A Bit of Background

Before launching into my rough research question and the article I reviewed, a bit of background on how/why I came to this topic of interest:

When I was a secondary student, drama class terrified me. The idea of having to ‘pretend’ to be someone else--a character-- was incomprehensible. I found it difficult to take on the thoughts, ideas and feelings of another, and to have a class full of my peers watch me try and negotiate the boundaries between ‘acting’ as a character and finding my own identity within these roles. I don’t remember having this aversion to role-playing as a child-- in fact, I pretended to be everything from a teacher, to a doctor to a famous ballet dancer in my play. Likewise, I was happy to participate in plays and skits during elementary school and found ease in switching between roles and back to myself. As I entered high school though, something changed and I remained in a state of terror over acting until two years into teaching when I took a course that opened my eyes to a different way of learning and teaching and forced me to consider the ‘why’ behind the statement I had come to accept: “I hate drama.”

A Drama Institute at UBC in the Summer of 2013 had a profound impact on me. Led by Dr. George Belliveau, guest speakers and presenters were brought in to demonstrate how drama and dramatic strategies can be used in a multitude of ways to enhance and deepen the content in a classroom. One particular session with Dr. Judith Ackroyd, a professor from the U.K transformed my thinking. We took Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a play I had read and studied countless times, and started from the middle. We put ourselves into the role of the Friar, then we switched out and created vignettes on an impactful scene from the play, then we created a cross out of paper and one-by-one laid messages on this cross imagining what we might have said to Romeo and Juliet. I had never experienced this text in such a way. I left that week feeling transformed and an emerging belief that these drama strategies must be brought into the classroom.

As students transition to secondary school, an increased focus on ‘academic reading and writing’ and a decrease in the significance of ‘play’ begin to emerge. This, of course, falls around the exact time that adolescents are constructing and renegotiating their own identity as they enter this next phase in their lives. I wonder how situating oneself ‘within the text’ can help students construct their own identity and allow them to try on many different personas or ways of being.