Drama: The Productive Pedagogy

Abstract

How things change. And how attitudes to change change. Twenty five years ago I started teaching drama in Queensland though the word drama did not exist formally in the schools or in any curriculum documents, other than two yellow supplementary pages in the four hundred page Language Arts Syllabus. The first school I went into, the Principal greeted me with a guffaw and 'Drama oh there's no shortage of drama in my school!' meaning that there was no drama at all but a lot of behaviour problems. A depressing number of class teachers would meet me defensively with 'Oh these children aren't very creative, I'm afraid', as if this was normal. All that meant was that the teacher was not trained or expected to notice creativity, certainly not to nurture it; 'creative' behaviour meant 'problem' behaviour. In my first year there was a big row in the Education Department over whether the phrase 'education for change' could be used in a curriculum document. The phrase was dropped because of severe government pressure. Social change, or students even thinking about it, was something that the Queensland National Party Cabinet of 1976 did not want, consisting as it did of thirteen elderly men, mostly farmers, who had all left school before they were twelve, except one who had stayed till thirteen so they made him Minister for Education. Every new government through the whole period since then, five of diem in all, has responded to ongoing public concern about education by public rhetoric promising renewed emphasis on 'Back to the Basics' or 'The Three Rs'. Nevertheless, often surreptitiously or even accidentally at first, change has been happening, until now it is perhaps the central word in the new rhetoric of education. The often unconsciously positivistic, hierarchical and behaviouristic assumptions that have underlaid schooling systems since the acts of the 1870s when they were founded are under siege from the realities inside and outside the schools that contradict the simplistic political refrain of 'the basics'. The curriculum and the organisation of schooling have been challenged from inside and outside. The education systems are trying to catch up with the rhetoric and the scholarship of education as process and education for change. This has been a fairly congruent common academic currency at least since Dewey, who is significantly coming back into fashion. This currency is expressed in a range of paradigms and educational settings, often embodied in vigorous debate.