A number of years ago I was hired as a drama consultant to conduct ten sessions in a special education classroom at Diamond Elementary School in Gaithersburg, MD, north of Washington, DC. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12. A number had severe learning disabilities and several had various forms of mental retardation. Besides basic reading and math skills, students focused on learning life skills like how to shop, how to make change, how to travel on the bus and subway systems, and other essentials to survival in a large urban area.
When I asked the teacher if there were any educational or social issues I could help with, she immediately said she’d been having trouble with students getting along in the classroom. Certain students would tease others and tears would result. Pencils and other small items got “borrowed” from desks without permission and angry accusations of stealing ensued, along with pushing, shoving, insults, and the inevitable hurt feelings.
I decided to start with identifying emotions and move on to practicing problem-solving social skills through role-playing. We started out simply. We had fun drawing faces and making faces and talking about feelings. Then we started identifying emotions in others by looking at pictures of faces to figure out what these people were feeling. We moved on to show how we felt with our whole bodies and by the way we moved. Then we began to tackle situations of conflict in the classroom.
I wasn’t sure how quickly these children would catch on to that fact that we were just pretending these situations. They’d never had drama before, either in their classroom or as an extracurricular activity. I didn’t want confusion between fantasy and reality to create more bad feelings than already existed. The “worst possible scenario player” in my head created visions of children crying and yelling, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” at each other while the teacher and the principal kicked me out the front door of the school with the admonition never to set foot in Gaithersburg again!
Needless to say, my worst fears were not played out. In fact, each time I set up a dramatic situation in which one student was supposed to create a conflict with another and demonstrate their worst behavior, they insisted on doing the “right thing” and resolving their conflicts peacefully. I started to feel frustrated because I couldn’t get a fight going! Even with direct permission from me to enact an example of “the bad way” or “the wrong way,” they insisted on listening to each other with sensitivity and offering generous win-win solutions.
At the end of class, I shrugged my shoulders and half-seriously said to the teacher, “I’m sorry. I tried. I couldn’t get them to misbehave.” She nodded sagely and said, “Actually, I learned a lot today. Probably more than they did. I learned how much they actually do understand about appropriate behavior. I’m going to have much higher expectations of them now.”
Behavior change. I wish it were simple. I wish, when a student didn’t know how to behave, I could tell him what to do and he’d just do it! Or when a client is not behaving the way I want her to, I could tell her how to change…and she would!
But we all know it’s not that easy. It takes motivation to learn; it takes rehearsal over a period of time; and most of all, it takes patience on the part of the learner and the teacher until the old behavior has been extinguished and the new behavior has come to be second nature.
This is without addressing the issue of learning styles; the fact that each person has a different profile of preferences, both sensory and neurological, for taking in information. Some people are haptic and have to actually kinesthetically experience a new skill, others need to see someone else do it; others grasp the information best through hearing and reflecting back, and most of us need to do a combination of all three.
Mel Levine, M.D., a pediatrician and expert in the learning and behavior of children, has identified specific neurodevelopmental systems or constructs that each different kind of learning task requires in his book A Mind at a Time (2002). The components within these constructs don’t work alone; they are interconnected and dependent on each other, but the construct framework provide a handy metaphor through which to look at the skills that certain learning tasks require. A block or weakness in a particular system — Levine calls them “breakdown points” – requires pinpointing the exact breakdown through carefully observing the child’s behavior while involved in the learning task, then ascertaining whether this particular individual can heal/improve that breakdown or if it would be more efficient to substitute some other strength from a different process to bypass the “glitch.” To educators and parents who ask, “How can you expect me to invest so much time and expertise in each individual I’m responsible to teach?” and Dr. Levine responds, “Because it’s your job!”
Dr. Levine is one of my ultimate heroes, along with Howard Gardner, Ph.D., who posits that intelligence is multiple and can be accessed, measured, and expressed through the arts, and Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., who speaks eloquently about the necessity of Emotional Intelligence for our social survival. What my three heroes haven’t yet discovered, however, is that the best tool available for implementing their wonderful ideas is drama therapy.
Drama therapy is quite simply the intentional use of drama or (to use the Greek translation of the word) doing to achieve new understanding of oneself and others. Depending on the requirements of the situation and the needs of the students/clients involved, drama therapy can focus purely on discovery through process drama (role-play, creative drama, improvisation, etc.) or can lead to rehearsal and the creation of a formal product (performance). Either way, our most basic human developmental learning strategies are harnessed: imitation and dramatic play which begin universally at about age 3 in most children as well as the use of metaphor for framing and understanding concepts which begins a little later. As drama – watched or participated in – is an embodied, three dimensional, sensory experience, all possible learning styles are encompassed with students listening, speaking, seeing, moving, thinking, feeling, inventing, and replaying by turns or simultaneously. In addition, all the intelligences are accessed at some point in the process. As can be seen in the chart below, all of Aristotle’s elements of drama are reflected in Gardner’s multiple intelligences:
|
VERBAL-LINGUISTIC |
PLOT, LANGUAGE |
Words spoken or signed |
|
LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL |
PLOT, |
Sequence, logical reasoning |
|
VISUAL-SPATIAL |
SPECTACLE |
Costumes, Sets, |
|
BODILY-KINESTHETIC |
DANCE/CHARACTER |
Blocking, Gesture, Dance, Posture, Pose |
The connection between drama and multiple intelligences was first identified by the Southeast Institute for Education in Theatre at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in their Data Based Theatre Education model (DBTE). What it ultimately means for parents and educators is that when dramatic forms are used to express an idea, the multiple intelligences are naturally all stimulated simultaneously.
What’s most exciting is that while most of us are not pediatricians or neurologists or educational psychologists, we all are expert dramatists. You may not have ever acted in a play, but you have acted out imaginary stories in your backyard or basement while you were growing up, you’ve rehearsed and performed job interviews and presentations, you’ve even occasionally “created dramatic scenes” for good or ill with the other people in your life.
Drama is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn how to do it, you might not “do it” for years, but you always remember how – that inner balance and relationship between your body and mind never leaves you. It comes back naturally, the minute you put it back into practice.
Of course, you can always develop those dramatic skills further – hone them so that they can be used seamlessly in the classroom, at meetings, demonstrations and workshops, and on the job as methods of communication, training, and clarity. The best part is that whether it’s through a formal class, a workshop, or a community play, dramatic skills are not only useful, they’re fun to develop. And the next best part is that the students who you’ll be teaching are also expert dramatists, with perhaps more recent hands-on practice that you!
I discovered in my years of teaching children, adolescents, and adults with and without disabilities that if you, as the leader, are willing to initiate dramatic play, your students will join in. Maybe not with perfect behavior, but gladly! Enthusiastically! Even students with no previous dramatic training in the special education room at Diamond Elementary knew how to role play!
Bibliography:
Bailey, S. (1993). Wings to fly: Bringing theatre arts to students with special needs, Bethesda: Woodbine House.
Bailey, S. & Agogliati, L. (2002) Dreams to sign, Bethesda: Imagination Stage.
Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice, NY: Bantam Books.
Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, NY: Basic Books.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ, NY: Bantam Books.
Levine, S. (2002). A Mind At A Time, NY: Simon & Schuster.
1 Drama comes from the Greek dran, “to do,” hypothetically derived from dra-, “to work” or “deed” and has developed into our modern concept of drama as action through which something of value is accomplished. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, 2nd ed., 1970.