a future that may still be influenced. The child can also become aware of the human dimension in all knowledge, and drama can be used to connect the child’s experience with this new knowledge, thus encouraging research into relevant areas of knowledge. Personal and social problems, such as bullying and passivity, that are beginning to manifest themselves, can also be dealt with.

By the time the child reaches the senior classes drama can be used to memorise facts and, through the use of script, to establish simulations of actual events. Script, however, should be used sparingly and only in conjunction with good drama practice. Drama can also be a powerfulinfl uence in extending the child’s vocabulary and in teaching specific language skills. However, it should be borne in mind that, whether it deals with content from other areas of the curriculum or with content that is especially relevant to a particular group of children, drama should always lead to understanding and to the revelation of pattern and meaning.

The selection of content

In the selection of content the teacher should be guided by a number of considerations, all of them related to the particular quality of the learning experience that drama can provide. The content of drama should help to

• make children curious about knowledge
• assist with and motivate research skills and actively show the place of personal enquiry in the acquisition of knowledge
• show the child the relationship between wanting to know something and the ability to acquire that knowledge
• make the child aware of the human dimension inherent in all knowledge
• increase the child’s understanding of life topics and themes
• give the child an insight into aspects of life that are vital to his/her development
• relate knowledge to experience
• assist the child, through the involvement of all the senses and through a total body experience, to develop the memory, and particularly the longterm memory of facts and data.

The fictional lens

When the content is chosen it is examined through the medium of the fictional lens. This is the means by which content is translated into story. The question ‘What’s the story?’ has the double meaning, ‘What is the real situation?’ and ‘What is the fiction?’The making of plot (a series of incidents) and theme (a focus of reflection on essence and pattern) has, from myth to fairy-tale to Shakespeare to soap opera, always been regarded as a valid way of understanding reality. For example, the issue of bullying might be examined through making a fiction about a boy and his dog, his friends, his parents, their kindness and their cruelties. Such story-making will allow the child who has a tendency to bully, as well as those children who have experienced bullying, to identify with the fictional boy who is bullied and to examine the issues involved without having to put up the personal defences that a direct approach to the subject would invite. The lens offiction distances the issue enough to make it safe for the participants to handle while at the same time presenting it in such a way that the essential elements become clear. If this were merely a story that was read, someone who had bullied might and could opt out of the discussion and, consequently, out of active consideration of the issues. The active, playful, affirming way in which drama makes stories is the lure that invites everybody to participate.

In infant and junior classes the stories and fictional incidents that constitute the fictional lens and through which the content is mediated will be stories of animals, toys, fathers, mothers, simple journeys, bus stops, and all the other fictional transformations that allow the child to try out, in safety, situations encountered in the real world. Later, when the child is no longer afraid of fantasy and fairy-tale, these can be added to the fictions used. From the middle classes onwards factual stories from history or current news (which will have been used from the beginning) may be used more and more. At this stage it is important that the particular framing of the dramatic incident allows the child to enter the drama without being restricted to mere representation of fact.

By the time they reach sixth class, children should have begun to understand the essential relationship that drama has with life, and the basis should be laid for an enlightened choice of significant action. Children should also have a sense of how different genres (the tragic, the comic, the absurd) can act as distinctive lenses on reality. This can lead them towards an authentic appreciation of dramatic literature as a blueprint for dramatic action. In the senior classes especially, existing fictions such as stories, poems, play scripts or videos can be used as pre-texts, providing content that has already been mediated through a fictional lens by the writer or director.

It should be emphasised, however, that the drama process involves story making, not merely the acting out of existing stories. While existing stories, plays etc. may help the teacher to find the fictional lens appropriate for his/her class, existing material should always be reinvented in order to match the needs of a particular group of children and the educational objectives of the teacher. The children will take the characters into new situations, discover new dilemmas, test other solutions, and give them new words and worlds as they pursue the characters’ relevance to their own childhood needs and concerns.

The experience of approaching drama through a wide variety of fictional lenses can help develop children’s perceptions of the relationship drama has, in all its forms, with life. In choosing the appropriate fictional lens the teacher should be concerned that it enables the children to

• understand, through active participation, the essential nature of fiction and the relationship between plot and theme
• understand the particular relationship that drama has to life and thus form the basis for an enlightened, critical viewpoint in the study of all dramatic texts on the drama floor, in the theatre, in the cinema or on television
• understand the nature of dramatic literature and the way in which it invites the participant to create dramatic texts that illuminate the time the drama was written and at the same time relate to the universal concerns that can apply to the present time
• understand the place of myth, fairytale and drama in the moral, cultural, aesthetic and spiritual development of people
  understand the place of symbol and sign in the examination of reality.

Creating a safe environment

The making of drama involves entering the drama world with as much honesty, authenticity and spontaneity as possible. The degree of spontaneity will be in direct proportion to the emotional and physical safety that the child feels. Insecurity may be caused by the child’s temperament, his/her family background, the social relationships in the class, or how emotionally safe he/she feels with the teacher. The teacher, in the drama class, can address these problems directly by creating fictions that explore such issues as gender equity, self-esteem, the valuing of difference, the acceptance of responsibility, or the development of positive attitudes towards problemsolving. However, he/she will get truly spontaneous work and innovative thinking from the class only if positive attitudes in these areas are continually nurtured at a practical level in the drama class.

Since children have different emotional and physical needs, this process will have different emphases in different classes and with different groups of children. While young children are usually very physical and free in their play, many of the social skills needed for small-group work are relatively undeveloped. The child may therefore feel threatened by the social situations involved in smallgroup drama. Furthermore, since the child at this stage still has some difficulty in distinguishing between make-believe and reality, and since drama by its nature crosses this boundary, the teacher may sometimes be required to help the child with this distinction.

Developing social skills will, in time, allow the child to participate comfortably in small groups working simultaneously. However, children should be made to understand that, in the real social context, no child may hurt another physically, emotionally or intellectually.

The strong natural desire for makebelieve will wane as the child progresses through the infant and junior classes. It is important that the teacher creates vibrant and motivating drama contexts that will keep the impulse towards make-believe alive during this period of the child’s development. Otherwise, he/she may reach the stage of thinking that make-believe and drama are just silly, and this may lead to the fear of ‘making a fool of myself’ or of ‘making myself ridiculous’ through becoming involved in the drama. The teacher can greatly assist in dispelling this attitude by entering into the drama through the teacher-in-role.

At this stage, too, children can begin to confuse drama skill with display. This may discourage the more introverted children as well as steering the extroverts away from both a sincere participation in the drama and any useful reflection on it. At this stage children also begin to seek safety in comedy. This should not be discouraged. On the contrary, it should alert the teacher to the need for even greater safety if feelings are to be explored with the truth they merit and in the depth the children need. It should also make the teacher aware that the comic genre can be used effectively to explore important topics and content.

As children mature, small-group work can be used effectively to accustom boys and girls to co-operating and to sharing ideas and suggestions. This exchange is crucial in the development towards adolescence. Peer pressure and bullying may also be a part of children’s experience at this stage. The observant teacher will see these tendencies manifested in the drama class and can deal with them in a non-judgemental way. This should lead to a healthy atmosphere in which the child can experience open relationships with more than a selected few in the class, and this in itself will improve the quality of the drama.

The creation of a safe drama environment is concerned particularly with the child’s intrapersonal and interpersonal development, and it is worthwhile identifying what drama has to contribute in each of these areas.

Intrapersonal development

Drama can help the child

• to understand and moderate his/her behaviour
• to become more spontaneous, confident and self-assured in dealing with others
• to foster, in a practical way, the sense of his/her own uniqueness and in turn develop a positive assertiveness as the basis of handling conflict and solving problems
• to value his/her own abilities and aptitudes
• to understand and come to terms with, at a very practical level, any disadvantage accruing from the child’s environment
• to recognise the positive and negative aspects of emotions and their importance in his/her life
• to come to terms with appropriate aspects of his/her growth and development.

Interpersonal and social development

Drama can help the child

• to trust, respect and support others in the group so that a basis is laid for co-operation in the creation of drama
• to experience openness with others and to practise, without fear, selfrevelation and self-expression
• to respect and cherish the differences in people
• to be comfortable with and expressive in verbal and non-verbal language
• to experience and create an atmosphere in which ideas, thoughts and feelings can be expressed, conflict handled positively, and life situations openly and honestly explored
• to help the child to experience open, healthy relationships with all the members of the class and not just with a selected or exclusive few.

The elements of drama

Drama has a number of defining characteristics. These are the elements of drama. They dictate the structure of dramatic form and give the drama its characteristic mode of expression. They are as relevant to process drama in the classroom as they are to the corpus of world theatre. The elements of drama are:

• belief
• role and character
• action
• time
• place
• tension
• significance
• genre.

Their importance in the curriculum is underlined by the fact that they are closely reflected in the individual content objectives of the strand unit ‘Exploring and making drama’. The first two prerequisites for making process drama, content and the fictional lens, also have an intimate relationship with the elements, while the creation of a safe environment is an essential ingredient of all drama in the classroom.

The relationship between the elements of drama

Belief

The element of belief in drama, as in all literature, is rooted in imaginative truth. The world of the imagination allows for the myriad of human possibilities that lie beyond the reach of everyday experience, even beyond the experience of a lifetime. Through it we can explore these possibilities, speculate about them and extend our view of the world. This depends, of course, on our acceptance of the validity of the truth that imagination offers, in the trust we have in its capacity to enrich human experience.

The essence of drama is story, the creation of a fictional world in which certain characters live out the consequences of a particular situation. In the theatre the characters and the situation are developed, typically, in a play script, which actors and the director ‘bring to life’ on the stage in a performance for an audience. The text of the play is a fiction created by the author, and the element of belief resides, in the first place, in the author’s conviction that it is a dramatic construct that, either realistically or metaphorically, represents or comments on or gives meaning to some aspect of human existence. Belief is also essential when the director and the actors accept the author’s version of the fictional world and attempt to bring it to life on the stage. In the course of the performance the audience, in acceding to the conditions and logic of the play, agrees to the fiction and completes the circle of belief. The centrality of the element of belief in the drama is as relevant to a soap opera as it is to Greek tragedy.

With regard to drama in school, belief is most evident in the child’s trust in and ease with make-believe play. It is the quality of this belief that the drama curriculum seeks to foster and preserve throughout the child’s life in school. The degree to which he/she can enter into the imaginative world by accepting the fiction of the drama will, to a great extent, determine both the success of his/her drama experience and the learning experiences that will result from it.

In conventional theatre it is customary for people to enter the process of making performance texts with the object of fulfilling one of the three following functions:

• the actor: mimicking life-behaviour until he/she can surrender to the fiction and behave as if living in the existential fictional moment
• the director: ensuring that the representation of life is accurate and creates visual and auditory meaning
• the author: probing for meaning and initiating drama moments that may lead to potentially significant understanding.

In process drama, however, all three functions are undertaken jointly so that the teacher may be in role while the children may interpret what may emerge from a still picture or a score, or suggest where the drama might go next. Belief in the drama world is built up through this fluid engagement and the drama takes on its own life, from which we may hypothesise about life in the real world.

Role and Character

In the early stages of taking the part of a character in the drama the child will do no more than assume a role. In Drama activity 2 (p. 70), the child takes the role of a shepherd without having any knowledge of how the individual shepherd acts. In taking the role, he/she is saying, in effect, ‘If I were a shepherd this is how I would behave in this situation’. This is enough to enable the child to participate in the drama. As it progresses, however, he/she will come to know about how the shepherd thinks, about his past, about his ambitions, about his view of life. As the child proceeds to generate and accumulate information about the shepherd, he/she is engaging in characterisation, which is the process of taking on himself/herself the physical, emotional and intellectual make-up of a fictional character. The benefit of characterisation is that the child learns to view the drama world from the point of view of someone different from himself/herself. This promotes understanding and empathy, and this empathy will in turn enhance the child’s ability to understand characters increasingly distant from his/her own personality.

It is important to distinguish between taking a role and what is often called role-playing. Role-playing is the acting out of a limited activity for the purpose of forming or representing habits and attitudes, for example road safety drill, or to give practice for a forthcoming event, such as a mock interview. It could also be used to consolidate the memorisation of facts already acquired. Role-playing Diarmaid Mac Murchú’s conversation with Strongbow might be used for this purpose. Taking a role in drama, on the other hand, involves entering into a fictional world and helping to determine what happens in that world in order to understand the patterns of human behaviour that underlie a particular event.

This may, of course, involve characterisation—an attempt to assume the characteristics, desires, thought processes or physical attributes of another person.

In make-believe play, children create characters quite spontaneously and without reflection. As they mature, however, a more acute sense of individuality develops, along with a heightened sense of the otherness of people. More conscious characterisation becomes possible at this stage. This can assist greatly in exploring relationships, in developing the ability to use different registers of language and in using nonverbal means to communicate meaning.

Through a consistent engagement with a wide variety of roles and characterisation in a range of stimulating and challenging situations, children can develop

• the ability to enter physically, mentally and emotionally into the fictional context and to co-operate with others in ‘playing at’ the fictional situation in order to discover the particular possibilities that it offers
• the empathy with and understanding of others needed to assume a role or a character
• a willingness to accept responsibility.

This can foster the personal adaptability, spontaneity, verbal and non-verbal skills, co-operation skills, initiative, imagination and creative abilities that are necessary to ensure that the drama text is a fresh and valid representation of life.

Action

Action springs from the interaction between character and situation. In the drama, characters and situations are chosen so that certain unresolved conflicts, tensions, questions or choices result. The action of the drama lies in the resolution or attempted resolution of these. The characters act and interact with each other in the desire to resolve the situation in which they find themselves. Through the action the initial fictional situation changes and develops, and this in turn will be reflected in the development of the different characters. The essence of drama, then, is the modification that occurs in the circumstances and attitudes of a group of characters in a particular situation, and it is through the action of the drama that this modification comes.

However, in entering into the action it is essential that children accept its dramatic consequences, otherwise the validity and potency of the drama will be lost. This may conflict with what they might wish would happen; but they must be encouraged to ‘stay with’ the character and to affirm the dramatic logic in order to ensure the integrity of the drama. When this happens, when they are truly involved with character and action in the drama, children can come to new insights, gain new knowledge and reach new understanding. Action in the drama has an integral relationship with the concept of text. The definition of text, hitherto confined to the written word, has expanded considerably in modern times and is now used to describe a performed play, a film or a video, whether these are fictional or documentary. The use of the word ‘text’ in the drama curriculum is related to this meaning. It does not mean script but the performed fiction that takes place on the drama floor. To make the drama text, pupils create and enter a drama world and create a fictional action in that world. The coherence of the action is not achieved through linear narrative but through the enactment of selected significant moments (scenes), which together illuminate the content of the drama.

The teacher can begin the drama process by introducing a pre-text—an object, a poem, an anecdote, a piece of script etc.—that is a starting point from which to launch the dramatic world in such a way that the participants can identify their roles and responsibilities and begin to build a dramatic context together as quickly as possible. The pretext therefore provides both a springboard and the context for the drama. The role of the pupils will not, however, be confined to acting out what the teacher suggests; they will also take part, side by side with the teacher, as shapers, contributors, creators, selectors and evaluators in the drama process.

The nature of the child’s engagement with the drama will vary with his/her stage of development. However, through planning and careful consideration of the other elements—belief, character, action, place, time, tension, significance and genre—the teacher can maximise the child’s involvement in the enactment (in the creation of the dramatic text) at any age or stage of his/her development.

Time

All dramatic action, like all human existence, takes place in a dimension of time. The content objective of the curriculum, ‘Experience how the fictional past and the desired fictional future influence the present dramatic action’, reflects the element of time.

A stage drama begins with particular characters in a certain situation and involves a modification of those characters and the situation they are in. Time is an element, first of all, in that each of the characters starts with a history and can realise a future development through the drama action. What has happened before the action is preserved in the fictional memory of the characters.

This fictional memory contains

• what the characters may have done
• what the characters may have thought and felt
• previous relationships they may have had
• where the characters may have been
• what may have happened to a particular character
• what may have happened to the other characters in the drama.

The fictional memory contains the seed of characterisation, the basis on which the actor can develop the character in order to give it a full fictional life. If what has happened in the fictional past shapes what the character is now, the fictional past also shapes the future that the character projects and desires for himself/herself. It also influences the way in which the character seeks to mould his/her own future. Thus, knowing the character’s past enables the actor to divine how that character pursues his/her future in the present moment.

Although this is as true in process drama as it is in the theatre, there are two crucial differences:

• the child finds it easier to enter in by imagining a future for the person whose role he/she assumes
• it is not easy for a child to adopt a character’s past experience without having experienced it himself/herself.

In view of this, it is usual in process drama to help the child into a role through the desire for a future outcome and allow him/her to pick up experience of the character’s life as the drama proceeds. How this works in practice can be seen in the ‘Descriptions of successful drama activities’ (p. 64–91). In Drama activity 2 (p 70), for example, the characters are initially asked to make a choice for their immediate future: to go to Bethlehem or not. Incidents are built up on the journey and a past is created so that, eventually, when they come to the moment when they have to make a decision about helping Mary and Joseph, they make it as the characters who have a certain past, and not as themselves.

Time also helps to frame the action and can (often crucially) constrain the action. This will be the case if the nature of the action depends on a time factor:

• How can we get across the river before the enemy arrives?
• How long will we have to wait before help comes?
• If we don’t reach the castle in time, will the princess have been taken away?

In this context, of course, time also contributes to the element of tension.

Whereas it can sometimes be difficult for children to sustain an isolated improvisation, they can be enabled, through using a series of enactments, to construct a longer drama experience encompassing a greater time span. The gradual building up of the scenes helps to give vividness and to build a commitment to and a belief in the drama. This is shown in Drama activity 3 (p. 74), about building a dolmen. Here a number of short, concentrated, related enactments accumulate to create a drama text that happens over an extended period. Initially the scenes may be short or long, but as they grow from one another, an extended story is created, making the overall experience vivid and relevant. This also helps the child to an appreciation of other features of time:

• People change over time.
• Circumstances and needs change over time.
• What may be desirable at one time may prove not to be so later on.
• Change is an inevitable component of life and history.
• It is necessary sometimes to allow time to elapse in order to effect change.
• In the drama the element of time contains the unknown, and the experience of the drama is a journey in time, through the drama, into the unknown.

Place

Character, action and time constitute the who, what and when of drama. The element of place encompasses the where. Just as drama takes place in a dimension of time, it also has a location: it happens somewhere. This element of place has two defining characteristics in the drama:

• the place where the fictional action happens
• the use of real place, or the space available, to represent this.

The coexistence and interrelationship of real and fictional place is both complex and flexibile.

In the sense that character doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that characters have a past and a present, their fictional existence presupposes a spatial reference. Where did the character live? Where is the character now? What are the details and the conditions of the place in which the character existed and exists?

In a play script this will be indicated by the author through stage directions, which the cast and the director will create in the staged setting of the play. This staged representation of place will not be available to the actors in rehearsal. They may have only an empty space available to them, which they imagine as the place where the action happens.

It is here that we find the analogy between theatre and the element of place in process drama in the classroom. Likewise, when the teacher suggests the fictional lens of the action, he/she may indicate where the action will take place, and the children will make use of what space is available to imagine the spatial details of the action. On the other hand, a fictionall ens can be presented with no overt indication of place, and it will have to be inferred from the situation in which the characters find themselves.

Just as children should be encouraged to build up a knowledge of the past of the characters as they engage with them in the action, they should also be encouraged to imagine the dimension of place that the characters inhabit and have inhabited: where and how the characters live and have lived. This will help them to give depth and fictional belief to both character and action. They should be encouraged to use what features are available to them in the space that is being used for the drama as imaginatively as possible:

• How much of the space should be used?
• How can particular features be used to represent spatial details of the fiction?
• How can furniture or other props be used to represent details of the fictional place?
• How can sound be used to add to the atmosphere and ambience of the fictional place?

Thus, for example, when the teacher suggests ‘We have to cross this river before the king’s soldiers arrive,’ he/she might also ask

• How wide is the river?
• How deep is it?
• How high are the banks?
• Are there materials available from which to make a raft?
• How well and how long can we stay hidden?

In this way the element of place will not only influence the enactment but will stimulate children to give it a greater vividness and immediacy.

Tension

Tension is essential to the drama because it is tension that drives forward the action of the drama. It arises when characters in the drama are faced with conflicting needs, choices and desires, and this leads to uncertainty. The source of the tension will be inherent in the situation of the drama and in the reaction of the characters to it. Because of the conflict of needs, choices or desires, one or more of the characters in the action wishes, or is constrained to wish, to resolve the dilemma, to escape the constraints of the present fictional uncertainty. This will impel the action forward and develop the characters towards the fictional future.

This in itself, of course, engenders further tension, since the outcome of the attempted resolution and its possible consequences are unknown, or at least not fully foreseen. The effect of tension in the drama can be seen in the following example.

As the children are rowing in their holed boat towards the island the teacher narrates as follows:

‘Can you feel the silence in the boat. We are waiting because any minute now the splash of an oar or too loud a whisper may signal our presence to whoever is on the shore. Row silently, think silently, breathe as silently as you can. What’s that! What is it! Where did that arrow come from?’

It is from a combination of the elements of action, role and character, time and place that tension derives.

The teacher has used the action to create this suspenseful situation. The natural reaction, in drama or life, would be for all of them to panic and shout, but they are constrained by the fact that they do not want to betray their presence. This constraint and their fear for the fictional future derives from a manipulation of the fictional place. To add to the tension there is also the element of time. They cannot delay, because their boat has a hole in it and the presence of the arrow is also a manipulation of time, because it brings their possible future into the present. The arrow is also a manipulation of space, in that it makes real to the children the fact that they are close to the island and that some spatial adjustment must be made if they are to escape the attentions of those on shore. Tension also comes from the element of character, since different characters in the drama will want to take different courses ofaction or evasion. It is from a combination of the elements of action, role and character, time and place that tension derives and this drives the action forward. The nature of the children’s involvement in this process will determine the extent to which belief is built in to the context.

Significance

Significance could be described as the underlying relevance that a piece of drama has to some facet of life. Drama, as with all artistic endeavour, seeks to clarify, to illuminate, to explain or to redefine human experience. The extent and the success of this can vary enormously and will depend, among other things, on the purpose of the particular dramatic expression. However, whether the drama is tragic, the lightest comedy or a process drama activity in the classroom, its relevance, great or small, to human experience will still be discerned.

This significance, or deeper meaning, of the drama will be a factor of the total dramatic experience but can be related most directly to the theme of the drama and the plot through which it is refracted. The theme might be described as an abstract summary of what the drama is about, but the drama can only attain significance when that theme is given a concrete dramatic expression through character, action, time, place and the other elements of drama—when, in other words, it ‘comes alive’ in a specific dramatic fiction.

Shakespeare’s plays Macbeth and Richard III could be said, in general terms, to deal with the theme of ambition and the evils that can result from it. However, each casts a very different light on the origins, the power and the effects of ambition. On the one hand Macbeth, an essentially good man, succumbs to the temptation of ambition through the intervention of the supernatural and the influence of another strong personality but comes to realise its ultimate futility and destructiveness. In the other case Richard, a man who is nakedly ambitious from the outset, perpetrates equivalent evils and causes similar human misery but has, at the end of the drama, learned nothing. Macbeth’s despairing words

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing

contrasts with Richard’s pathetic cry of defiance and frustration:

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

The significance in each case could be said to lie in how shallow and how deep human nature can be and how different people in different circumstances accommodate experience and, ultimately, learn from it. That of course represents only a partial reading of the plays, but it may serve to illustrate the function of the element of significance in the drama.

The relationship between plot, theme and significance is just as important in process drama in the classroom. In most cases the theme will be chosen by the teacher, for a variety of reasons. He/she may wish:

• to examine some important facet of life experience
• to explore some relevant issue
• to enhance learning experience in some other curriculum area.

The teacher in choosing the content and the fictional lens or in providing the pre-text will launch the action, and it is through this that the plot will develop. As the children are involved in the enactment, in the making of the drama text, they will be engaged in continuing reflection on the drama as it happens, and this will in itself influence the course of its development. Later, when the drama is finished, the children can be led, through further reflection, to consider the drama they have made, what the plot turned out to be, how this reflected a theme, and what significance was to be drawn from that particular expression of the theme.

Such extensive post-drama reflection is not always appropriate and can even be self-defeating. It is also worth noting that the significance of a piece of drama is not always readily amenable to paraphrase. Often the significance may only be experienced by the children, not expressed. Experience is the most valuable part of process drama for children, as it is of every other artistic activity.

In the drama about the dolmen in Drama activity 3 (p. 74) the plot is manifestly about a tribe that wants to build a monument to a dead chief that will outdo the monuments of rival tribes. This springs from the theme of honouring the dead and particularly of honouring great people when they die. This quite extensive drama exercise led children to discover that at least part of its significance is not just the importance of honouring the dead but whether this is appropriate at all and if so what form the commemoration should take.

Genre

Naturalistic drama is the genre that imitates most accurately the details of life. It is the genre that will come most easily to children. This is very evident in the propensity that young children have for make-believe play. In makebelieve play they create a symbolic reality through which they can explore the real world and come to terms with its strangeness, while remaining in the safety of their own fictional world.

In fostering and preserving, through consistent drama activity, the instinct for make-believe play after the spontaneous impulse for it has waned, the naturalistic genre affords children a similar opportunity to explore the newness of experience and the issues it raises.It is important, however, that the full potential of drama is made available to the child, and this should involve a gradual widening of his/her drama experience to include genres other than the naturalistic. The genre most readily akin to it is tragedy. This will grow out of the naturalistic as more serious themes are accepted as content and as the element of tragedy is accommodated within the fictional lens. The depth and nature of tragic characters, plots and themes should be of such an order that the child’s emotional and intellectual maturity can encompass them. In other words, the fictional consequences of the tragic shouldimpinge in a significant way on the child’s thought and emotions but in a context in which he/she can engage with them in safety. It is, indeed, one of the strengths of drama that it allows the child to come close enough to content to examine it seriously while at the same time distancing it safely through fiction.

The world of fantasy is also accessible to the children, at first through fairytale and myth and later through their experience of films and television. This, too, provides them with a way of experiencing some of man’s primal fears and obsessions through a world at a remove from their own. The rejection by the stepmother, the threat of the animal world, the mirror images of beauty and ugliness, the healing power of love are all available to children in the genre of fantasy. The safety of the world of the fantastic, suspending as it does many of the constraints of the real world, allows them to look through the glass of wonder at some of the extremes of human experience. Although care should be taken to preserve the joy that children can extract from fantasy and from an experience of the genre of fantasy in the drama, it is important too that a judiciously pitched element of reflection gives them some insight into its deeper springs.

By the middle classes children tend to use comedy as a safety device, and there is often a leaning towards absurd situations and characters. This may serve children in trying out a wishedfor world where, for example, teachers are browbeaten, parents are stupid and children are wise. Such drama should not be invalidated as being ‘not true to life’. On the contrary, it should be used by the teacher to begin to develop the distinction between the genres of comedy, absurd drama and naturalism.

Approaching a drama activity

This section has so far discussed

• the continuum from make-believe play to drama. This is central in developing the child’s facility and ease with drama and is the focus of the first content objective at each level
• the three prerequisites for making process drama. These will, as their name suggests, be a feature of every drama activity
• the functions of the eight elements of drama. The elements will give a structure and an enlivening power to drama activity
• the close relationship that exists between the elements and the content objectives of the curriculum. The content is presented in a way that ensures the centrality of the elements in the drama process.

It might be useful to consider how all of these might be reflected in a drama activity in the classroom.

A drama activity can have many starting points, as is made clear in the five descriptions of drama activities that follow (pp. 66–91), and it is important to stress that the teacher should regularly use different starting points for drama activities. However, the approach might be best explained through showing a fairly obvious route a drama activity might take, starting with content.

The suggestion that follows is based on one of the exemplars given in the curriculum for first and second classes. It should be emphasised, however, that it could be used with equal effectiveness at either of the higher levels.

The exemplar reads:

play out the scene where a dealer convinces Jack that he should sell the cow he loves for a bag of beans, exploring what kind of person the dealer is and what kind of person Jack is.

Here the content with which the teacher has started is the possibility of insights into relationships between parents and children, shady dealings, and power relationships inherent in the story. The fact that this content has already been mediated through the fictional lens of the story allows both the children and the teacher to follow the structure of the existing story until such time as they want to depart from it and change it to accommodate what is happening.

Laying down clear social rules for the drama, respecting the contributions and ideas of the children, and affording them many opportunities to engage in the drama unwatched, will ensure a safe environment for the work.

At the point of departure from the original, a pupil might suggest that Jack loves this cow and might run away with her. In response, the teacher might suggest that the children divide into threes and set up the following scene:

Jack is on his way to the fair to sell the cow but he is so fond of the cow that he has decided to run away rather than sell her. He is now sitting at the side of the road (place) and he is telling her what he has decided to do and why. As this is going on, a neighbour comes along and asks him what he is doing and why he is so lonely. This neighbour will try to persuade him not to run away.

This process of setting up the drama scene is called framing the action. The teacher frames the action in such a way as to be close enough for the child to relate successfully with it, yet distant enough for him/her to engage safely in it.

From this new fictional lens the action can develop. This could consist of the neighbour telling Jack’s mother about him trying to run away and her setting out to look for him. To connect directly with the theme of honesty and dishonesty Jack, in running away, may go through the market-place (again a development of the element of place) in which all the dealers and tricksters are offering various ‘special offers’ to the sellers. In these enactments the children should be encouraged to enter imaginatively into the characters.

It is also possible to extend the drama by introducing another character. Without telling the children playing Jack or the dealer, the teacher could take some pairs from the market place and brief them as follows: ‘You know what the dealer is up to. He has done this sort of thing before but he doesn’t know that you know this. Stop and listen to them and see if you can stop Jack being foolish.’ This would be an example of giving a brief.

If the teacher wanted to bring the drama back closer to the original story, he/she could, for example, ‘stand on a wall’ and announce that there were some people selling extraordinary beans with special powers and that there were others selling ordinary beans and pretending they had extraordinary powers. This would be an example of the teacher in role.

The element of time could be used to add further tension through the teacher giving Jack the prompt ‘That neighbour has told your mother about your plan to run away and she’s coming to look for you. Better sell as quickly as you can.’

The significance of the drama for the children would come from what they learn of human motivation and attitudes through the experience of playing out the drama. Where appropriate, this could be explored further in post-drama reflection through discussion in groups or wholeclass situations.

Although the drama in this case is based on a well-known fairy-tale the genre of the enactment can be unambiguously naturalistic. The effectiveness of the drama will, indeed, be a factor of how real the children can make the characters and the action.

Descriptions of successful drama activities

Five descriptions of successful drama activities follow.

These are intended to give the teacher a detailed description of what is possible in drama lessons. It should be pointed out, however, that they do not seek to prescribe what a teacher should do in a drama lesson, where the children influence choices and directions through their suggestions and through the need to take account of their particular needs and abilities. They describe as closely as possible five drama activities that did actually take place. The parallel notes provide a commentary in each case on the structure, the development, the teaching strategies and the teaching goals.

It should be emphasised too that these are not exemplar lessons the teacher should try to imitate. They merely furnish examples of successful drama activities that particular teachers experienced, interacting with particular groups of children in particular situations. This is not to say that another teacher could not take any one of the starting points and allow the children to develop it into an equally effective but quite different drama activity. Its success would, however, be dependent on the teacher’s personality and expertise, combined with the children’s knowledge, level of maturity and drama experience.

Along with the guidelines on approaching a drama activity (p. 62–64), these descriptions of drama activities exemplify salient features of process drama and the teacher’s approach to it in the classroom.

The essential components of drama— the elements that inform and structure drama, the prerequisites for making drama and the strand and strand units—and the relationship between them can be seen at work in each of the five drama activities. Furthermore, in order to illustrate the adaptability that is characteristic of the approach to drama each of the activities begins from a different starting point. In order, these are:

• the content (bullying and habitats)
• the enactment (the teacher in role beginning straight away to make a drama text with the children)
• the search for a fictional lens, which results in looking at the making of dolmens through the fictional lens of a story about a tribe
• a reflection (on a poem)
• a need for the children to cooperate with each other in order to transform the pre-text of a script into a drama text.

The missing component in this list, the concern for a safe environment, might just as easily have been the starting point for the first activity. Furthermore, the activities are appropriate to different levels. Because they describe drama activities that actually took place the teacher is referred to as he or she as is appropriate.

Drama activity 1
Drama activity 2
Drama activity 3
Drama activity 4
Drama activity 5

Examples of how content objectives in the strand units manifest themselves in the descriptions of successful drama activities

Some of the exemplars under the content objectives in the curriculum for the various classes are drawn from the description of successful drama activities. Many more, however, suggest other approaches to drama activities. The way in which the content objectives of the curriculum manifest themselves in the five descriptions of drama activities at the different levels is outlined below. Because the content objectives show a progression from level to level and because content objectives that are, for example, appropriate to senior classes do not appear earlier, the fourteen headings that follow represent a summary of all the content objectives throughout the four levels of the curriculum.

Explore and develop the instinct for make-believe play into drama so as to achieve spontaneity and freedom

Drama activity 1: The children moved from the game of ‘little packets’ into being rabbits playing the same game and thence into a drama about the fox.

Drama activity 2: The children enact the problems of the journey with the same energy and commitment as they act sheep being chased.

Drama activity 3: A group rather inexperienced in drama achieved a degree of spontaneity through engaging in the unwatched simultaneous enactment of half-minute scenes.

Drama activity 4: For the wise men, the world they enter in search of the moon must have the same reality as the world the child enters in make-believe play.

Activity from script: A sense of play and playfulness pervades all these lessons.

Understand, at a practical level, role and character and develop the ability to hold on to either for as long as the dramatic activity requires

Drama activity 1: The children are effectively taking on the roles of the rabbits.

Drama activity 2: While the children may begin in the role of shepherds, they will, as they proceed through the drama, accumulate the personal experience that is at the basis of characterisation.

Drama activity 3: The children take on the roles of tribe members and, in the scene in pairs, accept briefs for elementary characterisations.

Drama activity 4: The process of getting to know the three ‘men’ is the process of exploring their characters.

Activity from script: Here the roles and characters are divined from the script. As the character of Abie is created, we recognise that we all know an Abie.

Explore and discover how the use of space and objects can act as signs in context-building and in the exploration of dramatic themes

Drama activity 1: The children lay out their briar-patch and feeding areas.

Drama activity 2: The sleeping quarters at the inn are laid out in the space.

Drama activity 3: The capstone and the logs are created through the use of space in an agreed way.

Drama activity 4: The participants decide where the water and boat are going to be and mark them on the floor.

Activity from script: In Abie’s case, the placing of the birds, the desk and the window add to the experience of the drama.

Explore how the fictional past and the desired fictional future influence the present dramatic action

Drama activity 1: The rabbits’ previous experience of the fox and their desire for a safer future force them to seek solutions to the present dilemma.

Drama activity 2: Because the shepherds have been warned about innkeepers and because they want cheap lodgings they treat the innkeeper with suspicion and caution.

Drama activity 3: The past relationship with the Dari tribe is coming in the way of achieving the goal of building the dolmen. That must be rectified in the present.

Drama activity 4: Having never previously seen the moon in water, yet wanting to get it, they cast their net to capture it.

Activity from script: Past knowledge of Abie’s inertia may lead his friend to drag him to see the birds.

Become aware of the rules that help maintain focus in the drama in large- or small-group work

Drama activity 1: The children experience focus mainly through the teacher-in-role maintaining it. There is a strong focus in the games the rabbits play.

Drama activity 2: In the small-group work in threes, each group focuses on getting the donkey up the slope.

Drama activity 3: The children focus on what they need their friend to do in the scene that is acted out in pairs between the worker and the visitor from home.

Drama activity 4: The characters focus on not telling each other about their mission while trying to elicit help.

Activity from script: The ‘fishermen’ must focus on the bite they are getting if the scene is to work.

Experience and become aware of tension and suspense in drama and howit ensures the interest of the participants

Drama activity 1: There is tension when the fox won’t leave. Nobody knows what to do.

Drama activity 2: The man asking if a king has been born is creating a kind of tension that will only be released at the end.

Drama activity 3: There is tension between the messenger who is praising the work and the tribe members who feel they should go home.

Drama activity 4: There is a tension created by the need to catch the moon and their inability to do so.

Activity from script: There is tension between Abie’s objectives and that of his friend. There is tension when the children are face to face with the bull.

Use script as pre-text

Drama activity 1: Doesn’t apply.

Drama activity 2: Doesn’t apply.

Drama activity 3: There is no example in the particular activity. Script could, however, have been used as pre-text for the scene in which they push the donkey up the slope.

Drama activity 4: There is no example in the lesson, but a few lines of script could be used as pre-text for many of the scenes if so desired.

Activity from script: This happens in all these activities.

Use reflection and evaluation of a particular dramatic action to create possible alternative courses for the action

Drama activity 1: As a result of what the fox has done, the children have to decide whether to kill him or negotiate with him.

Drama activity 2: The shepherds may decide whether to let Joseph and Mary in or not. Their decision will result from reflecting on the likelihood, based on their experience of the innkeeper, that they may be thrown out and also reflecting on the need to be kind where possible.

Drama activity 3: It is as a result of their experiences of the bog that the tribe members decide that the hardship is too much.

Drama activity 4: It is from reflecting on the reason the characters are sent that the children know how to relate to each other as characters.

Activity from script: As a result of reflecting on the action they have created, the children decide what the relationships between the characters are.

Explore and learn about the relationship between story, theme and life

Drama activity 1: The feeling that the fox has to be resisted comes from experience of bullies in life, and some of the strategies for doing this come from what the child has gleaned from experience.

Drama activity 2: The children accept that if, as shepherds, they don’t allow Mary and Joseph in, the basis for their decision is derived from values held by people in real life.

Drama activity 3: The children are drawing on their experience and knowledge of jealousy in deciding how to negotiate with rival tribes. They are drawing on experience when they decide that ramps will have to be built to raise the capstone.

Drama activity 4: If the people of the various worlds want the moon and the ‘hero’ doesn’t want to go for it, the decision on what to do has to relate to what they might do in a similar real situation.

Activity from script: To create the riverbank we need to know about riverbanks. The children draw on their knowledge of danger to create the imaginary bull in the field.

Use the sharing of insights arising out of dramatic action in order to develop the ability to draw conclusions and to hypothesise about people and life

Drama activity 1: The children wonder how real rabbits were so clever as to know what kind of habitats to make.

Drama activity 2: The experience has, in this lesson, been reflective enough and it need not be weighed down with further reflection.

Drama activity 3: The children are made to wonder about how we pay homage to our dead and whether this can, in some cases, stultify our lives.

Drama activity 4: The hero’s written account of his journey at the end is the children’s reflection of the experience.

Activity from script: The children may wonder why so many people are fascinated by bulls and things that terrify them.

Develop, out of role, the ability to cooperate and communicate with others in helping to shape the drama

Drama activity 1: The children contribute ideas on where, in the space, they should place each burrow in the warren, where the green area should be, and where we should have paths through the briars.

Drama activity 2: The children work with each other in different groups for the small-group activities of the session.

Drama activity 3: The children must cooperate with each other in making the still pictures of the tribe members moving the stone.

Drama activity 4: The children must cooperate with each other in making scenes that show the life that each one of the three men left.

Activity from script: Having acted the first four lines of an Irish script, the pupils have to co-operate with each other in making a follow-on from those lines.

Develop, in role, the ability to cooperate and communicate with others in helping to shape the drama

Drama activity 1: The children, as rabbits, decide on early warning systems and test out their effectiveness.

Drama activity 2: The children decide whether or not they should go to Bethlehem and whether they have much choice in the matter.

Drama activity 3: The tribesmen decide that a dolmen should be built for the chief, Odhran.

Drama activity 4: The children cooperate with each other in making a piece of music to go with the drama.

Activity from script: Every move a participant makes is, in some small way, defining the course and meaning of the drama.

Develop fictional relationships through interaction with the other fictional characters in small-group or whole-class scenes as the drama text is being made

Drama activity 1: The children, as rabbits, play with each other and develop rabbit relationships.

Drama activity 2: The children, as shepherds, argue over where each should sleep.

Drama activity 3: The children, as tribe members, develop relationships with each other as they rehearse their arguments to convince the Dari tribe.

Drama activity 4: The three wise men in the drama develop relationships and interactions as they learn to share a common world.

Activity from script: Éiríonn gaolta pearsanta idir na páistí agus iad ag féachaint ar an tarbh agus ag iarraidh a shocrú cad a dhéanfaidh siad.

Enact spontaneously for others in the group a scene from the drama, or share with the rest of the class a scene that has already been made in simultaneous small-group work

Drama activity 1: There are no examples in the drama activity at this level. However, it could happen that, for example, some rabbits might demonstrate games to others.

Drama activity 2: Some show the scenes where they help the donkey up the slope.

Drama activity 3: The tribe members demonstrate for each other some of the techniques they should use on the Dari tribe to negotiate with them.

Drama activity 4: A random group of three enacts, without rehearsal, the scene in which they see the moon in the water for the first time.

Activity from script: In some of the small-group work, for example, on an Irish script, the teacher and pupils look at a random group to see how far the process of making the drama text has progressed.

Drama strategies and conventions

Many strategies can be used in the drama. Some of the more familiar ones are listed below, with comments on their usefulness to the teacher.

Drama games

Many drama games are useful in helping to establish trust, confidence and a sense of playfulness, and some are used to help the children experience some aspect of the drama (for example blind man’s buff, to equate with searching for a friend in a big city).

Games can promote the social integration of the class, but if used indiscriminately they can become a substitute for drama.

Still image and montage

Groups compose a still picture to illustrate an idea or capture a moment. In montage such an image is set against a contrasting image or a contrasting soundscape so as to question the content of the still picture (for example, a still picture of emigrants with a sound-track of sounds from home).

This strategy can help greatly in reflection and in slowing down the drama but if overused can lead to talk about drama rather than action.

Hot-seating

A character sits in the centre while the others ask questions about his/her life and he/she answers as the character. As a variation the others can also sometimes ask the questions as their own characters.

Hot-seating can help to clarify aspects of character for all concerned, but it has limited usefulness in primary school drama.

Thought-tracking

Some of the class do actions silently or make still images while the others speak their thoughts aloud about them, either simultaneously or individually.

This can be useful for reflection on the meaning of particular significant moments but should not be used as a substitute for entering into the drama.

Sound-tracking

Some of the class do actions silently or make stills while the others make the sound-track to go along with them. This can be seen in Drama activity 4 (p. 83) when half the class make the soundtrack for the other half.

This strategy is useful in situations where the teacher is working towards a loosening of control but unsure about how far to go. It is also a useful substitute for ‘showing’ a particular section of small-group work. However, if overused it can lead to intellectual rather than physical drama, to staying outside the drama rather than entering playfully into it.

Voices in the head

At a moment of choice for a particular character others in the group articulate the conflicting voices the character can hear in his/her head.

This can lead to reflecting on the meaning of a moment for a character. It should not be used as a substitute for putting the characters in situations where such considerations are articulated spontaneously as part of the action.

There are many more strategies and conventions that are used in the drama. Their common advantage is that they allow creativity within a controlled situation. However, they should be used with selectivity and discrimination. By overusing them the teacher can keep for himself/herself too much control of the children’s creative impulses, and process drama is thereby reduced to a series of drama strategies rather than the lifelike ebb and flow of productive dramatic action.

Looking closely at children's work

Assessment in drama, as in every other area of the curriculum, is an essential element of the learning and teaching process. It is through continuous monitoring of the children’s engagement with drama that the teacher can plan the drama experiences that will develop their drama skills and concepts most effectively and maximise their learning through drama.

The continuum from make-believe play to process drama is central to the drama curriculum. The extent to which the child can preserve the characteristics of makebelieve play in drama activity will indicate to an important degree the success or otherwise of his/her drama experience. The most important of these are

• a willingness to believe that the symboli s real
• sincerity in playing their characters
• an acceptance of the fictional consequences of the drama
• an impulse to explore.

In summary, a successful drama experience will have at its core the child’s ability to enter fully into the drama, engaging with as much depth and belief as possible in the characters and accepting the dramatic logic of their situation in the drama.

The content objectives of the curriculum indicate clearly the drama skills that the child needs to acquire and they also incorporate the concepts based on the elements of drama that he/she will develop. In taking part, therefore, in the various drama activities the child’s progress in mastering these skills and concepts can be monitored.

The importance of drama lies in the unique contribution it can make to the child’s wider learning experience and development. The choice of content for the drama curriculum will be drawn from

• the child’s everyday experience
• particular issues, such as responsibility, that the teacher may wish to explore through drama
• aspects of life from the past, the present or a possible future that will arouse the child’s curiosity
• the needs, concerns and preoccupations of the child
• content and issues from other curriculum areas.

The extent to which the child’s learning is furthered by engaging, through drama, with particular features of content drawn from these sources will form the second major focus of monitoring children’s work.

Since the learning benefits of drama derive principally from the drama process itself only a limited number of assessment tools are appropriate to it.

These are

• teacher observation
• teacher-designed tasks and tests
• work samples, portfolios and projects
• curriculum profiles.

Teacher observation

This is the form of assessment most consistently used by teachers and most useful in monitoring children’s progress in drama. In observing closely on a dayto- day basis the children’s involvement in the various drama activities, the extent to which they are developing the ability to use drama skills and concepts to maximise their learning experiences can be monitored. Such observation will enable the teacher to

• identify the drama experiences most appropriate to the children’s learning and drama needs
• identify the particular content that is most successfully mediated through drama.

Because the content of drama comes from a variety of sources, including other areas of the curriculum, part of the teacher’s assessment of the child’s progress will be complemented by assessment in other curriculum areas.

A child’s language development and language use will, for example, be influenced by drama experience and, consequently, the monitoring of his/her progress in this area will be a factor of the teacher’s assessment in both language and drama.

Teacher-designed tasks and tests

These arise continually in the course of drama activity as, for example, when a pair of children are asked to play two characters in order to explore a particular issue, or a group of children is asked to work together to solve some problem or to arrive at a decision about what course the drama should take. The assessment of children’s ability to perform particular tasks like these will involve teacher observation in a way that is focused on a particular aspect of children’s involvement with drama.

Work samples, portfolios and projects

In drama these would be made up of writing, art work and other examples of children’s response to, reflection on and extension of their drama experience. Decisions about what can be included will be made variously by the teacher, the child, and the teacher and child in consultation with each other. In this way a valuable dimension of selfassessment will be given to the assessment of the child’s progress in drama and learning through drama. Work samples, portfolios and projects can also contribute to a longer-term summative picture of the child’s learning through drama.

Curriculum profiles in drama

These entail short descriptive statements of pupils’ achievements, behaviour and attitudes in relation to drama and to learning through drama. They may be standardised for different levels of competence and used to check children’s individual ability in relation to each of the statements. In the case of drama they would reflect the child’s progress in relation to elements of the three strands units, enable the teacher to construct a learning profile of each individual child, and create a reference record of his/her progress.