Drama, Desire and Schooling. Drives to learning in creative and expressive school subjects

Desire is an unfamiliar and neglected concept in education and schooling. This paper makes an argument for the need to consider desire as a drive to learning in schools. In parallel with both Freud and Piaget, Vygotsky draws connections between play in children, fantasy and imagination in adolescence and, in adulthood, the making and enjoyment of the arts. In each case, the force, or drive towards creativity is seen as an expression of desire. With the emergence of arts-oriented subjects in the curricula of mass schooling, adolescents are encouraged to draw resources from the internalised worlds of fantasy and imagination and to materialise these in the social production of various cultural forms, where the resources of production are held as much between the group of students as within their individual and internal worlds of fantasy and imagination. This paper focuses particularly on the secondary school curriculum, taking a piece of improvised drama as evidence and analysing it from a Vygotskian perspective. Firstly, how, in these kinds of activity, might educationalists gain insights into the individual and social drives towards learning and development and, secondly, what resources from the socio-cultural environment are utilised and transformed? Major themes to emerge will be the productive and dynamic set of tensions which are exposed between the desire of the individual and the processes of social production, between the drive of desire and structuring principles of particular cultural forms and, finally, between the force of desire and the institutional constraints of schooling

The Meaning of Action in Learning and Teaching

Action is a highly theorised aspect of social life nonetheless it remains a relatively neglected source of data within educational research. This paper attempts to highlight the significance of the analysis of organised action within educational research. It describes and demonstrates an analytical approach to action applicable to the classroom developed from approaches to the analysis of bodily communication and action in drama education (Franks, 1995 & 1996) and from new approaches to rhetoric developed in the research project ‘Rhetorics of the Science Classroom’ funded by the ESRC (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn & Tsatsarelis, forthcoming). These approaches draw on social semiotic theories of making meaning in order to describe the complex relationship between the semiotics of social action and the situated experience of learning in the classroom. This paper describes how action realises meanings and shapes classroom interaction through the application of the schema to video data from a science lesson on energy with year nine pupils (14 years-old). Finally, it draws attention to the research and pedagogical implications of a focus on action in the science classroom and in education more generally

Lessons from Brecht: a Brechtian approach to drama, texts and education

In this piece the authors seek to re-read Brecht in terms of his contribution to drama education and pedagogic thought, rather than viewing him in conventional terms as a cultural icon and ‘great practitioner’ of theatre. The authors believe that a Brechtian conceptual framework, with its emphasis on critical production and critical audiences, is still pertinent to the conditions of contemporary cultural production. A Brechtian framework is seen as a way of taking drama education beyond the conventional polarities where on the one hand it is seen as a process of moral and social education dealing with universal truths, or on the other hand, as a set of formal and critical techniques

Changing play – writing, researching and learning in an early years arts project

'Changing Play' is an ongoing project initiated by education curators from the Serpentine, a prestigious London art gallery, working with the Portman children's centre nursery. Viewed by curators as a collaboration between artist, children's centre staff and parents, and the gallery, Changing Play combines art and action research, and expands the boundaries of the gallery. In the words of one of the education curators, 'the project is about social change'. It is not for the gallery curators to develop proposals but to 'co-develop work'. Ethnographic evidence employing narrative, visual arts informed analysis is being used by the gallery to report to funders, inform iterative planning and inform future directions. The paper focuses on methodological questions on ways in which ethnographers might meet artistic projects both during and after being in the 'field'. It takes the form of a 'loose parts' montage which reflects the ways in which the art project was conducted. Keywords Modes of ethnographic research; ethnographic writing; community-based arts and play; gallery sponsored community-based arts and play; community-based arts and play curation; community-based arts and social chang

Drama and the representation of affect: structures of feeling and signs of learning

The way in which school students represent affective aspects of human relationships in drama and what this reveals about learning in drama is the focus of this paper. Such an enquiry traverses the borders between affect, intellect and physicality. Affect and its representation in drama have been themes in the history of drama and theatre and is a current concern in the field of applied theatre and drama. Writers on drama in schools have hitherto been mostly concerned with affect in terms of feelings experienced and emotions represented by students participating in drama. There has, however, been little theorisation of what students’ representation of affective human relations might reveal about the complexity of learning processes involved. Cultural theories of representation and learning are related to an example, drawn from field notes, of school student drama in which students present a stylised representation of a relationship. Because affect is intimately connected with both the bodilyness and modes of representation in drama, multimodal social semiotic analysis will be used as one component of a framework to draw attention to the body as a principal material and tool for making meaning in drama. Theoretically, explanations of learning will be taken from the work of Vygotsky, who maintained a lifelong interest in both drama and learning and the relationship between the two. Concepts taken from the cultural theories of Raymond Williams are also referred to – specifically to the ways in which cultural activity and artefacts represent ‘structures of feeling’