Staging Equality With Dramatic Inquiry: Teachers Changing How They Mediate Learning Using Classroom Drama

• In Event: 33.046 - An Exploration of the Dialogical Possibilities for Drama and Performance for Diverse Learners

Abstract

Overview/Purpose/Significance:

Classroom dramatic pedagogy has recently become more widely used both in the teaching of particular disciplines such as literacy (e.g. Winston, 2000) and in cross-curricular integrated learning (e.g. Heathcote & Bolton, 1995). Drama has tended to be regarded on the one hand as a set of engaging generic strategies (e.g. Neelands & Goode, 2000) and on the other hand as an art form that engages a whole group using a predominately pre- or teacher-planned sequence of activities (e.g. O’Neill, 1995). The practical and research literature almost exclusively focuses on the learning of students with little attention paid to how students actually engage (e.g. Adomat, 2009).
This research is significant because little attention has been paid to teaching on the ‘edges’ of dramatic activities with disengaged students who may feel disaffected or marginalized and who position themselves or are positioned by peers with less agency to participate. In this presentation we focus on how and why teachers changed their practice as they struggled to engage specific students in particular activities when using dramatic inquiry (Author, 2011).

Theoretical Perspectives:

This presentation assumes teaching and learning in multimodal (Jewitt & Kress, 2003) mediated cultural historical activities (Roth & Lee, 2007) with increased affordances possible in dramatic pedagogy (Heathcote, 1984) and takes a sociocultural view of research with particular attention to agency, power, and identity (Lewis, Enciso, & Moje, 2007), social positioning (Harre & Langenhove, 1999), and dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999). Following Ranciere (1991) and Bakhtin (1981), we begin with a presupposition of the equality of intelligence of all participants assuming that a primary responsibility of teachers is to use their authority to ‘stage equality’ by creating and shaping activities to make dialogue as inclusive and ‘polyphonic’ as possible.
Data Sources/Methods:
Data is drawn from four case studies of teachers (one kindergarten, two 5th grade, and one 12th grade English teacher) in a year-long participatory action research study (McIntyre, 2007) in which teachers were experimenting with using the cross-curricular dialogic inquiry-based dramatic pedagogy, dramatic inquiry.
In addition to field notes and digital photographs of students’ artifacts and writing, video data sources include: teaching sessions, teacher and student reflections. Following Norris (2004), analysis of examples collaboratively selected and analyzed by teacher and researchers focused on modal density and each student’s foreground, mid-ground, and background attention in relation to real and imagined actions, objects, and other people. Following Alexander (2006), Harre & Langenhove (1999), and Author (2014), data were coded, clustered, and compared using criteria for dialogic talk and the social positioning by one person of self and others in both real and imagined contexts.

Findings:

We present extracts from case studies including examples of collaborative multimodal analysis to illustrate how teachers changed their social positioning of students ‘on the edge’ in both the real and imagined contexts of activities and why they believed their positioning had a significant effect on student agency and participation in dramatic inquiry.

Authors

• Brian W. Edmiston, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Kathleen Farrand, The Ohio State University - Columbus