Affective Teaching Through Drama

Heather Albers and Dr. Harrison Campbell

Abstract: We have created a multimodal folio comprising the written word, visuals, and an audio recorded interview addressing the call of Drama and Dance: Creative Tools for Change. We contend that students benefit greatly from playful, collaborative, and embodied explorations of highly academic content to both enrich their comprehension not only of the texts, but of themselves and others they are learning with. We offer this multimodal folio as an invitation to other educators and researchers to be inspired by the possibilities of drama to create change in their own classrooms.  

Keywords: Shakespeare; creativity; drama-based approaches, embodiment, normativity  

 Within the study, Heather and I saw literacy as something multimodal and complex and, so, within this multimodal composition we present writing, visuals, and recorded video reflections wherein we consider drama as a change agent within classrooms - moving literacy beyond the textual and into spaces of embodiment and relationality. While examples from the study are discussed throughout this piece it should be noted that data included: Classroom observations during the teaching of Othello, student created character masks, student created scripts, student created artist statements, audio recordings of student and teacher interviews, and video recordings of students’ drama performances. We contend that drama was a force for change in this teaching fostering embodiment, relationality, and playful approaches to the learning of Shakespeare that enriched student learning opportunities (Bacalja & Nash, 2023; Dutton & Rushton, 2022). 

How did we consider social location, privilege, and marginalization in Othello?

When working with Othello, it is important to consider questions surrounding social location, privilege, and marginalization (Corredera, 2022). These questions, and conversations occurring around the questions, deeply inform our understanding of the text. Shakespeare is the only required author that must be studied within the jurisdiction where this study took place, and Othello was chosen because of the nuances it offers surrounding social location, privilege, and marginalization. Prior to reading Othello, Heather had the students consider the question: Who am I and how do I navigate places based on identity and social location? For Heather, social location is the combination of factors including gender, race, social class, age, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and geographic location. So, the focus of the pre-reading lessons was on the understanding that identity is situational and not a fixed point and, because of that, in some spaces we hold power and privilege and in others we are disadvantaged and restricted. The students had many conversations in the pre-reading, during reading, and after reading stages of Othello that scaffolded towards the even larger question of: who holds the power and privilege in this social identity that is our society? How do they hold this power and how are they advantaged by this power?

Students also explored social location, privilege, and marginalization through the work of Poet Laurate Phoebe Boswell and their original piece, Dear Mister Shakespeare (British Council, 2016), which explores the inherent racial tensions present in Othello. We highly recommend viewing their work on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d55GytFubzE) which provides both their beautiful spoken word and many supporting accompanying visuals. 

As students studied the characters in the play, they considered the villainy and tragic outcomes of racism and misogyny. They brought themselves and their own lived experiences to generate understanding, meaning-making, and creativity.  

Questions that guided students’ thinking during this process included: 

• What is your insightful observation of the character’s identity?

• How do you know this is true?

• Why is this observation important to the thematic analysis of the text?

Conversations surrounding identity also came to inform the characters the students selected to study. The class was, primarily, female identifying and so many students opted to select female characters for their masking, scripting, and performance projects. There was a feeling among the students that the female characters deserved more time in the spotlight and that their gender was impacting the way that they navigated the themes and action of the play. This led to performances of clandestine letter writing, monologues facing mirrors of words they wished to say, and, memorably, of one student performing as Desdemona’s ghost floating over their own body in the closing moments of the play (we apologize for the spoilers, but the text is centuries old). 

When selecting characters in a text for drama-based work be sure to do so with sensitivity and proper scaffolding. For instance, Heather made sure to focus her lectures, during reading, on the female characters of the play and their experiences of events to inform the students ongoing masking, scripting, and performative work given their areas of interest and questioning.   

Harrison: Research shows us that there is sorely missing professional development in the arts, as it relates to teaching core disciplines, that makes teachers hesitate when engaging in drama-based work (Goodnight, et. al., 2023). A chance to overcome this is involving teachers, artists, and researchers together, in a communal research process, that is itself relational. That is what writing like this is all about – the opportunity to center the classroom teacher, Heather, in the research decimation process and re-affirm their professional identity.  

How have you used Drama and Dance to inspire change? 

Heather: The performance of a character is, itself, a kind of profound change. For a student to pretend that they are someone else, with their own values, strengths, struggles, flaws and possibilities, is enacting change on an incredibly personal level. When the language, cadence and pacing are unpacked, adapted and then adopted for a performance in front of their peers, this not only deepens comprehension, but this also deepens learning. When one of the student’s reflected that through performance they were able to “understand a character on a level [they] have never reached,” (Rosalind, personal communication) this encourages both educators and students to consider that, as the student later noted, “thinking through the character’s lens will be very beneficial to [their] understanding of [the character’s] inner motives.” (Rosalind, personal communication). 

Harrison: Exploring a text, such as Othello, through dramatic conventions including masking, scripting, and performances creates an experiential learning environment (Medina, et. al., 2021) and helps to prioritize positive play within classrooms (Bacalja & Nash, 2023). However, it is important to know that this type of work creates a “thirdspace” (Dutton & Rushton, 2022) and, in so doing, teachers must focus language centric lessons on identity affirmation and student led meaning making (Blackledge & Creese, 2023). By doing so, drama inspires a change in the students and teachers’ overall willingness to communicate (Lee, et. al., 2020b). 

How have your students been changed by Drama and Dance? 

Heather: At the outset, students recognized that understanding William Shakespeare’s work was important to academic rigor but struggled to see the relevancy of his work to their own lives or the lives of others. Creating masks that symbolized aspects of their chosen character and performing as these characters reinforced that the experience of marginalization that has been experienced in the past and continues to be a site of struggle even now.

Harrison: We can see evidence of this change and growth in the student work itself with Rosalind focusing on the character of Emilia and “society's perception of her”…”in her time” (Rosalind, personal communication). Rosalind became very interested in how women were presented across the play and focused heavily on Emilia’s condemnation of Iago as a scene with resonance for them saying:  

We see the hurt, the uncertainty, and the loss that makes up much of the character. Indeed, there is a recognition of marginalization in the symbolism of the masks (i.e., the broken ladder, scales of justice tipped by the ocular, and “proof” of the handkerchief). Additionally, within their script Rosalind wrote: 

ACT 5, SCENE 2 (added after line 165)

EMILIA: (indignant and also defiant) I say, I have had enough!

Enough of pretending to be a porcelain doll,

Enough of this blind obedience.

Enough of living in fear,

Rosalind was inspired by “Emilia’s anger at being expected to be perfect by her husband when he, too, is flawed” (Rosalind, personal communication). They also felt that Emilia was not given adequate stage time and, so, they sought to create a space where they could explore “the despair brought by Emilia’s desire to be loved, how her intelligence gives her courage, and how her bravery allows her to stand up for her beliefs” (Rosalind, personal communication).

In completing this work students, including Rosiland, mentioned that they had never explored a Shakespearian text in a way that they would consider playful. Moreover, many students had assumptions about Shakespeare and reservations about studying him, they thought him not relevant or connected to modern themes or experiences, but drama helped then to see real world connections between the text and their own experiences (Lee, et. al., 2020b). 

How is your practice evolving and changing? 

Heather: I continue to invite students to use the highly academic learning environment as a brave space for learning rather than just considering it a safe space to learn. We consider how the students' normative expectations of learning as being “serious business” have robbed them of the richness of play. I now regularly invite groups of highly academic learners, who are preparing for high-stakes exams, to wrap themselves in gauzy juggling scarves and present embodied character performances to their peers. Once they are done with the questions and the nerves and the brave moments needed to steel themselves to embrace this kind of learning: they soar. 

Harrison: My practice as a literacy professor has become entirely grounded in playful approaches to learning following my collaboration with Heather. Indeed, literacy has been discussed as being enriched through the arts and creative approaches in literature for over thirty years (Lee, et. al., 2020a). Seeing literacy through the arts is of benefit to educators because it creates increased opportunities for experiential and embodied learning (Medina, et. al., 2021) and helps to prioritize positive play within classrooms at both the elementary and secondary levels (Bacalja & Nash, 2023). Furthermore, creative assignments show pre-service teachers that we are all teaching and learning artists (Crampton, & Lewis, 2020) and both teachers and students are better able to understand texts if they are explored through creative modalities (Lewis, 2020). Across educational research, playful classrooms, in both elementary and secondary, are getting increasing attention (Bacalja & Nash, 2023), in part, because of their ability to extend learning and make it more relevant (Skovbjerg, & Sand, 2022). 

However, pre-service teachers need greater exposure to these pedagogies in their training for them to be effective at employing them during their future practice, hence the need for multimodal assignments and assessments (Parker, et. al., 2022). With this practice pre-service teachers will be better able to place an emphasis on play within their lesson planning, assessment, and instructional designs once out on practicum (Bacalja & Nash, 2023). It is my hope that, in continued collaboration with Heather, I can plan future arts-based assignments that are authentic, meaningful, and worthwhile (Uştuk, 2023).

 An invitation not conclusion 

Drama created multimodal opportunities for engagement with Othello due to its interactive nature (Medina, et. al., 2021). The approaches were something new, novel, and different in comparison to how Shakespearian texts were studied in the past by these students, but they felt that drama more fully engaged them and developed their agency and understanding (Barton & Baguley, 2014). Many of the students even felt that experiencing drama-based work earlier in their learning would have helped them to develop stronger character analysis skills as well as stronger critical and creative writing abilities. The change that drama provided these students was profound and involved building their critical and creative comprehension of Othello as well as increasing its relevance in the current era (Lee, et. al., 2020b).

As educators, however, we recognize that teachers hesitate when engaging in drama-based work because they feel that they need additional supports (Goodnight, et. al., 2023). We offer our support to fellow educators looking at making a home for drama in literacy education. We understand that this can feel like a leap of faith in your pedagogy, but we are willing to jump with you towards more playful approaches being used in the teaching of complex texts. Please reach out to us anytime and remember to keep on being playful in your practice! 

REFERENCES

Bacalja, A., & Nash, B. L. (2023). Playful literacies and pedagogical priorities: digital games in the English    classroom. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 22(4), 447–461. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-01-  2 0002

Barton, G., & Baguley, M. (2014). Learning through story: A collaborative, multimodal arts approach. English Teaching, 13(2), 93-97. 

 Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2023). Translanguaging in performance: an ethnographic drama approach. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 10(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2023.2181965 

British Council. (2016, October 7). 'Dear Mister Shakespeare' - Othello (ft. Ashley Thomas) | Shakespeare Lives [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d55GytFubzE 

Corredera, V. I. (2022). At the Intersection of Gender, Race, and White Privilege: A Case of Three Desdemona Plays. In Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America (pp. 206–252). Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474487290.003.0005 

Crampton, A., & Lewis, C. (2020). Artists as catalysts: the ethical and political possibilities of teaching artists in literacy classrooms. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 19(4), 447–462. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-11-2019-0154 

Dutton, J., & Rushton, K. (2022). Drama pedagogy: subverting and remaking learning in the thirdspace. The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 45(2), 159–181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44020-022-00010-6 

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Lewis, C. (2020). Emotion, Critical response, and the Transformation of Signs: The fundamentals of language arts. Language Arts, 97(4), 274–278. https://doi.org/10.58680/la202030516 

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