Drama strategies can help children organize, and give visual form and voice to their thinking and inter-thinking, through engaging children both cognitively and affectively, prior to and during the writing process. Drama strategies can not only act as aesthetic forms and structures but also as pre-writing, writing and post-writing evaluation activities.
Thinking and speaking and creating drama are all closely linked and can be integrated. When taking children through drama, on a writing pathway, teachers will need to consider, which types of writing are supported most appropriately by the various drama strategies, before and during the writing process. It is worth considering the type of thinking and speaking necessary to prepare children for writing tasks of different types and then select the drama strategy that will help develop this.
Table 2.1 gives some brief examples of how some specifi c drama strategies can support writing.
Table 2.1 How individual strategies can support writing
Strategy
(for defi nitions, see Drama Strategies, pp. 50–61)
An example of how it can support writing
Role on the wall This helps children record briefl y and visually, notes about an individual character and their characteristics. Over time several can be collected to record a
character’s development. These can act as a sequence of writing frames. Role on the wall can be used to collect any sort of predefi ned information about a character, for example, facts, opinion, thoughts, speech fragments, actions, motives, emotions and so on.
Teacher in Role (TiR) This brings a character to life, enables verbal and non-verbal interaction with the character and can generate dialogue that could then be scripted. TiR helps children to get to know aspects of a character fi rst hand and with the teacher deciding what to say or hold back. A TiR can help drive a narrative forward or focus the attention of the children where it is required for the drama (and maybe for subsequent writing). A TiR can also use the role to feed in or gather information, build tension or add complications into the drama plot (as a writer does in a story or novel).
Collective role This lets children in role collaboratively contribute to the creation of one character and their speech. It helps children feel closer to the character.
Strategy
(for defi nitions, see Drama Strategies, pp. 50–61)
An example of how it can support writing
Role sculpture This raises the children’s awareness of the multifaceted composition of a character. It helps children when writing in role later as that character or when creating and understanding scenes with the character in.
Conscience alley This enables children to see a character’s dilemma from polarized viewpoints.
They listen and contribute in turn, to reasoned argument, which can help prepare them for persuasive writing.
Freeze-frame When a scene is frozen at a key moment, it enables investigation and interpretation by participants and audience. The scene’s signifi cance can be refl ected on individually and collectively. Discussion in and around the image will provide ideas and vocabulary that can be used later for writing.
Still image (devised) A still image is planned and devised by the participants. In order to plan for maximum impact they need to synthesize what they are trying to depict visually and communicate it clearly. These thinking processes are also central to the writing process.
Image theatre This usually involves devising contrasting images, depicting the reality and the ideal of a situation in the eyes of a character. To create both images authentically and collaboratively the children need to come to a shared understanding of the current situation and how it could ideally look in the future, as well as what a character is trying to achieve. Once there are still images they can be brought alive and become the source of action and dialogue that can then become script or prose for example.
Storyboard This is a series of images. If they are created after the drama, they can act as a narrative writing frame. Thought and/or speech bubbles, captions or more extended explanatory and/or descriptive text can be added.
Captions When images have been created, they can be given a one sentence caption that can be written and placed with the image (rather like a picture in an art gallery has a title that synthesizes what the picture is about).
Essence machine This involves the class in performing relevant sounds and actions repeatedly that link to a theme or a moment in the drama. This focuses their attention on signifi cant auditory moments, actions and gestures, some of which they may give prominence to in subsequent writing that draws on the multi-sensory.
Hot-seating This involves asking a character questions that they answer in role. It often gives opportunity for note-taking leading to reporting. It can provide factual information to the children that will help them better understand a character that may feature in subsequent writing of various types. Or, if they are asked to write as that character they will be better able to do so.
Talking objects Children become objects of signifi cance to the drama (or to a character in the drama) and are able to speak individually or to each other. This activity not only deepens their understanding of aspects of the drama and its characters but also can pave the way for writing that involves personifi cation.
Eavesdropping The teacher passes scenes that the children have prepared or improvised and pretends to be eavesdropping unseen. Only the group scene (or the part of the class scene) being eavesdropped is active. The rest wait still and silent. If the scenes are sequenced it can help focus the children on episodes that can be the structural basis of different paragraphs or chapters.
Strategy
(for defi nitions, see Drama Strategies, pp. 50–61)
An example of how it can support writing
Eye witness A group or class scene is prepared or improvised and shown. The audience become eye witnesses to the scenes. This can become the pretext for writing eye witness accounts. It is possible for the whole class to be in role and then come out of role and write as eye witnesses to the scene they were actually involved in.
Thought-tracking Listening to the inner thoughts of characters can offer the material for writing a soliloquy.
Teacher narration The teacher can act as a narrative storyteller, telling the drama back to the children in narrative form. They hear their collective drama as a story and this heard structure can support them later when writing stories.
Active storytelling This embeds the structure and content of a story through the physical re-enactment of it. The teacher may tell the story and the children act it as it is heard. When the children have used their bodies to act out the story, it aids recall of it later when they write it.
Statement prompts This involves everyone having the opportunity to completing sentence openings verbally that are usually focussed by the teacher. For example, the focus can be sensory, ‘I can hear . . .’ or emotional, ‘I am feeling . . .’ or can encourage enquiry, ‘I wonder . . .’ and so on. They can be written on sentence strips and arranged as a collective poem.
Choral speaking This requires all children to closely engage with the same text. It enables the director/s (which can be the children collectively) to draw out the particular emphasis and signifi cance of certain key words and phrases through performance.
Soundscape This involves the class in making an improvised or prepared performance of just the sounds, relevant to a theme or a moment in the drama. This focuses their attention on only the auditory aspects of a scene which may then give prominence to in subsequent writing.
Voice collage This involves the class in making an improvised or prepared performance of just selected key words and short phrases from the drama. Words might be repeated, overlapped, and so on, for maximum meaning and impact. The voice collage may be unravelled and words and phrases are given further prominence in subsequent writing.
Mime Acting out a story (or part of a story) without words, will evoke a response in an audience that can lead to inviting the audience to add the words. This may be through speech or just describing or telling the narrative.
Mantle of the Expert (MoE) Children in role take on the responsibilities of workers (often professionals) with specifi c tasks to do, usually for an imagined external client. These tasks can be professional writing tasks, reports, design briefs, legal documents, posters and so on. MoE easily provides a pretext for writing non-fi ction texts.
Mapping and drawing in role If children map the place where the drama takes place then this can provide a shared visual reference point for creating and describing settings visually (adding to the map), orally (talking in role about the map) and then through writing the setting later. Maps can also have written labels and keys. When children are asked to draw in role as a character, it can reveal much about a character. It can also help children to organize their thoughts visually before writing with their drawing available for reference.
Strategy
(for defi nitions, see Drama Strategies, pp. 50–61)
An example of how it can support writing
Devising and performing This is self-explanatory. The children create a short original piece of drama together (maybe just a short scene) with the intention of performing it to others (usually this is a group work and the rest of the class is the audience). The process results in a product that can provide the content for various types of writing, for example a critical and evaluative review of the performance, scripting the performance.
Forum theatre This involves creating a short scene or series of scenes by consensus around an authentic situation that needs remedying for a character or characters within the scene. After seeing the performance once through, the audience can make suggestions to the characters about changes they then try out through improvisation. Or the audience member can take over from the role from the actor and show the change/s he wants. Forum Theatre generates many alternative endings to scenes. The improvised scenes can then have the different endings scripted. The situations depicted may give rise to relevant writing opportunities, for example the characters in the scenes may keep diaries or write graffi ti or leave letters to be found, and so on.
Although isolated strategies can be very useful as a way of bringing an engaging drama activity into a lesson (English and other subjects) to support writing specifi cally, it is when teachers are able to create strong sequences that help create and sustain an ongoing and compelling drama, that they can achieve so much more for writing and for drama.
Examples of how drama strategies work together to support writing
What follows are sections taken from each of the drama units in this book, highlighting the contexts, within which various strategies are used and how they achieve both focus and fl ow in ways that support writing through a whole, sustained drama. The analyses take account of what the children have already experienced and practised in the lesson/s, prior to a specifi c strategy being used and explain the way that the children’s thinking, speaking and listening is being focused ‘in role’ as they move towards producing writing of different types. The sections from the units have been selected to cover together a wide range of drama strategies in context and a range of different types of writing tasks and types.