Abstract
In this paper, I describe a collaborative process in which a class of grade 6&7 students made and performed two plays, and also transformed their learning. In this process, a reconfiguring of the spaces of learning, the students and I adapted a variety of literacy and drama practices; a key change in practice was the shift away from an instrumental mode of dialogue in which the teacher occupies the superior position of knower and evaluator, towards a Bakhtinian mode in which dialogue, as heteroglossic, moves between all the participants, and becomes the main purpose of learning. In a dynamic combination of linguistic, theatrical, and relational meaning making, the students moved clear of the outcomes-based learning that had hitherto stultified their interactions and language. As a result, they developed a new creative agency, both singly and as a collective, and an authoritative discourse. They left this discourse open for me to join, and also continue afterwards, as I have done here, by presenting and interpreting their voices, and including new ones.[1][1] EDITORIAL NOTE: Charles Bisley’s article is an unusual and brave attempt to transcend the current norms of scholarly and academic genres and create a polyphonic article in which he describes a year long educational event through the voices of all of its participants – among which he counts not only his students and himself, and their audience of parents and the school authorities, but also includes educational, literary and philosophical authors who inspired him and whose thoughts guided him in his actions and reflections during and after his project in creating dramatic spaces and times with his students. His writing has elements of reflective auto-ethnography, Woolfian lyrical stream of consciousness, dialogic double-voicedness and a storytelling narrative that is intended to transport the reader into an experience of the dramatic enfolding of the events and their protagonists, actors and directors: his students and himself. Although, his work doesn’t follow what is currently assumed to be the scientific criteria regarding form, length or standard components, we find it interesting and valuable as a polyphonic approach and qualitative study.
Highlights
In this paper, I describe a collaborative process in which a class of grade 6&7 students made and performed two plays, and transformed their learning
Later I came to ask what if, along with their play, this class had created their own way of learning, and a language to go with it, an internally persuasive discourse that took over from instructional language, from its authoritarian discourse? Was their authorship of this discourse the dialogical struggle which Bakhtin describes as determining “the very basis of our ideological relationship with the world”?
I staged the opening of the second term in two ways - setting process drama in motion, as a vehicle for improvised language and thinking, and at the same time, reconfiguring the learning space of the class, to provide aesthetic and interactive learning spaces
Summary
It’s late in the last term and the children are busy, rehearsing their parts in our new play Sooner or Later. She’s stepped into the little gap right before my desk I took it that Maisie was answering a question she’d come up with about me. Her answer came across as more about the class than me, as an afterthought to another inquiry, perhaps. Around the performances of the two plays- first, thank you for holding and Sooner or Later, the class became coherent a new way. Later I came to ask what if, along with their play, this class had created their own way of learning, and a language to go with it, an internally persuasive discourse that took over from instructional language, from its authoritarian discourse? No amount of dialogue will change the fact that in this relation one party determines the grades and the other does not, one possesses the knowledge that the other does not (or not in the same measure), and one partakes of an institutional power that the other does not” [561]
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