NUI Galway Conference

Here is a flyer for an exciting conference in NUI Galway on November 15th, 2014. Topics include literacy for the developing child, the arts and how rich narratives can inspire multi faceted learning.

Drama at the Heart of the Curriculum: NAPD Leader article

Here's an article published in the autumn 2014 edition of the  NAPD journal for Irish Principals and Deputy Principals. I wrote it to illuminate how we can use drama for integrating curricula. Drawing on experience in two different secondary school settings it demonstrates ways to activate a variety of learning styles and curriculum content through the revised Junior Cycle schema.

Integrating Curriculum through Drama

POSTER MADE BY A STUDENT
FOR OUR MONSIEUR PRONY PLAY 

Co-devised with 14 year olds as part of an integrated curriculum, we developed this play out of historical themes of revolution, science, language: English and French. Renovating the old school house in Scarriff, County Clare became a community endeavour which gave us a wonderfully stark and spacious warehouse-like performing space. The students gained a certain sovereignty and empowerment in making the space theirs while a family of nesting birds was left in the rafters to sing along.

Following include extracts from student journals which provided materials for an exhibition set up first in the public area of the school and then moved to a display at the performance space.




 

 Below are story-board drawings for
key elements of the industrial revolution.

 

 Below, a diagram of James Watt's steam engine and its realisation in our stage set

 Below, classwork supporting oracy and literacy

A GLOSSARY OF FRENCH WORDS USED IN THE PLAY

SPEECH EXERCISES WE USED TO DEVELOP
PROJECTION AND CLARITY

Activating our Students Creative Voices

Screeds have been written on this fascinating topic so here is some more........

In working with teenagers, I have found that transitioning from writing plays for students to writing collaboratively with them can animate their own creative process and mine in very substantial and enjoyable ways. The dialogue between ourselves and the characters we create forges trust, lots of humour and sensitises us to how we can know human beings, so attuning us to the murmurs and whispers that every creative soul has burbling away underground. Through the active rhythm of working hands on, creating and developing something for performance, or a particular practical use, we are stimulating an appreciation of the activity and outcome of crafting, potentially sparking both the inspiration and discipline that are required in what the poets call ' a shaping joy'. Quality becomes for our young students a tangible aesthetic and not a mere abstract concept or the name of a type of chocolate.

There are numerous ways to spark the creative and make our teenagers more aware of the creativity within themselves and how generative we can be. Our thoughts are shaped through metaphor, so images and stories of creative lives offer them great inspiration. For example, I use the lightning rod image, the invention of one of the most prolific creative minds ever, that great First American, Benjamin Franklin. After we had studied his life I drew an image of the lightning rod and frequently alluded to it in our writing classes, as an example of how thought and the creative can be grounded and stewarded. Clouds gather in the heavens, analogous to random ideas. Dense thunder clouds collide, producing thunder and lightning, the Sturm and Drang of potent and combustible fire. The rod, as in real life, catches the electricity and directs it to the ground where no harm is done. We too, as creative minds, can channel Promethean Fire and bring it to Earth where body based skills enable our dexterity, our inventive minds and hearts, to find means and modes for our human ingenuity.

The 18c offers a very rich period for this crossing over from a rhythm of life where a world fuelled by wood, wind and water, of cottage industry, the homespun and the homemade, was increasingly replaced by a the world of coal, steam and iron, a modern world of manufacturing. The crucible of the late 18c where James Watt and Benjamin Franklin showed their constant inventive genius helped to change the world. While in the same period, William Blake sang his songs of prophetic poetry, fulfilling the role of another true creative voice, warning us what revolutions were being unleashed upon our world at the possible expense of our humanity. We can ask where the creative ingenuity of women is in this time and where their inventiveness was channelled. In literature a woman might show her insights, private thoughts and imagination. Not long after Mary Wollstencraft was to bring her own explorations of our human machinations and our obsessions with progress in the story of Frankenstein

Benjamin Franklin remains a remarkable and heroic character for our time, an example of a human being concerned with the common good and equality for all human brethren. All his inventions served a practical need and a simple aesthetic. By contrast, across the Atlantic in England, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, patents and monopolies became a political issue and pirating and industrial espionage was rife. James Watt is instructive on what militates against the creative for him. There is nothing more foolish than inventing! he expostulated, so stressful was this stealing of ideas and the cut throat world of patenting. Franklin who was already wealthy, thanks to the success of his printing press, eschewed patents for his inventions placing them in the public domain. These gifts included bifocals, improved street lamps, the Franklin stove, flippers and the glass harmonica, to name a few. Generosity of spirit which he embodied so fully, is often a characteristic of true creativity. For we discover in the creative freely given and received, a sense of abundance in how ideas and inventions arrive and can be shared. Our own age mirrors this in open source aspects of the net and the patronage of current day inventors such as Dyson offering grants and scholarships to young, aspiring, inventive minds.

The creative can reclaim our humanity. It puts us in touch with our feeling life, our mental and spiritual life and, potentially, the moral where the laws of nature teach us about both boundary and the infinite. No more than the arts are a decoration or an ornament, so the creative is not just useful as another job skill for our CV. but rather, vital for connecting us to ourselves and each other. The field of drama shows this very clearly, in the cultivation of give and take, the listening ear for what works like music, transitions, rising and falling, contrasts, climaxes and resolutions of narrative and the empathy and eye involved in reading and sharing human foibles and strengths.

True education happens an environment where teachers can work cooperatively to foster the creative in their students. Political manipulation and prescription rather than safeguarding our students, erodes the spirit of the teachers and in turn the potential of their students' learning. Blake again has much to say about the binding with briars, the joys and desires of young people, threatened then as they are today, by the deadening manacles of a stillborn and oppressive authority. The recovery of what makes us human and the connection to our creative that in turn, connects us to the wider Creation itself is discovered and celebrated through humour, language, metaphor, ideas, fallow time, ref James Watt and Archimedes, risk taking, a sense of freedom, in failing and above all the sense of wonder.

Here is a short extract from a play collaboratively written with fourteen year olds, based on a true tale of industrial espionage and the life of James Watt, inventor of the modern steam engine.

            (France 1779 in the tavern Les Trois Cochons Ivres)

Monsieur Gaspar Prony: a French engineer
Jacques: a manservant to the Mayor of Chaillot

......
Prony: Please, tell the mayor that in order to secure his water works at Chaillot, the first and foremost of their kind, mark you, I will need to undertake a little trip to scout out, you understand, the new inventions of Watt.

Jacques: (slight pause) What Monsieur Prony?

Prony: Precisely! Watt!

Jacques: Precisely what Monsieur Prony?

Prony: James Watt! He is a Scot! He now resides in the heart of England in the town of Smeth..wick near Bir-ming-'am. where he dabbles in...... (looks around surreptitiously)...steam machines.  (puffing up) Your master, the Mayor of Chaillot, understands of course that we French with our magnificent (pompous gesture) heritage of reason, science and natural philosophy may have more than a few things to teach this Scot who lives and trades in England. 

Jacques: Yes, Monsieur Prony, I understand perfectly. It does sound very interesting. I know my master the Mayor is indeed very enthusiastic to have a waterworks powered by steam in Chaillot.

Prony: (nervous and then enthusiastic) This project is more than interesting! It is literally ground breaking my friend. It is both.....cutting edge and visionary! We would be making a mark for notre patrie, pour toute la France! Why to combine this with the French genius for both engineering and science (clasps his hands in joy and proud triumph) well.....how far could it go? But first, we need to take this little trip across La Manche.

Jacques: Yes M'sieu Prony. Undercover M'sieu Prony? We have just gone to war with England have we not Monsieur?

Prony: S'il vous plait! (sshing and spraying Jacques as looking around nervously despite his own recent volume) Not so vulgar! Under cover? No! No! My good friend this will merely be a discreet affair. A little investigation. All above board.

Jacques: Discreet quite, quite so. (ironically) My master says Monsieur would you please come to his house in Chaillot tomorrow morning at ten? He has some important contacts he wishes you to meet.

Prony: Important? Are we perchance talking patronage? L' Academe des Sciences de Paris perhaps? Or are we talking.....his Majesty... King Louis? He has patronised my work before you know and thought very highly of it.

Jacques: I am not privy to the details Monsieur Prony regarding patronage or where or how he project may be funded but there are two brothers he wishes you to meet.

Prony: What?

Jacques: No, not Watt! Perrier! Les freres Perrier. Can I tell the mayor you will be there?....
....
....

Example of a history lesson using the fishbowl method of discussion

A group of fourteen year olds gather into groups of four, designating a leader and a note taker with easy efficiency. Within minutes they are assembling key points either to defend or prosecute the King of France. Rooted in their knowledge of the French Revolution, they are assembling evidence for each key assertion they will make in response to the catalytic statement of Maximilian Robespierre 'The King must die for the Revolution to live'.

Divided into groups of royalists and revolutionaries we will go further and further into make believe, as language, thought, and reflection connect to themes of revolution and sovereignty which we have been studying and which have archetypal resonance for this age. The more I can draw on those deep patterns of symbolic play, and exchange, the more the students will say yes to becoming present to learning.

In the run up to this cooperative group activity, we have stretched and moved, sung and recited a poem - Liberty Tree by Thomas Paine - and now, as we settle into the next phase of our lesson, a cohesion warms the group and differences find their own level. For adolescents, as much as any age, what can support their increasingly individuated styles of learning is crucial. Connecting to what has gone before and what beckons from the future, offers a living context. The more vivid our learning the more we can know ourselves and how we learn (AaL). As pubescent turmoil takes over, our burgeoning powers of cognition, powerful inner feelings, and rapidly changing bodies can colour and confuse. Self consciousness emerges as the painful enabler of growing self awareness. 

Meanwhile, the students are very productively engaged as lively royalists and revolutionaries, considering the topic of a king on trial, a beheading and the implications of their actions. They will now divide into two circles for what is called a Fishbowl Discussion. Inner circle and outer circle are facing inwards, each circle composed of equal numbers of royalists and revolutionaries. The protocols of discussion are set and then the debate begins as the inner circle conducts the debate and the outer circle observes. Passions rise, engagement deepens, moral arguments fill the space, while the teacher is able to move increasingly from facilitating into an active witnessing role. After a time, if a member of the outer circle wishes to engage directly in discussion, they tap a person in front of them on the shoulder and indicate their wish to participate directly and so seats are exchanged-often a number of times. Discussion continues and the realm of make believe takes us deeper and deeper into the truths of a challenging question that marked a turning point in modern history.

In reflecting together afterwards about what we have learnt, students are amazed at how passionate they became and how much there was to say. As a teacher I delight, as do they,  in the intensity and articulate clarity of engagement and how students who might not speak suddenly are kindled into expressing new points of view. The follow up activity next day or for homework, will be to organise the arguments into opposing columns and write our conclusions. No one will struggle with this.  Fluency characterises our next steps.

Reflective practice: what have I learnt as teacher?

• That language, thought and action are most alive when kindled in a context that has directly met the needs of the body and feeling life. The affective and cognitive work together.
• That meaning is made by the students themselves through making something both collaboratively and in resistance to each other.
• That direct exchange with each other engages students when they are held in a structure that allows scaffolding - a gentle coaching towards autonomy and ease.
• That the theme, when developmentally relevant, is a mother lode for both teacher and student in terms of connection and further material and activity.
• That changing roles from facilitator to witness enables me to observe afresh how students are active. Distance changes perspective and allows me to see what they might need next and what speaks.
• That their own assessment and my own of the learning taking place happens organically and efficiently with knowledge of the subject living at the heart of the lesson.

Literacy is not just about reading and writing but about navigating the world. Making meaning leads to literacy. Skill grows out of a desire and need. My job as teacher is to attend with patient vigilance to the ripening I see before me, find models of good language and subvert where I can monosyllabic, cliche reductions. In mainstream educational reform much is now made of the need in the 21c to stress speaking and making, as much as, writing and reading. If we remind ourselves the oral was the cradle for the written word, that tool use and language evolved together, that song and melody preceded language, and that whole brain learning requires working with movement, gesture, and song to awaken to activate our right hemisphere, as much as the left we can support more modes and styles of learning.

Student's write-up of French Revolution debate

Narrative is now widely acknowledged as the leitmotif of how we make meaning our own and so find our place in the world.  Freedom comes through knowing myself and moving between, the ground of skills, activated through and by the body and the limbs, and the mountain top where altitude allows us to see, sift, select, and determine choices and next steps.

Literacy is not just a skill but part of our social glue, a way of knowing ourselves, of naming and charting the world through the poetry of metaphor and the rhythm of the familiar, as well as the strange and surprising. When joy accompanies our growing literacy we have fuel in our engine for life. If in the early years, children have been nourished in playful language, in rich storytelling, and in symbolic play, then in the teen years they are much more likely to embrace and connect with the empowering and sustaining vibrancy and deep listening that a rich feeling for language can offer.

Extract from an article published in Kindling magazine