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Rolling Role – Heathcote ReconsideredProject Introduction

www.water-reckoning.netSue Davis s.davis@cqu.edu.au

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+The Water Reckoning Rolling Role Project for Heathcote Reconsidered Conference

The Rolling Role project will take place online and live – in several schools across the world leading up to and during the ‘Heathcote Reconsidered’ conference

The conference will be held in London July 5-7 2013. Many leading drama education scholars and practitioners will be there discussing her work and her legacy

Young people, teachers, artists and academics will be able to contribute to a creative project which will draw on Dorothy Heathcote’s philosophy and strategies

Together we will co-construct a story that responds to a common pre-text

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Dorothy Heathcote 1926-2011She was an innovative teacher whose groundbreaking work challenged notions of teaching, of drama and how to work with children. She entered into the creative space with those she worked with and pioneered strategies such as ‘teacher-in-role’ and ‘mantle of the expert’.

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Heathcote ReconsideredMany of her ideas and strategies are still relevant today though contexts have changed enormously. It is timely to consider her legacy, how it lives on and may be repurposed, reworked and extended upon into the future.

In particular… how do her strategies translate to drama, education, applied theatre in the digital age?

+Who is involved?

Drama teachers and facilitators from each site

Young people who study drama – with each group creating drama and digital content that will build and ‘roll’.

Australia – sites in Qld and NSW

Greece

Singapore

USA

Drama researchers who will work with the teacher/facilitator to document the learning journey and outcomes

+Rolling Roll – what is it?

The concept of Rolling Role is to involve different groups or classes in building a community that then faces some kind of change. The initiators create a common context and agree to the key features, affairs and concerns of the community. The students/children are then involved in building the community, the lives, events and artefacts of it and add to developments.

Work is often left incomplete so another group can take it forward and continue the drama.

Heathcote suggested this work lends it self to sharing through something like a website.

(See ‘Contexts for active learning: four models’ By Dorothy Heathcote ’)

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The idea Discovery of a lost culture of frozen people underwater who experienced times of crisis

Responding to a message in a bottle about the history of ‘Ardus Unda’

Who were these people and what happened?

What did their emissaries learn about stories from elsewhere around the world?

Is it possible to help the frozen people or restore them to life?

Jason deCaires Taylor imagery

+Questions to ponder

Why is water so important to our lives and cultures?

What actions, activities and rituals involve water?

What types of experiences can we draw on to inform our drama?

What different roles, dramatic conventions, movement, music, imagery can we use to tell our stories?

How do people cope in times of water crisis?

Can we do anything to ensure water security – so that all may share healthy, clean water?

How do we know who to help and how?

Why do we help others?

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How will it work? o Groups create drama work using different

conventions. Key content and outcomes and digitally recorded and documented - audio, text, images, videos

o Selected material is posted to PlaceStories, on the blogs, on YouTube etc

o Each group begins each session by reviewing what has already been posted and considering ways to ‘roll’ the action forward

o There are some session where participants (or nominees) interact online together

o The drama as it has developed is shared at the conference and somehow resolved!

+Opportunities and risks

Today’s young creatives use a realm of cyberspaces and digital tools to create and share their work

We want to position young people as creators and global citizens, not just consumers of culture

We want to capitalise on using different social media, online spaces and tools

We need to do so in ways that are manageable and responsible, especially where young from school contexts are involved

Drama teachers/facilitators will therefore be involved in uploading and moderating content.

Web-based spaces Creative opportunities

+Ideas we can draw on from Heathcote’s work Drama is about making

significant meaning through commitment to an enterprise and fiction

Importance of finding and creating significant objects, artefacts, images, texts

Teacher often works in-role with the group, manages, questions and facilitates from within

Consider and use dramatic elements movement/stillness, sound/silence darkness/light

Finding the universal in the particular, the emotional connection

Segmenting and selecting focus from culture: work, war, education, health, food, family, shelter, travel, communication, clothing, worship, law, leisure

Find a simple starting point and build belief in stages

Participants should have the power to take action and operate, drawing on what they know and can do

Different frame choices can offer closeness or protection from the main event or action

Suppose that…I wonder what ….If we could only …I bet if we tried hard we could …

+Different conventions

Second hand account

A written account or report

A story told about another

A letter in the voice of the writer

Action as if from a film

Creation or re-creation of painting or photograph

Finding or drawing up plans

Drawing or map

Rules or instructions

Clothes or artefacts of a character, time or place

Enacted Role

Effigies

Portraits

Identikit creation of role

Life sized model

A conversation overheard

A reported conversation

Finding a cryptic message

Rituals & ceremonies

Formal demonstrations, meetings, briefings

p. 166-167

+How does drama work?

Drama demands co-operation

Drama puts life experience to use

Drama makes factual experience (information) come into active employment

Drama uses fiction and fantasy but makes people more aware of reality

Drama stresses agreeing to all trying to sustain mutual support for each other while allowing people a chance to work differently

Drama makes people find precision in communication

Drama stresses the use of reflection

Symbols become ordinary but the ordinary also can be symbolic

Drama introduces you to living out crises in a testing kind of way. It tests your attitudes and your present capacities.

Collected Writings on Education & Drama pp 203-4

SOME KEY IDEAS FROM HEATHCOTE’S WRITINGS AND WORK

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www.water-reckoning.net WE LOOK FORWARD TO SHARING THE JOURNEY AND OUR LEARNINGS!