Chapter Four

Classifying The Learning

4.1: Interpreting the Data:

4.1.4: Steve Russell: "The collective process and whole group role play"

I first interviewed Steve Russell in 1995. Steve was, at that time, the Head of Drama at Turner Fenton Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario. He is a Drama Specialist who is sincerely committed to furthering his learning about Drama-in-Education.

Steve told me that he has been teaching Drama since he was fourteen, when he was a day-camp counselor. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the games and activities that were used by the camp counselors were really Drama games that he said, "are the root of a lot of Drama work; that is children’s games of imagination and play for the purpose of group bonding."

His formal education in Drama was primarily at the University of Western Ontario, where he earned a double honors degree in English and Drama and an Education degree at the Faculty of Education there. He has also worked as an actor, and a technician in the theatre. But, when he realized that this was "a lousy way to make a living", he went into teaching. From that point, he has been involved at many different levels in Drama-in-Education.

I have known Steve for over eight years and our association has been mainly through the Peel Drama Heads’ organization, even before there were Headships for Drama in the Peel System. We have been Co-Chairs and executive team members for the Peel Drama Heads’ group, doing all kinds of political action on behalf of Drama in the school system. We have attended each other’s workshops and Steve said that he has especially benefited from my work on Laban movement theory and has used that in his teaching. We have talked a lot about that process and that very interesting approach to Drama work.

Knowing that he had written a letter to Jonathan Neelands about his confusion with Theatre and Drama, I asked him to elaborate. He explained,

Although it may not have been interpreted by Jonathan as such, the letter attempted to give voice to the dilemma that a lot of Ontario teachers find themselves in, coming from school systems where courses were called, Theatre Arts, not Drama and where the basis was Theatre. We now, find in Drama-in-Education, a great deal of influence from people like Jonathon Neelands and Dorothy Heathcote for a different kind of Drama work. It’s a different approach. It’s a different process and the goals are more clearly identified for the participants whereas I think, in Theatre- based Theatre Arts, or that form of education, there has been an emphasis on creating a product that was for an audience and would please an audience. And the craft of Theatre was the focus. With Drama-in-Education, we are looking at the students as the products, themselves, and the process they go through should be enriching for them, as students and the audience are of secondary concern or a later concern, perhaps.

In the letter to Neelands, he said that he was trying to express his feelings on behalf of other Drama teachers, that this is an on-going struggle for teachers and that this kind of Drama-in-Education is considered very meaningful and worthwhile, but that it was causing teachers to change their basic approach and to ask the question: "Is there value in teaching theatre craft to high school students any longer? That’s what we were taught; so is that worthless now?" Steve added, "This kind of teaching helped them to get where they are. And it had some value in connection and meaning in their lives and it still has relevance and pertinence but there is something ‘more’ there or something different that can be included in education. And, that is the struggle." I said that I thought that this discussion was significant and equally as important to include here because it was a compilation of his present attitudes regarding Drama-in-Education.

Steve’s early influences include Jeannie Nishimura who was his instructor for the Part Two Drama Additional Qualification course at the University of Toronto. It really was the turning point in his career, moving him towards Heathcote, Neelands, Goode, O’Neill, and that ‘approach’. "It still amazes me that I was a fully qualified Drama teacher without ever having heard of Dorothy Heathcote or that methodology. My Part One course at Althouse was based on Theatre and we worked from a textbook that was written in 1963, and I remember chapters that had to do with how to sit and stand up on a stage. Very Theatre Arts." So, he admitted that he was able to be a fully certified Drama teacher in secondary school without any other Drama-in-Education background. It was only in taking that Part Two course at U. of T. where he met Jeannie and recognized another form of practice.

He had used David Booth’s books, and Booth and Lundy’s, Interpretation and Improvisation as textbooks, but had simply neglected chapters that he didn’t fully understand that dealt with the collective process and whole group role-playing and those things which were not part of his experience up to that point. Since completing Part Two, he has gone back to those books and found some excellent material in them for that "other" approach to Drama. He said that Jonathan Neeland’s work has been very influential; his books have helped him a lot to understand the process. Making Sense of Drama and Structuring Drama Work, have both been invaluable resource books. Workshops that he has attended with Jonathan and Tony Goode and Warwick Dobson have been fascinating and they have really opened his eyes to that process.

Another workshop that he took had a little more to do with Therapy and that was at a CODE conference. The workshop was titled: Drama for Counseling Groups and he told me that he naively thought that it had something to do with counseling and course selection and perhaps, boosting the enrollment. But in fact, it was Drama psychotherapy, or counseling group therapy, and it was a very intense workshop that lasted three hours. "Although it was not scheduled to last that long, we were so deeply inside someone’s psychological history, that we simply couldn’t end the workshop and leave her ‘a sobbing dishrag in the corner’. So, we worked on through a kind of group therapy using role-playing and the support of the group."

Steve said that it was a fascinating experience and took him a long time to sort through what had gone on there. He had vivid images of that process and the particular woman who was the focus of the group and whom they were attempting to help with Dramatherapy in a way that he had never experienced before. "It was fairly influential and in a way it taught me that there is a great power in Drama and in the group process, that if you are not a skilled psychotherapist, I think there is a danger that we may open a can of worms that we are not prepared to deal with. So, I think we need to be careful about what we are doing with psychotherapy and Drama."

For Steve, one of the most profound things was going to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta, for a summer. There, he bonded with a group of artists from all over North America, who were extremely talented and went through a process that was very intense.

The simple and crude way to say it is, they broke you down first so that they could build you up again. So, you had a feeling after the first week that you didn’t know how to walk, to talk, or to move. You didn’t know anything and they started you over again. The group went through this process together and saw a higher level that many of them had never been to.

It was magnificent! And working with Paul Draper. Paul was seventy-six years old, and he led the dance classes all day long, led the work-out for the whole school in the morning and then taught hour-long dance classes for the rest of the day, at seventy-six, and was magnificent! He was pure grace, and earlier in his career he had fused ballet and tap and his movement courses built strength. It was a fantastic experience in my life and one that I would repeat in an instant if I could.

Then Steve went into theatre and began auditioning and going through that process. He was hired to do a show and that was one of those experiences that caused him to turn a corner. He was finally working in professional theatre and realized that the collective process, the shared group goal that he had always associated with theatre, was not there.

All through high school and University, we were volunteers and we did it because we loved it. And the goal was to make the best show that we could make together. It was very supportive, dedicated and always very professional, or at least I always gravitated to a core of people who took it very seriously, and that attitude remains with me. But in the professional theatre, the emphasis is on self-promotion. There isn’t a group goal. And at many turns, if an actor could make me look bad to make himself look better, he would do so. I was such a tiny part of the creative process that I found it disillusioning and I didn’t find the artistic satisfaction that I had found in other things.

He had played other roles in University productions but always "as part of an ensemble that was growing together and moving together toward a fine production." But that wasn’t part of the professional theatre experience that he said that he had. For example, when he worked as a stage manager, or as a technician’s assistant or any other jobs he could land in the theatre between acting jobs, he wasn’t satisfied. He found that there were walls that could never be crossed.

That’s why he said that he went back to the Faculty "looking for a way to make a living with some artistic satisfaction." He said that he hasn’t regretted that decision because he has managed to some degree to find a creative satisfaction in his work and has experienced growth as a person throughout High school or University, associated with the theatre experience. He has tried to give his students a similar experience, "a chance to shine and to grow and to learn something about themselves and the process."

I asked Steve to look at Drama, as a helping medium. (Note: I avoided using the word "therapy"). I suggested that the definition of Dramatherapy would enter the discussion, as we spoke. So, I asked him if Drama had helped him personally in any situations, and if they have helped, nurtured or developed certain aspects of himself.

Steve believes that his successful experiences in the theatre, have given him the confidence that he would not have had otherwise. He proudly recalled that in grade eleven, he won the Lion’s Club provincial public speaking contest, which had an "enormous prize" of five hundred dollars cash at that time. And the local Lion’s Club honoured him for being the first person from Bramalea to win at that level. They had a dinner with the then Premier of the province as the guest, keynote speaker. Steve delivered his speech again and was photographed with the Premier. "All of this wonderful glory for a grade eleven kid was very exciting and it gave me confidence and that turned into more leads in school plays and I became the student council president in my senior year because of the notoriety, and also the ability to deliver a campaign speech."

He believes that this experience in grade eleven really shaped him in many ways. It led to his student council presidency; he was valedictorian twice, both in the grade twelve and grade thirteen classes. Would he have had that without his Drama experience? He didn’t think so. "Confidence and self-esteem are so essential to one’s development." He believes that he was one of the few people who auditioned for Stratford because of that experience and believing in himself. "Because in small ways, I had gained success and I knew people, and was not consumed by my fears that they may not like or trust me."

Consequently, he thinks that he has gained a much better vocabulary of human relationships. He understands the signals because he has worked with actors and has seen others work with them. He has a heightened level of listening, of concentration, on stage in the theatre, in the rehearsal process, and he thinks that extends to those levels in other situations. "To control your emotions, is all part of that process too." He gave me the following example: "If I go to see the principal as a department head and argue for more budget, there are times when I am concentrating on facts and figures, on my relationship with that person, and trying to think about what he is thinking about. Those are processes of extending your imagination into another character that are part of my background. That is what I have done for a long time."

I asked him to comment on resolving conflict through Drama, which is a part of problem solving. He said that conflict resolution is something that he has been focusing on more, and he has read some books on assertiveness training as well. "When you read books about assertiveness training, you suddenly realize that you know a lot about it; you may not have formally known it, but in the school of real life, you have learned a lot about how to assert yourself without being overly aggressive, or without being too passive."

In the role-playing work that he has done in teaching his classes and after thinking through some of the processes that Neelands has pointed out, such as, "who is served by an action"; he feels that those kinds of things give a deeper understanding of human relationships and interaction. And that too goes for the work that he did in the past with the Second City Improvisation Team exploring status relationships.

The work in Improv, the book by Keith Johnstone about status relationships has been extremely eye-opening and the applications of that in class have given him a clearer understanding of it. "And as I interact with people ever since reading that book, it has been a part of my way of thinking. I understand a status maneuver; I understand when someone is lowering his status or condescending to me, you know, acting out of an elevated sense of his own status relative to mine." Steve said that this "vocabulary of human interaction" allows him to respond to someone who is making a really high status offer because he understands and sees it for what it is. So, conflict resolution comes into that, but also in finding one’s way through the world. "Walking through a crowd, I see the interactions of people in ways that I would otherwise not see." He was referring to his own behaviour as well as of others.

I wanted to know what his familiarity had been with writers in the field of Drama and Therapy. In Schattner and Courtney’s book on Dramatherapy, there are a number of chapters from practitioners in the field who use Drama techniques for specific therapeutic purposes and about people who have been institutionalized, or the elderly. Did he recognize any of those kinds of terms from his readings, such as Sue Jennings’ "movement therapy", and other terms like "catharsis", "acting it out", that he has used in his own classroom? He said that he didn’t want to pretend to have a great deal of knowledge about Drama as Therapy because it has not been an area that he has focused on in his own study, so he may not have a grasp of the terminology from that study. Yet, he confirmed that there is a crossover of the terminology into the educational context.

Absolutely. "Acting out". Any of the improvisational work that I do in class that deals with situations where the students are relating their own personal experience and bringing that into the classroom in a safe situation, a rehearsal for life if you want to use that phrase. I think that is extremely therapeutic for them.

And if he uses Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre exercises, he knows that the students as "watchers in the circle" are relating to their own lives.

There is a great deal of intellectual involvement there and mental involvement in that Drama, that is at the center of the circle where the kids are acting out what they would like to say to Dad when he comes home with beer on his breath. And then the group processing through talking about, ‘Your Dad got angry because you insulted him. You could get him to stop drinking without insulting him!’ deals with the fabric of teenage experience there, in a supportive group session. I think that if that isn’t what Dramatherapy does or attempts to do, I don’t know what it does. Catharsis? Yes!

Steve mentioned that students often will go through an emotional experience; they’ll break down crying during the process of a Drama class. He couldn’t say whether that happens every day or week, but he has certainly been a part of a ‘catharsis’ where someone has really ‘let loose’ and said something that needed to be said. "

The Drama situation gives them the opportunity to express that and deal with it and bring it out into the open in a safe enough environment. And the group allows them to bring out that emotion and does not abuse them for it but supports them through it, processing all of it and dealing with their own hardships."

On many, many occasions when that has happened, you know it’s everywhere; in a mask someone becomes almost entranced; this character comes forth through the mask that is remarkably powerful. And afterward, the student is sitting shaking, trembling, from having gone through that experience, not knowing what overtook him. Where did that character come from? Where did all that emotion come from? It’s only period two! They are overwhelmed by what the process has done and brought out of them.

He described a class workshop, he led, in which he was trying to deal with the issue of homophobia. "The Drama structure required the group to build belief in an "imaginary friend" who had withdrawn from them. Later, it was revealed that this friend of the group had tried to kill himself. Their friend was in the hospital and it all had to do with his realization that he was gay. Immediately the class became polarized; there were those who instantly hated him and those who supported him. The real Drama was with the class and their "real reaction" to this imaginary situation." He said that he has seen students becoming extremely emotional in that role-playing situation, defending that person’s right to be what they want to be with passions that have surprised even the students themselves. "For those who hear it, witness it and who are role-playing opposite that kind of intensity and passion, there is certainly a paradigm shift for those people. And, they come to see beyond the labels and have enormous personal growth as a result of those experiences."

I was very interested in his perception of the place for "emotion" in the classroom including his pre-conceived notions and fears. Considering what he had just discussed, I wanted him to reveal the origin of those fears. I think the whole idea of pre-conceived notions and fears, which I have termed, "Dramatherapy phobia" is prevalent and teachers are staying away from many significant areas of Drama teaching because they don’t feel ‘qualified’ whatsoever to deal with their students’ emotions. Steve admitted that he personally fears opening up "a can of worms" and getting into something with a student that he doesn’t feel qualified to deal with.

If it is there, or if that is my student, what choice have I got? What am I there for? It can’t be neglected. I suppose I am not afraid, not so much of harming someone. I don’t know. I have this image of creating the situation whereby I leave someone exposed. Suddenly I leave someone naked before the group and I am responsible if someone in that group is not supportive.

As a teacher, he thinks that the reality of his fear lies in: "I can deal with the person exposing their pain and their suffering and calling out for help and I can do whatever I can to help them; but, I am fearful that within a group of adolescents there will be those who are not capable of dealing with the situation in a mature way and it’s that experience that I am most fearful of, the part of it that I can’t control."

Do Drama teachers need additional training to deal with ‘emotion in the classroom’? The problems that students bring into the classroom nowadays show how tough their lives are and the whole idea of dealing with their emotion and reality is equally tough. "The further we go with these kinds of processes, the more we’ll be opening up." He thinks that our society is rapidly changing and that students need Drama because they don’t have any other support group.

They are ignored by their parents so they fall together into random peer groups. If they smoke, they will form a peer group on the smoking hill; they may form their peer groups from their neighbourhood, or their interest in hockey or football or what have you. But, in an organized, institutional way, students are becoming more and more isolated. They sit, cocooning all the time.

Many subject areas in secondary schools, in his opinion, are geared toward ‘cocooning’. "You know, here is your computer and in the home there are five TV sets and in front of each TV set there is a different family member watching a different program and they basically do that as a form of existence. They come to school, they read, they write, they work on their computer terminal, they answer their math questions, they may observe the teacher and they may be part of a Socratic lesson or taking some input from that source and then they work on their own material that is outside of themselves."

However, in a Drama class, it is an entirely different experience. In Visual Art, it is essentially the artist and the canvas and the creativity is very self-centred. The audience comes much later, if at all. The individual has total control over the artwork. Drama offers a different kind of experience and one that is an essential part of human development.

The vast majority of Steve’s students, he has observed, have no religious or spiritual experience in their lives. And, he added, "If they are connected, they are alienated from their peers because of their participation in that organized religion. They have very little family connectedness. How many parents come to parents’ night or have even show the simplest form of interest in their son or daughter’s experience in school? These kids don’t talk to their parents." He gave me the example that when he has given students an assignment to interview their Moms or Dads about when they first met, they don’t know that before the assignment and most of the responses that he gets are, "I didn’t know this! My mom and I talked for two hours." So, where in their lives is ‘interaction’? It’s missing and Drama provides a lot of it.

To Steve, Drama class allows his students to explore a social issue, through a role-playing structure and learn something beyond the sort of superficial media input that they are so accustomed to.

How did he think his various Drama teaching methods were perceived by outsiders and how did these affect the student/teacher experience in his classroom? He felt that I had really touched on something with this question and that Drama educators would do much better if the name, Drama, was dropped as a subject name. Steve feels that we should be offering our Arts courses in Secondary School under another heading.

Arts subjects should be referred to as "this is people to people or this is interpersonal relationships, or as job training, and we would have enrolment coming out of our ears!" We are constantly fighting a perception by parents and, therefore, by students, that Drama is Theatre, or just acting. And all of that carries the connotation, of "entertainment" which means, it is superfluous, or something that happens after work when all of the important things of life are finished. "Then there’s the fluff, the entertainment." And actor training as a route of some kind of vague notion of entertainment has a very low value in parents’ eyes.

And Steve understands that when it is perceived in that way, that it is a problem. "The enormous value of what goes on in a Drama program for students is often misinterpreted because of that lack of understanding of what a Drama experience is about. Much effort had gone on with developing the Drama Outcomes Rubric and the Drama Standards. The Provincial Outcomes are a part of the Common Curriculum and the Peel Board has its own Ten Essential Outcomes." His feeling is that we are missing a lot of those essential elements of Drama-in-Education in those Outcomes, for example, because it is very hard to see the outcome of such a concept as catharsis.

How does one describe that and how does the teacher assess to what extent a student has experienced an emotional catharsis or some sort of paradigm shift? It is very difficult to see. The Outcomes do not look for that which is too hard to see.

We are in the age of accountability in education where sadly, the Ministry and its partners from the business world are viewing education as job training more and more rather than a preparation for a life. The focus is on skills, or getting the dollar’s worth out of a teacher by making that teacher accountable, by saying to the public, "Here’s the learning outcome". The student has come out of the course able to do this and here is the demonstration of that ability.

That mind-set, or that kind of Henry Ford production line model doesn’t fit well with Drama, doesn’t fit well with profound human experience and it doesn’t fit with social learning because the demonstration of the greater ability to interact with peers is a subtle thing. And the rich reward of helping another person, the gain for one as helper, someone who has done something nice for someone will be remembered for a lifetime, but it won’t show to the teacher.

Steve supported this point with the case of a dysfunctional student who gravitated towards Drama because people were forced to be kind to him in a Drama class. "But, they didn’t choose to be that way in any other classes he took and so he was having a lot of problems in them. By the end of the grade ten Drama course, his class voted him and awarded as ‘the most improved Drama student’." And, Steve confirmed that this wasn’t his idea. He felt that they all gained enormously by performing that act of kindness

It was wonderful. The students had recognized a kid with a lot of problems who was working them out and was really growing and developing in that course. And the teacher, ironically, was scrambling to assess that as: concentrates for a longer period of time and listens with more focused attention. But nowhere can we assess that as an Outcome of that Drama program: a student has gained a sense of his own value as a human being that he would not have gained in any other situation. We can’t document it, but it is there and it is the most important thing in his life. And the students who performed that act of kindness for that kid, some of them had tears in their eyes.

The students had felt something; they had experienced something and delivered it to that other person. That is as important as any other skill that they may pick up along the way in High school and he is certain that in ten years time, when they remember High school, they will remember that experience long after they have forgotten the Pythagorean triangle formula or something like that.

I wondered if a Drama teacher would have to be aware of certain "therapeutic techniques" or "self-concept exercises" or " other activities which are more helpful to social development"? In Steve’s practice as a Drama educator, more and more, his role is to diagnose a class, or to say, "these kids have this problem or if only they would do this, we wouldn’t have these difficulties; we could progress." And once having made that diagnosis, he said that he will look through whatever resources he can find or through his own experience with games, to find something that will help them use the skill that they need in order to function better as a group or to learn an important lesson about interaction.

I said that I thought it was an amazing accomplishment for a teacher to develop or encourage the development of an individual; that’s what we are there for: the individual but also, for the development of the class as a unit in itself. Steve agreed with me that it takes an enormous amount of energy but that is what is done. And it goes back to Brian Way’s philosophy of "starting from where you are". And he added, "You start from where that group is. Some groups do not listen to or respect each other and you cannot proceed until they establish some kind of social contract in that classroom."

Often Steve refers to Neeland’s, Making Sense of Drama and he takes out the section in that book where he talks about a very unique learning contract for Drama classes and,

Just to introduce that concept, that there is such a thing as a social contract to students. There is a set of rules that we all agree to in order for this group to function well as a group and when the students begin to enforce those rules themselves, to really accept those rules, to police it, to accept responsibility for their participation in a group under that contract, then you are ready to proceed to more profound and meaningful experiences which will result when you have set that kind of groundwork. Some groups, arrive very close to that, very ready for that launching pad.

That is, in his opinion, the process, or the central part of the process of Drama-in-Education. "You have to develop that trust, the rules, the implicit kind of self-discipline, and group discipline and ways of functioning together in order to move on.

Steve wanted to go on talking about the Theatre end of that. "After processing that, after the group has explored an issue and made some statements that hopefully involve some new realization, then there is a later process of refining that learning and reshaping it into a presentational form. And that is where my background in Theatre Craft comes in." He said that he couldn’t always do that because he is always fighting against the ever-shortening attention span that the media is helping to produce in students. "They lose interest because they are not accustomed to holding their interest on a particular topic or focus for very long. And in Drama-in-Education, there is a process of distracting them and stepping outside the theme or issue." For example, he said that he will introduce the Laban movement theory, for a few of days and then he will come back to the previous theme or topic to see if the Laban theory can be applied to that. "This is ‘teacher trickery ‘ in order to help or enrich the process of learning for the students."

I asked him if he thought that the "reflective writing" assisted the student either individually or in a group. He does think that sharing reflective writing is often very helpful for the group to share a number of different perceptions of the same experience.

I don’t do it as often as I should, but whenever I do it, I find the quality of the reflective thinking always impresses. And we have talked about promoting Drama. It is one of the best vehicles for promoting Drama because it forces the students to realize, and to put it down on paper. They gain an enormous amount from this experience; they do get new insights. ‘Experience without reflection is meaningless’, is true. We can have a wonderful experience but if we don’t reflect on it, the meaning is lost.

He believes in reflective writing because it has always revealed so much about the students’ learning. It is a really important part of the process. The difficulty he sees in the High school setting is ‘beat the clock"’ "You know you have seventy-six minutes exactly for a lesson. We must move the students quickly to a level of profound meaning and then have time enough left for them to reflect and write about (with limited writing skills)." I asked if he thought that you could expect them to do it later, at home and what would be the value of that. "Homework", he laughed,"simply isn’t done. Or if it is, it is done quickly and it is so distant from the moment they are asked to reflect upon."

He often has thought that using reflective activities during the Drama class, is more useful and in Neeland’s, Structuring Drama Work, there are a number of reflective activities that are done quickly and don’t require writing skill. This is certainly important in junior level classes and basic level classes where the writing skills interfere with that process.

Steve gave me an example of where, he believed, Drama had failed as Therapy. He said that he was not involved as the teacher, but as Department Head.

At the end of the semester a grade eleven class was required to prepare a show and sub-groups in the class must prepare an anthology – type show. Within one of the small groups, there was a girl with a lot of family problems: a victim of incest, alcoholic, abusive parents, had a lot of troubles. And she was helped by her Drama class.

But, under the pressure of presenting, preparing to present material and given the on-going problems at home, she was unreliable, late, absent, uncommitted because there were things going on in her life that were certainly more important to her at that time than the work. However, under the pressure,’the show must go on’ and the group began to exert pressure on this student. They begin to ostracize, and become demanding, cold, and unsupportive. They were tired of her antics and her lack of participation. They tried to shut her out and reduce her contribution. She resented that and she found that further rejection from other quarters in her life were too much. And in the end, she stormed out; she refused to work with these people; she was venomous and lashed out at them because she saw a sudden change in their supportive nature. And why? Because the show must go on. And the kids felt that and the teacher was structuring evaluation around the presentation of material that had been prepared in a certain time frame. Therefore, the goals of the course, in assessing the work, contradicted the therapeutic benefit of Drama for that kind of student.

It was therapeutically beneficial for the short term, in his opinion, but would be hard to project for the long term. He asked the following questions: "Would the failure hurt her or would there be some residual benefit of for once in her life she had been a part of a supportive group, where people cared about her and showed that they cared? Or was that all washed away by the structure in which Drama is done?" In retrospect, he realized that if she had worked in a therapy session with a counselor, there wouldn’t have been the pressure to put on a show at the end, so the group would never have to focus its attention away from its members and onto a product that is far less important.

I told him that he had just talked about the dynamics and characteristics of a Drama course itself and how evaluation is inherently, "untherapeutic. By trying to please the administrators, Steve believes that we try to fit "it" into a round hole. And as a square peg, Drama doesn’t fit very well. There are gaps, and there are problems. And being forced to have a final exam in a Drama class has always struck him as very odd. The therapeutic value of an "exam" for a student with extremely low self-esteem who has had enormous growth but who winds up with a mark of sixty-seven per cent anyway, is questionable. "Their self-esteem never really gets launched when they see that final report and that mark which is based on the structure of that course and verbal skills and it averages in marks from early in the semester with marks from the end and the formula is consistent and accountable to people who are totally outside of the experience. Those are problems and limitations on the therapeutic value of Drama-in-Education that I don’t think are easily solved in the public school system.

A case in which the Drama experience had been "therapeutic" that came to Steve’s mind involved a very talented young man who had an enormous challenge in his family life.

His father is a drug addict, not living with the family; his mother is suffering from Lupus and worsening states of health and he was diagnosed with Lupus at the age of seventeen. He was a class clown, hyperactive, and one who many teachers disliked intensely because he didn’t seem to take his work seriously. He was manic most of the time and disruptive in class, always making a joke out of everything. He was a musician in a band (heavy metal) and often worked himself into states of sleep deprivation and then he would crash. He was a fairly intelligent student but with a lot of problems and not a lot of school success because of his attitude towards a lot of things. His attitude with Drama was that he would get one hundred per cent in "Drama" because he was so funny and always made everyone laugh; he wasn’t afraid to go onstage and make a fool of himself. And he was quite comfortable doing things in very poor taste, as long as he got a laugh.

So, it was a therapeutic approach for Steve as his teacher to use role-playing situations and to try and make him seek a higher level of comedy and to appreciate that there were times for comedy and times when comedy is inappropriate. The idea for the Drama arose because he said that he was frustrated as a teacher with an extremely talented student who was unable to discipline his performances, and who was unable to share the stage with his fellow players. So, Steve "diagnosed" that this was the Drama Structure that this boy needed. Of course, this student had a real flair for the absurd; so, Steve figured that a Drama Structure with a clown would work and developed a scenario where there was a person who was a clown.

We developed in class a little story about a clown who wanted to be taken seriously and at times, he was in role as the clown, and at times he was playing other roles. He was playing the people who needed the clown to be serious. I believe that it had an enormous effect on him. But, that is one of the intangible things; it is very difficult to measure; it is very difficult to report that it was a definite success that could be measured.

But the feedback from other teachers that followed that time of his working with Steve in Drama, indicated the success of the work. I wanted him to discuss whether he had felt apprehensive as an instructor to actually do this approach and whether it was a Structure that he had used before or one he had created for this situation. "It did serve other purposes since we had been exploring comedy which is on the curriculum with Commedia dell Arte and so on. But, this structure was really developed because this kid was in my class." And he did not think that the experience would have been threatening for the student.

The basic idea was that we were going to examine how a clown, someone who couldn’t help being or looking funny, would function in the world. And then, it was in the back of my mind that I would find a reason why the clown wanted to be taken seriously. So, over the first day, an eighty minute period, we explored the idea through scenes that the students made in small groups and presented to each other, those sort of everyday situations: first day at work, meeting your new roommate, those sorts of simple situations. And one of you is a clown and everyone laughs at you and you hardly have to do anything to make everyone crack up around you. There was a funny nose and everyone who played the clown person wore the nose in the little scenes. So, as we role-played the character coming downstairs for breakfast, they would have the nose on.

This was a mask as I commented to Steve. Steve clarified that it was a mask of the clown. The reflective group discussion on those scenes and what was found funny and why it was so funny, was really an interesting one to Steve. He felt that it had seemed to open his students’ eyes about comedy.

You can’t escape being funny. You just are funny all the time and you know, there was a range of reactions. Some of the players loved it and they just thought that it was the most fun and wouldn’t it be great if you could always be funny. And other thought that it got tiresome. It was very interesting talking about it. And I don’t know if the student that we had been talking about, picked up on the parallel that this was for him. I certainly tried to keep that quiet, in the background. I didn’t say, "This is all about you".

On the second day, Steve said that he wanted to move the Drama Structure along a little bit further. He decided that the clown wanted to be taken seriously because there was a problem in his workplace; he needed to be recognized for the valuable contribution to the workplace and the students took that in their own direction such as he was asking for a raise or he wanted a day off. But, the situation that Steve gave them was that the clown was not being recognized for the true contribution that he was making in his workplace and that was his problem and they were supposed to see how the clown was going to solve the problem getting the respect he needed to have for whatever reasons they came up with. "So, they saw a number of scenes again prepared in small groups that were shared and then there was some reflective discussion after the scenes had been presented. And they looked at the strategies and then the discussion went into more personal anecdotes. The questions that arose from the Drama included if they had ever had a time when they weren’t respected or a time when they needed to get the respect from someone else or to be taken seriously."

After Steve had read the boy’s reflections, he said that he didn’t recall anything from them that was unusual. "And so, it was perhaps avoiding, really getting into it. But he certainly understood the idea that there are times when a person is perceived in a particular way that they don’t want to be and it is very hard for them to get out of a role that they have built for themselves." And after that class experience, Steve taught that student for many years. "He took the OAC course three times. And in fact, in the last year, which would have been his grade fifteen, by the end of the semester, he wasn’t attending anything else; he was just doing the OAC Drama for the third time." He added that he has gone on to do some stand-up comedy at Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club and gigs with his band as the front man doing zany actions on the stage. But, he has learned, Steve believes, how to shape things, how to discipline, how to support other players onstage and how ‘give and take’ can produce a better audience response. "And that was the problem with him as a performer in the beginning. He was a stage hog."

Steve had modeled this Drama structure on a behaviour - modification approach through role-playing.

The role-playing which we did in the class was always done with the effort not to make the Drama work too personal or focused on any group member. But, the students picked up on the personal reference because the "problem student" was such an extreme case." But, it remains in the sub-text of the classroom. Those who clue in will indicate that to the teacher with a knowing glance but it remains at a sub-textual level in the group or the class. "Weeks later, somebody will say something to that student, (let’s say his name is Tommy). They’ll say to Tommy, ‘Tommy, you’re being such a clown!’ or ‘Get serious. I am not clowning!’

Steve realized that this was Group Therapy. And it became a new vocabulary for the group to use in order to function more effectively. For example, in another Structure that he had done with IALAC, he said that the ‘helping’ experience gave the students a vocabulary for asserting themselves within a group.

Without having gone through that Drama experience, they don’t have that vocabulary, and they tend to assert themselves more aggressively and inappropriately and create more problems. The Therapeutic activity, IALAC is an acronym for "I am a lovable and capable human being" which is printed on a piece of paper and worn around one’s neck for a day. It is used as a "technique" of developing self-worth in the grade nine Integrated Arts course that works very well.

It comes from the book, One Hundred Ways to Enhance Self-Concept in the Classroom (Canfield, J., 1994). There’s a little story in the textbook and the way that you proceed through the introductory lesson is that you put this sign around your neck and you read the story of Bobby or whoever it is who gets up in the morning and all of these things happen to Bobby that diminish his sense of self-worth, or hurt his feelings. Like, his mother says, "Get up you lazy head!" and you rip the corner off your paper. So, there is a very Dramatic demonstration of the impact of hurtful, killer statements as they are called in the book. And you go through reading the story, quite amazing the effect that it has on the class. They are stone silent and they relate to this story. You know, I adjust the story so that it is a grade nine boy and he is late for his bus and has to walk back to the house and ask for a ride. It goes on and on with experiences that students can relate to and a number of things that do, in fact diminish one’s self-esteem.

Then, you give all the students a piece of paper and a string or tape and they write IALAC which stands for "I am lovable and capable" and they wear that paper around their neck over the next several days no matter what else is being done in the class over those few days. And you explain to the students that we all carry within us an IALAC, a sense of being lovable and capable. We have that and we are just going to wear that on the outside for a few days and if anyone says anything or does anything to you that tears your IALAC, you have the power to tear a piece off your piece of paper. The teacher is alert to tearing sounds over the next few days. And if you hear someone tearing their paper or getting into a discussion about why they are tearing it or "I didn’t mean to tear your IALAC!" You can stop whatever else you are doing and discuss it and bring it all out into the open.

There was a case of a specific young male student, who was very thin to the point of looking very weak and frail. He was a very bright boy but sort of a computer geek (that’s what the kids called him), and he didn’t get along well with the others, always got into conflicts with the other boys who picked on him. And they would torment and tease him because he would throw a little tantrum and that would be quite delightful to them as it would get him in a little trouble.

So, he was in a group with whom I am doing the IALAC exercise and the most revealing thing in that case, was on that second day, when students arrived in the class, this young man came running in, full of energy , and he came straight to my desk and asked me," Are we going to wear those IALACS again? Do we have the IALACS today?" He was very excited about that IALAC and he had used it constantly. Every time those bullies were after him, he would rip it and he would call my attention so that I would help him deal with that situation.

Steve observed the Therapy working for that student. "To see that kid come in almost desperate to get that shield on, tells me that it was filling a need for him." It gave him a way of asserting himself, defending himself, which wasn’t aggressive. He would always get the short end of any kind of aggressive act; and he didn’t have the social vocabulary yet and he didn’t know how to defend himself."

I asked Steve if they compared the size of these IALAC labels at the end of the exercise. He said that he didn’t do it in front of the class because he didn’t want to embarrass those students who had only a square inch left. By the end of several days, he noticed that the class was down to a few, tiny pieces of paper just barely hanging together by a piece of string. He has done that same activity with many classes since and has always heard his students saying, "But I didn’t mean to". "That ‘s the greatest revelation! To become conscious of your self-esteem is a crucial step in development and it’s taken in that program and the students remember it."

He commented that he integrates it back into the course at the end of the semester by putting it on the exam. "It’s one of the themes they can choose to focus their work on in their final exam presentation. And they certainly all understand what it means and often choose to create scenes about the destruction of someone’s self-worth or how people assert themselves in difficult situations." But, he emphasized that he doesn’t choose to go further with it very often because he does not see himself as a Therapist.

The students have not selected to come to a therapy session. It becomes a little too much focusing on your self-worth and on your killer statements; it’s too close and too personal for people who are not there for those reasons. They are taking Drama because they want to explore Theatre and Acting and participate in Drama; they don’t want to do Therapy. So I try and give them what they want.

I asked him if he felt that there might be some students who would benefit from taking a full course like that (focusing on self-worth, killer statements, etc.) where he could go further and would he be able to teach it? He thought so, stipulating that it has to be taught by the "right" teacher. At Steve’s school, he said that they offer a Basic Level course so that they can stream the students, and work with groups of Basic Level students trying to meet their needs more directly. "And there is an abundance of material that discusses the self-esteem needs of the Basic Level student. I think the school will find that those students’ self-esteem is boosted."

Different modes of Drama can work therapeutically in Education. In one of Steve’s classes they were doing a Drama structure from a literary source in which a teenage girl had to decide whether to have sex with her boyfriend who has been expressing his desire for sexual relations. And he has gone ahead to the bedroom and she is faced with the dilemma whether to go into the bedroom. This is the Advice Tunnel mode that ensued.

The entire class lines up in two straight lines facing each other, forming a hall way and a student in role as the character must walk slowly down that hall way and as she passes that person, they give her advice. (I have also used that mode with the characters from the Drama forming the hallway). So, her mother, her father, and her friends from earlier work in the Drama Structure (or her "real classmates") give personal advice to the character as she walks down the hallway making her decision. And as she walks down the hall, each person has his moment to advise her. So, she hears all the voices in her head and we hear all the different possible thoughts that may be there (which of course are all the reflections of our own attitudes and morals). The person gets to the end of the hallway, opens the door and walks in. That ends the Drama mode.

After this, the whole group formed a circle, Steve described how he asked the student who did the walk down the hallway, what decision she believed the character she had portrayed, would have made and why she believed the character would have made that decision.

And then, she was asked to reflect about what advice really struck her and how she felt going down the hallway. What were her thoughts as she heard the advice being given. Had she already made up her mind? Had she ignored the advice to the contrary? This mode can be a very effective method in looking at all the implications of making a decision.

I wondered if Steve had done this "decision tunnel" or "advice line", as a therapeutic exercise in itself or had he done it as a prelude to an improvisation in which someone was having a conflict, like a fight with a boyfriend, for example?

It’s a way of stopping the narrative or plot development in the Drama to deepen our understanding of what’s going on for the characters in the story. The Drama Structure spanned a couple of weeks exploring the idea of date rape, teen sexuality, and virginity and all of those issues for teenagers. So, on the day that we had already talked about the pressure that people put on each other to have sex we created this mode to explore the internal conflict of the character as she is walking down that hall, deciding, am I going to go through with this? How am I going to tell him no and salvage a relationship and so on? It was a part of a longer Drama Structure, a method of deepening and understanding the thoughts and feelings of the characters in the situation.

I wondered where the helping or Therapy came in and was there a level of helping which had occurred on more personal level? To Steve, there was.

In another experience that he had with the same Drama Structure, he described an incident involving a young female, who was a General level student, with low self-esteem, rather pretty, from a blue - collar family, simple and had very low expectations for herself and her career. He recalled the time when he was on patrol duty outside school in the parking lot, and was just saying hello to her at a distance and her boyfriend who he had not previously met was with her. He saw her boyfriend grabbed her breast while he was standing there. And the surprising thing about that to Steve, was that she didn’t react.

It seemed to be a rather degrading and embarrassing thing in front of a teacher or in front of anyone but she just accepted it with a chuckle. And, she withdrew and shielded herself and gave him a smack on the arm but she did not assert herself against that thing in the future.

In his role as a teacher, Steve said, he told her boyfriend that he thought that the behavior was inappropriate, rude and offensive, and not to do it. So, given that situation, this is the way that this girl lets her boyfriend treat her and she is in Steve’s class that is coincidentally doing work on "date rape" and the power games between young men and women, and their sexual relationships.

I believed that doing this Structure would have been very helpful for her. Steve said that it was,

Especially when we got to the section in that Drama Structure, where we talked about the warning signs of what kind of guy is likely to become a date rapist. There are some warning signs in the date rape literature that I think is important to bring to the attention of young women. We look at men who don’t ask the woman’s opinion about where you are going, what you are eating, and they order for you, they choose the movie, they dominate and treat you like an object. And they say things like, ‘I paid for the dinner; you’ve got to put out.’ They reveal in a lot of telling signals that those are their attitudes towards women. And a boyfriend, who will grab your breast in the school parking lot, in front of a teacher and whoever else may be around may be the kind of boy who is not treating the woman as a respected equal partner in a relationship. So, when we got to that section where we dealt with the warning signs, I was quite conscious of this young woman listening. And I made it a point to emphasize inappropriate touching, or, or uninvited touching or any act that is perhaps degrading, or comments that are made about your body parts, or jokes that demean you as a person who is not worthy of respect and dignity. I think that it was very helpful.

Steve didn’t want to take credit for saving the young lady from being raped, but he told me that he knew that she had broken up with her boyfriend. "And whether that was part of it or not, we’ll never know, but I would like to think that raising her consciousness was a part of that. Because she certainly didn’t seem conscious of his inappropriate act at the time that I witnessed it."

Steve professes to keep an issues-based approach within a certain structure in his courses. "There are certain topics; for instance, we do Commedia dell Arte at the Grade Twelve level so there is a focus on that style of theatre within that program. But, if you’re writing a Commedia dell Arte style show, it can be about date rape, suicide, incest, or any issue that you might want to bring in (it’s rather strange to do that in Commedia style) but you can still work with issues and relevant Drama no matter what the style of presentation or the focus of the course."

He said that he, very often, will adjust the theme or the issue that is the focus, based on what is going on with the group. He had an OAC class, for example, "that was openly homophobic and was making inappropriate, hateful statements about homosexuals and this seemed quite acceptable to the group. The comments were coming from a just a few individuals but the group did not seem disturbed by it in any way." So, within a few days, he said that he started a unit based on homophobia, which attempted to address the issue and broaden their understanding of homosexuals as human beings.

Yes, we are looking at social issues, using Drama to raise awareness and that’s one of the most rewarding things about my work. I would obviously have a bias about not wanting them to become date rapists, or homophobic. So, it pleases me most when I see an attitude change in the direction of my own attitudes but I certainly don’t try to force them all to think the way that I think. It’s more a matter of making them aware of where their attitudes come from and what those attitudes are and if they choose to change, as they grow, that’s very good. But, at the very least, they are more aware of hurtful nature of their homophobic or sexist comments. Therefore, raising the issues, bringing them out into the open, giving them a vocabulary and a context in which to examine the issues closely, in a more human way is therapeutic.

I asked him if he had ever had a student say, "Let’s do the tunnel" or "let’s do the hot-seat"? He answered that giving them those exercises with the new vocabulary had become part of the process.

It’s often ‘a way in’ or a way of building in the commitment of the class to say, "I think we need to explore this character. I don’t understand this character and why he is doing these things? How can we learn more?" And the students then say, "Maybe we should hot-seat the character? Maybe we should meet other characters from his life and see what their attitudes are? Let’s interview the mother and the father." So, by the end of a semester, the students are selecting the modes that will help them to explore more deeply. And that’s helpful. It certainly shows that they understand how Drama can be revealing and how as a group they can bring a number of points of view into the Drama.

Since the collapse in 1995, of the Dramatic Arts Consultants Association due to Ministry of Education cutbacks Steve reported that he has moved on to the CODE (Council of Drama and Dance in Education) executive and has been active in that organization, which, recently included Dance under its umbrella. Another consequence of the cutbacks, affecting Steve directly, was the elimination of all subject Headship positions by the Peel Board of Education (including Drama), accompanied by the time release necessary to support colleagues teaching Drama in his school. As technology moves forward and as the student enrolment shifts in that direction, he has felt compelled to move to teaching television as an extension of Drama. In order to maintain a competitive profile and out of personal interest, he says he is focusing more on media-related activities. Steve has won awards of excellence for his innovative Television Arts program he developed and for the show he built in partnership with Roger’s Cable Television, Brampton.

Today, Steve is a writer of the grade ten course profiles for the province, still using Keith Johnstone’s book ( Impro., 1981) in the preparation of those profiles. He also has holds an ad hoc headship for secondary school reform in his school. In this leadership position, he is responsible for helping staff deal with the Secondary School Reforms, and all of the new policies.

I asked him if he saw a trend in the curriculum changes. He thought that the politicians had become too heavily involved trying to make the curriculum conform to their own political jargon, and making it too rigorous,as a result. In doing that he felt they had devalued the Arts and Drama and "shoved in a couple of ridiculous, expectations in theatre history for all grade nine Drama students that are beyond the resources of 99 per cent of the teachers in the province to deliver." He said that these expectations would even be too challenging for the OAC level students. "Trace the development of an element of comedy from ancient theatre to the modern day. For grade nines, to do that kind of research, it’s really absurd and quite pointless and it flies in the face of the true value of Arts-in-Education."

Over all, he thought the Drama teachers who contributed to the new curriculum writing process did a good job trying to present a range of skills, techniques and approaches. In his view, the expectations for Drama are written with enough flexibility that you could do a more theatre -based curriculum or you could do a more Drama role-playing process -oriented kind of program and still meet the expectations.

He did note that Drama as a therapeutic medium in an educational context, was not represented within these expectations in the curriculum because the politicians who reviewed them at the various levels did not understand Drama in that capacity. In his opinion, the expectations, have been written in such a way that could still allow Drama to fulfill a therapeutic function. "The teachers will have to know what they’re doing beyond what’s just written there. They’ll have to, you know, put those values back in while they’re delivering those expectations or create opportunities for the students to meet those expectations. If they do it right they’ll be able to create a helping environment for students. It’s not overt though. It’s not in the text; it’s in the subtext." He thinks that it is still a "short–sighted and counter-productive view" of the conservative politicians currently in power in the province to present Drama as an offshoot of the entertainment industry. "Drama is something more than that. It develops the ability to communicate, group skills, the concentration, the mental agility, the understanding of human relationships." It is frustrating for Steve to see expectations about Theatre History and about careers still in the Drama curriculum. However, he applauds those Drama Educators who tried to influence the writing of those expectations since they did include a number of expectations "that have real value". Steve believes that we need Drama more than ever because

We’ve got to get, the students, to think critically about the media and cyberspace. They have to pull their heads out of the television sets and sit with other human beings and realize the truths and the realities of human relationships. Their relationships are all with their television sets, their television idols and characters. They’re not all stories that end in half and hour and there are consequences to actions that are real.

Unless young people begin to deconstruct the media and really think, he feels they are in danger. They need to understand that the media is constructed and the world is not. They are building the world and they need the human relationships that they develop in the Drama class more than ever.

Steve’s appreciation of the collective group process of Drama, his analysis of the Drama/Theatre definition dilemma, and his foresight, as I understand it, provide a strong link to this thesis.