Drama Education with Digital Technology (Education And Digital Technology)

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Drama Education with Digital Technology

Also available from Continuum Music Education with Digital Technology, John Finney and Pamela Burnard Foreign Language Learning with Digital Technology, Michael Evans Mathematics Education with Digital Technology, Adrian Oldknow and Carol Knights

Drama Education with Digital Technology Education and Digital Technology Series

Edited by Michael Anderson, John Carroll and David Cameron

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London, SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Michael Anderson, John Carroll, David Cameron and contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Michael Anderson, John Carroll, David Cameron and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781847062666 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drama education with digital technology / edited by Michael Anderson, John Carroll, and David Cameron. p. cm. -- (Education and digital technology series) ISBN 978-1-84706-266-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-5298-5 (e-book) 1. Drama--Study and teaching--Audio-visual aids. 2. Drama--Computer-assisted instruction. 3. Drama in education. 4. Computer games. 5. Digital electronics. I. Anderson, Michael, 1969II. Carroll, John. III. Cameron, David. IV. Tiitle. V. Series. PN1701.5.D73 2009 792.078’5--dc22

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Contents

Notes on contributors Series editors’ foreword Foreword

vii xi xiii

Introduction

1

1.

Potential to reality: drama, technology and education David Cameron and Michael Anderson

6

2.

When worlds collude: exploring the relationship between the actual, the dramatic and the virtual Julie Dunn and John O’Toole

20

3.

Lip sync: performative placebos in the digital age Paul Sutton

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4.

Mashup: digital media and drama conventions David Cameron

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5.

Open the loop Peter O’Connor

67

6.

Point of view: linking applied drama and digital games John Carroll

81

7.

Audio drama and museums: informal learning, drama and technology Anna Farthing

8.

Digital storytelling and drama: language, image and empathy Kirsty McGeoch and John Hughes

97

113

vi

9.

Contents

‘A blog says i am here!’: encouraging reflection on performance-making and drama practice through blogs Jo Raphael

129

10.

Interactive drama using cyberspaces Sue Davis

149

11.

Digital theatre and online narrative Rebecca Wotzko and John Carroll

168

12.

Enter the matrix: the relationship between drama and film Miranda Jefferson and Michael Anderson

184

13.

Second life/simulation: online sites for generative play Kim Flintoff

202

Afterword Index

222 227

Notes on Contributors

Michael Anderson teaches and researches in drama, technology and education in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. In 2009, he co-wrote Teaching the Screen: Film Learning for Generation Next. His previous co-authored books include Real Players? : Drama, Technology and Education (Carroll, Anderson and Cameron 2006) and Drama and English Teaching (Anderson, Hughes and Manuel 2008 (eds)). Michael is Chief Investigator on two large Australian Research Council grants, Accessing the Cultural Conversation which investigates the preferences of young people in the theatre (2007–2011) and The Role of the Arts in Academic Engagement (2009–2011) and works regularly as a consultant. David Cameron lectures in journalism and social media at Charles Sturt University, in Bathurst, Australia. His research areas include flexible learning, mobile media and digital game-based learning. He has recently worked as a social media consultant for several Australian corporate and government clients, and is a foundation Teaching Fellow of the CSU Flexible Learning Institute. He is co-author with John Carroll and Michael Anderson of the book Real Players? : Drama,Technology and Education (Trentham Books 2006). John Carroll is Professor in Communication Research at Charles Sturt University, Australia. His research area is mediated performance, drama and role, focusing on the relationship between production and performance including the areas of dramatic role and computer gaming. As part of his research consultancy he led a team which redesigned the curriculum of the Australian Film Television and Radio School and the curriculum of the Film and Television Institute of India. He also recently conducted a review of the audio-visual curriculum at the Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE. He currently heads up an industry linkage research project in the field of crisis management simulation in online environments. His most recent publication is Real Players? : Drama, Technology and Education (Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. 2006).

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Sue Davis is lecturer at Central Queensland University, Noosa and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Her current research is looking at engagement, creativity and learning through cyberdrama. Previously she has worked as a Drama Teacher, Head of Department and Policy Officer for Education Queensland. She has been involved in state and national syllabus development, assessment and curriculum projects as well as devising performance work for and with young people. She had published several articles about cyberdrama (NJ Drama Australia Journal and ATR/IDEA Journal) and presented papers at a range of national and international conferences. Julie Dunn is Senior Lecturer in Drama Education at Griffith University, Brisbane. She has taught in a broad range of contexts in the field of drama education. Her doctoral research examined play and playfulness, while the bulk of her publications have explored the relationship between play and drama. Julie is currently extending this exploration and actively investigating the resonances that exist between drama, play and online gaming environments. Her publication, Pretending to Learn (co-authored with John O’Toole), was voted Best Teacher Reference Book in the 2003 Australian Education Publishers Awards. Anna Farthing is an award winning writer, director and performer of drama for theatre, music theatre, audio, video, live-action and animated film, with a special interest in creating original material from historical and intercultural themes. She is a founding partner of Harvest Films and Harvest Heritage Arts and Media. Anna is Board director of the International Museum Theatre Alliance. Anna is undertaking practice-based Ph.D. research with Manchester University. Kim Flintoff started teaching K–12 Drama in the mid-1990s after a decade in professional theatre. As co-chair of the IDEA SIG on Drama and New Media and as a member of many online learning communities, Kim has taken a lead in developing an international community of drama educators with an awareness of the role of technology in redefining the field of Drama Education. He has taught in Drama Education and Contemporary Performance programs on both sides of Australia and currently works within the Office of Teaching and Learning at Curtin University of Technology. Kim’s Ph.D. research through Queensland University of Technology is largely focused around drawing together 3-D MUVEs and Drama pedagogy. His current research pursuits include the development of a virtual training environment for nurses and an interactive mixed reality performance project employing novel interface technologies.


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John Hughes lectures in drama/theatre pedagogy in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, and has a particular research focus on youth performance festivals, young people and theatre, and drama as a learning medium. In 1997, he was selected as one of four international master teachers of drama at the International Drama/Theatre and Education Research Institute in Canada. He was Chair of the Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia’s Education Committee 2000–2006. For many years John was educational consultant to Opera Australia and he co-authored the acclaimed Operaction educational materials. He has also been educational consultant for the Australian Ballet where he conducted workshops for teachers and students in NSW and Victoria. Miranda Jefferson teaches in drama curriculum and film learning at the University of Sydney. She is supervisor of marking for HSC drama in NSW, and has been a Board of Studies syllabus writer (Years 7–10 and HSC drama) and was head teacher of film and drama at Newtown High School of the Performing Arts (a leading school in creative arts education, development and innovation). Miranda’s research involves creativity, literacy, drama and film learning. Currently her research focus is the development and implementation of creative arts and literacy learning and pedagogy in schools. Many of her creative works have been performed and exhibited at festivals and conferences at a national and international level. Kirsty McGeoch is an experienced English language instructor having taught both in Australia and abroad – particularly in Asia and South America. After completing her Master of Education degree at the University of Sydney in 2005, she received an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship to write her Ph.D. thesis on digital storytelling in second language teaching and learning, also through the University of Sydney. She continues to work parttime teaching and giving professional development workshops in the areas of digital storytelling and TESOL. Her research interests include digital storytelling in second language education, process drama and language learning, and the intercultural dimension of language teaching and learning. Peter O’Connor has extensive experience working in drama and arts education in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He is a specialist in the use of drama pedagogy across curriculum areas, within public health campaigns, and with students with special needs. Peter was the recipient of the AATE (American Alliance for Theatre and Education) 2006 Distinguished Dissertation Award, for his 2003 PhD research. In 2006, Peter was appointed adjunct Associate Professor in The Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. His extensive publication record

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includes texts on drama education, numerous chapters and articles in refereed journals and books. He has served on the editorial boards of two international drama education journals. John O’Toole is the Chair of Arts Education, University of Melbourne. Previously he was Professor of Applied Theatre and Drama Education at Griffith University in Brisbane. John has worked in drama education for many years and is the author of a number of key texts in the field including The Process of Drama (Routledge 1992), Dramawise (Heinemann 1987), Pretending to Learn (2002) and Cooling Conflicts (Pearson 2004). He is also a published playwright. John has been director of publications for or the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association and the winner of a number of important international awards. His teaching and research work is broadly based and currently includes exploration of the complementarity of drama and computer education. Jo Raphael lectures in Drama Education at Deakin University in Melbourne. Jo is Vice President of Drama Victoria and is Director of Projects for Drama Australia. Jo was instrumental in establishing the Drama Australia VINE project in 2005 and coordinated the project through to its completion in early 2008. Her recent research has been in the area of the use of web-based technologies such as blogs for encouraging reflection on practice and the development of communities of learners. Paul Sutton is the founder and Artistic Director of C&T, a UK-based theatre company combining new technology and participation in educational and community settings. Paul has accumulated a wealth of experience in theatre, learning and the arts and has an international reputation for his work with drama and young people. Paul also teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, both at the University of Worcester, and also at University College Chester and the University of Kent. His extensive youth theatre experience has led him to chair the National Association of Youth Theatre’s Regional Development Programme since 2002. Paul is a Council Member of Arts Council England, West Midlands, helping to shape arts policy and practice for the whole region and nationally. Rebecca Wotzko is a researcher, digital artist and filmmaker at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia. She completed first class honours in Theatre/Media in 2007, focusing on the relationship between social media and drama. Since then she has been teaching media production and presentation at Charles Sturt while working on a range of digital and film production research projects focusing on reality TV programming. She is currently completing a research higher degree on a European Erasmus Mundus scholarship at the University of Warwick.

Series Editors’ Foreword

Drama educators are uniquely placed to offer the possibility of engaging students in culturally framed exploration using technology to create exciting new learning . . . If drama education is to draw upon the real world knowledge and experience of participants, then educators and practitioners must begin to explore the new practices, problems and stories emerging from their students’ own explorations and experiences. Introduction: Drama Education with Digital Technology

It is the very ‘what-if’ness of drama education which captures the hearts and minds of young people. Placing their experiences at the centre of their education, with the heady possibilities of change and control, is an exciting combination not open to all subjects; but, as the editors say, drama education is uniquely placed in being such a subject. The addition of skilfully employed digital technologies, as is evident in this book, is a powerful enhancement of these qualities of experimentation in drama education. The opening chapter at once sets out for us potentialities and possibilities, and the ways in which the opportunities afforded by digital technologies can enhance learning and teaching in drama – opportunities offered, for example, through the use of computer gaming and role play is an immediate and recognizable world of the imagination for young people; through online participatory drama; through mobile phone use; through creative uses of digital media. Each chapter outlines for us ways in which drama education and digital technologies can combine to reflect, shape and energize in the drama studio or classroom. Extending the reach of school spaces is also an integral part of this book. Engagement with real-world professional knowledge; using museum exhibitions to stimulate engagement – and the resulting opportunities to create narrative through digital audio production tools using image film and sound – indeed, dissolving boundaries between film and drama, all represent ways of thinking in drama education which simply would not have been available even a very few years ago. And yet, if we as teachers are not able to engage with the social space softwares our students use as a regular event – if we cannot exploit youth web culture, or demonstrate our

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Series Editors’ Foreword

own engagement with the virtual worlds that young people inhabit without second thought – then we are left high and dry, outside of a learning environment which has such great potentialities for teaching and learning. As Series Editors, therefore, we are delighted that this volume offer us all the opportunity to engage with the rich and varied learning opportunities that digital technologies offers drama educators. The chapters here will lead you through not only a world of possibilities but will also demonstrate in clear and practical ways how you might go about introducing and developing using digital technologies in your own drama spaces. It is with great enthusiasm that we invite you into the world of drama and digital technologies, skilfully constructed here by Anderson, Carroll and Cameron, and can only echo their words: “We hope you enjoy and participate in the ride.” Sue Brindley Tony Adams

Foreword Jonothan Neelands

In 1991, I edited a collection of case studies exploring the uses of what was then called ICT in drama with the subtitle The Human Dimension. At the time, these groundbreaking studies all sought to combine the uses of information and communication technology within dramatic explorations of our common humanity. The fear at the time was that technology would come to replace the human in the ways in which we communicated with each other and represented the world to each other. But then we also argued over the superiority of valves over transistors in amplifiers and the death of the analogue! Several generations later we have this compelling collection of studies in a new century. My first response is that I have become a ‘digital immigrant’ again! I am left gasping at what is now possible and the extent to which technologies have permeated every nook and cranny of our lives and more importantly have become integral to the world that young people enter and will inherit. So much has changed and is changing and yet some of the historical themes relating to the uses of technology both in drama and beyond remain, and these themes are wonderfully crystallized and carefully considered in this new collection. Issues of power and ownership remain central to any discussion of both the educational uses of technology and also to the shaping influences of technology in the wider world beyond the classroom. Who controls the means of technological production and dissemination? Who benefits and who loses? How do technologies both work for and against democracy? What sense do young people make of themselves and of their worlds through their uses of technologies? How do technologies both extend and shrink the world? What role can technologies play in challenging and alleviating the causes of social injustice and cultural misrecognition? These are key questions for education but they are also key social and political issues for young people. In this sense drama education has a dual responsibility both to embrace and integrate the benign and empowering

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Foreword

uses of technologies within a historical model of pedagogy in drama that is both student centred and pro-social in its objectives and also to use the same technologies in its representations of a technology-saturated world: a world in which the human and the technological, the real and the mediated have become increasingly blurred and inseparable. In his classic analysis of the spirit of progress in the Modernist tradition of theatre, Raymond Williams argued that each new generation demands new ways of seeing itself on stage and that this results in the introduction of new conventions into the art of theatre. This must be true for the young people in our classrooms who are seeking, expecting and creating new ways of utilizing the technologies of now to more accurately describe and communicate their lived experiences and responses to the world. This is both the historical and contemporary function of theatre. This collection of studies responds to this duality with authority and conviction. Each study is grounded in work with young people that respects and acknowledges the ‘digital native’ practical understanding that many, if not all, bring to the classroom. The themes of ‘pedagogy pushing technology’ and young people’s ownership over the means and uses of technology are strongly represented in the discussions of new emergent pedagogic models which are both consistent with the core values of the historical paradigm of drama pedagogy and also pushing the boundaries of what has become possible because of the new. The idea of new conventions and how these can be creatively used both to extend and enrich exploration and inquiry in drama and to create forms of theatrical communication and dialogue which enable young people to see themselves through contemporary and future-oriented lenses is also fully explored. The collection is also sensitive to the ways in which technologies shape young people’s personal and social identities and how this shaping can both liberate and oppress young people. The collection walks the line between the benign and the malignant without moralizing or falling into generational despair on the one hand, and without over-hyping the optimism for technology as a new frontier for humanity on the other. There is a constant and critical vigilance about the absorption of digital native practices into the classroom, which can both open up new and relevant ways of knowing and learning but also bring young people’s own and often subversive and profane uses of technology into the sphere of social control of formal and institutional schooling. The studies acknowledge the capacity of technology to exaggerate isolation and alienation while stressing the alternative capacity to generate connections and solidarity of purpose.

Foreword

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The collection starts from the assumption that living in a technology-saturated world causes young people to be more aware rather than less that there are multiple and diverse constructions of reality. There is no ‘real’ to mourn or to protect. While their parents may be left jumpy by the idea that there is no longer an authority that authorizes the authors of these multiple constructions, young people are increasingly aware that they can become their own authors, their own authority. Again this theme of what is real and who says so, forms part of the criticality and creative potentiality contained in these chapters. There is also, in this book, a healthy subversion and appropriation of the commercial pedagogic devices used by those who make money from young people as consumers of technology. Digital media give us all the potential to be the authors of our own lives but also the artists of our times. But the commercial uses of simulation, problem posing, quests, world making are transformed here into strategies for engaging and motivating young people as active learners rather than as consumers. Perhaps the greatest gift of this book is to normalize the uses of technology in drama education as something to be expected and embraced rather than as threats or exotic experiments with the ‘new’ that are not consistent with and integrated with the best traditions in drama education. The book provides clear and inspiring examples of what is going on in many classrooms. It offers a strong and detailed theoretical foundation for these departures into the here and now of young people’s lives and experiences and offers the reader practical advice and a host of new conventions for drama work and performance. Welcome to our new age and its ways of seeing and knowing! Jonothan Neelands is Professor of Drama and Theatre Education, University of Warwick.

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Introduction Michael Anderson, John Carroll and David Cameron

A laptop can be transformed into a mobile school: a portable learning and teaching environment. A connected laptop is more than a tool. It is a new human environment of a digital kind. One Laptop Per Child 2008

The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), which seeks to provide an affordable laptop to every child in developing nations, stresses in its vision statement that it is not so much a technology project, but a plan to give children a tool to assist ‘learning’. Large Western governments are pouring billions of dollars into delivering computer hardware to students in schools. In Australia, for instance, two billion dollars has been spent helping schools provide 15-18-year-olds with their own computer under a National Secondary School Computer Fund. Similar moves are afoot in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. While it is laudable to provide access to technology in the name of education, the question remains, what will students do with these computers? How will the creative potential of this technology be fully realized; for example, how will the OLPC’s aims of allowing ‘collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning’ be realized? As we near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we face some crucial choices about how we support the learning of our students. Ensuring access to the technology, through charitable or government means, is a start. Educators need to think seriously about how pedagogy can push the technology, rather than the technology pushing the pedagogy. The technological determinist argument that digital technology is forcing change in schools that can’t be stopped needs to be replaced with a view that sees technology as able to be socially shaped for educational purposes. Drama

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pedagogy is a cultural process happening inside societal bounds, and the technology we choose to employ in our schools is not outside of our social control; it is not autonomous and self-directed as is sometimes claimed. By taking a social constructivist view we can shape the technology we decide to use in our classrooms and not become victims of the ‘learned helplessness’ (Seligman 1975) that many drama teachers fear technology causes. Throughout this book the authors argue that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is more than a simple combination of hardware and software. They see this new technology as a cultural product consisting of knowledge and social behaviour as well as physical tools. Drama educators are uniquely placed to offer the possibility of engaging students in culturally framed exploration using technology to create exciting new learning, not only in the future, but as you will see from the chapters in this book, right now. The educators and practitioners writing in this volume show how we can be the decision makers about how best to use these technologies with our students if we are willing to engage with these tools on our own terms. To a certain degree we must also accept that in many societies young people are already finding ways to play, create and collaborate within the networked media forms available to them, in places beyond the classroom. If drama education is to draw upon the real-world knowledge and experience of participants, then educators and practitioners must begin to explore the new practices, problems and stories emerging from their students’ own explorations and experiences. The future is a difficult proposition to wrap your head around at the best of times. What we have tried to do in this book is not only envisage the future as it relates to education, but also as it relates more specifically to drama education. To some this may seem a little futile. What profit could there possibly be in knowing what drama education will look like in, say, five years time? We think the profit comes from aligning what drama educators know about teaching to the looming challenges that face us as a society. In the ‘supercomplexity’ (Barnett 2000) that faces us in our modern world, drama offers a pedagogy that is centrally concerned with exploring and negotiating problems – whether they are the perils of prophecy that Macbeth faces or coping with another culture’s lived experience of its own past and hopes for the future. Drama offers a key to understanding and engaging with a range of possibilities. Within these pages are research-based examples of practice where thinking about problems, combined with technologies, have been integrated with drama-based learning. The contributors to this book provide some

Introduction

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important signposts for anyone interested in creating a place for drama education in our increasingly technology-saturated world. In Chapter 1, co-editors Michael Anderson and David Cameron continue to establish the themes and intent of this book by outlining the practical and theoretical landscape of drama, education and technology. They consider some of the claims regarding the ‘digital native’ generation of learners and call on drama teachers to keep finding appropriate ways to make use of technology with their students. Julie Dunn and John O’Toole then discuss how role-play means very different things in the worlds of computer gaming and classroom drama. Chapter 2 continues with a classroom case study which explores the links between live drama and computer-generated play. It concludes with a consideration of the opportunities for learning that may be possible with two different forms of virtual reality – computer games and drama. A creative blend of drama and technology underpins Paul Sutton’s analysis of the educational work of the C&T theatre company in Chapter 3. Through the use of a computer virus metaphor, and tapping into the online video trend of musical lip syncing, Paul illustrates how C&T’s research and experience over many years has created a brand of online participatory drama that can work in school-based environments. Chapter 4 offers some ways of thinking about the possible advantages of mixing established drama forms with new technologies. Borrowing the concept of the data mashup to describe how new applications can emerge when complementary elements are combined from two or more sources, David Cameron considers ways in which well-established drama conventions might be updated to reflect contemporary digital media. The significance of mobile communication technology in young people’s lives forms the basis for Peter O’Connor’s case study in Chapter 5. Illustrating the creative use of cell phone conventions as the basis for a theatre in education project, Open the Loop created a forum for young people to discuss issues around peer relationships, specifically centring on cyber-bullying. In Chapter 6, John Carroll compares the drama techniques of Mantle of the Expert and the Commission Model with its counterparts in the digital field of Epistemic Games and looks at their similarity based on dramatically framed problem solving. Both drama and digital games are seen as ways of enhancing learning by encouraging students to engage with real-world professional knowledge. In Chapter 7, Anna Farthing gives a further example of drama education and technology merging in a space beyond the traditional classroom – in

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this case, a museum exhibition exploring issues of racism and the slave trade in British history. It illustrates informal learning through the application of role-based drama conventions and the storytelling opportunities offered by digital audio production tools. In Chapter 8, Kirsty McGeoch and John Hughes explore the application of digital storytelling in the creation of first-person narrative. The authors use digital storytelling to engage participants in the telling of their personal narratives through images, film and sound. The uses of Web 2.0 applications for reflection on drama learning is investigated in Chapter 9. Jo Raphael considers the use of social software and in particular blogging platforms, emerging from youth web-culture, as a space for groups and individuals to reflect upon performance making processes. In Chapter 10, Sue Davis explores the creation of ‘virtual worlds’ and experiences. She discusses the use of ‘open forms’ in drama and on the web and how these can be adapted to a range of digital genres and conventions that young people use regularly. The worlds of online social networking and video come together in Chapter 11, as Rebecca Wotzko and John Carroll describe a drama project, based around the Facebook online application. In this work, process drama techniques such as pre-text and role-play are used along with social media as methods to generate narrative material from both actors and external participants. In Chapter 12, Miranda Jefferson and Michael Anderson explore a pedagogical model for film in the classroom. They discuss how film learning lives in a parallel universe (the matrix) to drama education. They examine how drama and film education share similar pedagogies and outline a framework for film learning based on arts education principles. Virtual worlds are the focus of Chapter 13, as Kim Flintoff describes his drama research using three-dimensional Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs). Although hampered in some cases by technical issues, particularly in school spaces, educational institutions around the world are beginning to explore the dramatic potential of these virtual worlds beyond initial comparisons with videogames and online communication tools. These chapters represent a sample of ideas for those interested in drama education and digital technologies. The research presented here demonstrates both the potential and the actual learning that can take place when drama and digital technologies are part of learning and teaching. In another sense they show us what can be achieved when the one laptop per child dream becomes a reality. When and if that does occur, this book

Introduction

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provides some of the answers by combining one of the oldest art forms – drama – with some of the newest technologies available to young people. We hope you enjoy and participate in the ride.

References Barnett, R. (2000), Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Buckingham: SRHE Open University Press. One Laptop Per Child: http://laptop.org Seligman, M. E. P. (1975), Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

Chapter 1

Potential to reality: drama, technology and education David Cameron and Michael Anderson

This chapter introduces the themes and intent of the book by outlining the practical and theoretical landscape of drama, education and technology. It illustrates and justifies the approach taken in the book, which relates learning theory to present exemplar practice and provides support for those interested in integrating technology into their drama pedagogy. The advent of Web 2.0 and the growth of social media means that there are emerging opportunities for drama educators to make use of this technology. This chapter outlines some of the emerging classroom applications and also offers a critique of some current practices and presents research-based findings that suggest the principles behind best practice approaches in teaching drama with technology. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how drama pedagogy and technology can be used to support and engage an increasingly technology-literate student body and how this blend of technology and drama can make for engaging and creative learning.

In a future time children will work together to build a giant Cyborg. Robot parade, Robot Parade Wave the flags that the children made. (They Might Be Giants)

They Might Be Giants penned this modernist tune in the mid-1990s as a kind of ironic vision of the future. Far from the robot parade and flying jet cars vision of the future, we are now seeing some of the realities of the technology we dreamt of a few years ago. The book reflects both our own

Drama, Technology and Education

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continuing efforts to engage with the changes and possibilities brought by digital technology, and a desire to explore practice outside our own experience since our previous joint project Real players? Drama, technology and education (Carroll et al. 2006). In the opening chapter of Real players we tried to articulate some of the changes to drama and education we felt were possible – if not probable – as a result of the transformative nature of digital technology. We drew upon a number of concepts along the way including: communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), liveness in mediated performance (Auslander 1999), dramatic property (Sutton, this volume), boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), digital natives (Prensky 2001), Dorothy Heathcote’s Commission Model (Carroll, this volume), and Epistemic Games (Shaffer and Gee 2005). If you want the specifics please buy a copy of Real players from Trentham Books (www.trentham-books.co.uk). Tell them we have sent you back from the future to change the course of our sales history. The other important function of this book is to discuss how the research that informs the discussion of education, technology and drama has shifted. Drama educators and practitioners are now considering the impact of technology on what they feel can and should be done with drama in a world being changed by new digital media forms. One of the difficulties of engaging in these reflections is that the change seems to happen so rapidly that we feel we are now hopelessly chasing a moving target. Inventor and ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil suggests that this is inevitable whenever an industry or practice engages with digital technology, as the exponential growth apparent in the speed and power of computing begins to influence and shape the pace of change in those industries and practices (www.kurzweilai.net). It can be a wild ride, but Kurzweil argues that if you can start to see the exponential changes happening, you have a better shot at predicting the future of a whole range of disciplines. If you are reading this book you are probably already convinced of the need to integrate technology in the drama classroom, but is understandable that some teachers will find this difficult or confronting, just as others will see exciting opportunities. As Henry Jenkins argues, . . . injecting digital technologies into the classroom necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology, changing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper, chalk and blackboard, books, films, and recordings. (Jenkins 2006, p. 8) As part of the ongoing discussion about these changes, this chapter re-examines some of the assumptions about young people and technology

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and makes an attempt to define some areas of research focus at the intersection of drama, education and technology. Our intention is to provide some impetus in this burgeoning field for the further development of research that is connected to the real lives of young people and the virtual world they live out in their drama classrooms and in the digital sphere. We also outline some of the themes that are reflected through this book to signal some of the key issues in the debates around education and technology and locate them within the drama education research context.

Revisiting assumptions about digital natives Theory in this area has swung from those who suggest that technology will be the end of cultural identity (Postman 1993) to others who see technology in messianic terms (Negroponte 1995). This has permeated the discussions that relate to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education, naturally enough. Goodyear (2000) argues that ICT is now beginning to deal with the emergent realities of the classroom. He argues that the decline of the compliant learner, a more user-centred educational technology and evolving educational design now offer more pedagogically appropriate ways of designing and utilizing ICT in learning environments. While he may have a point there are still deep curriculum specific issues surrounding the application of technology to learning. In the drama classroom where students control much of their own learning, the use of the body and enactment is central to the approach. At the same time, students are engaging with technology and bringing their own digital native (Prensky 2001) approach into the classroom. The digital immigrants in this encounter (the teachers) are often left wondering how they might respond to this challenge where the body seems to have been made marginal and dramatic role is pervasive and rendered ambiguous through the online world. Many researchers and practitioners in educational technology assume that young people have qualitatively different approaches to the use of technology than their predecessors. The main proponent of this approach, Marc Prensky, argues that schooling and teaching must change to take account of the digital natives that he claims to exist in the classroom. Prensky’s argument, although influential on many researchers, has received a reasonably strong critique of late from those who argue Prensky’s generalizations about young people’s acuity with technology is overstated. Media education researcher David Buckingham is one of the most prominent


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critics of the digital natives argument. In a critique of Prensky’s notion Buckingham says (2007, p. 15): This relentlessly optimistic view inevitably ignores many of the down sides of these technologies – the undemocratic tendencies of many online ‘communities’, the limited nature of much so-called digital learning and the grinding tedium of much technologically driven work. It also tends to romanticize young people, offering a wholly positive view of their critical intelligence and social responsibility that is deliberately at odds with that of many social commentators. This critique argues for a view of technology that does not romanticize students or the technologies they use. Buckingham is the latest in a tradition of researchers and academics to advise caution in the face of the onslaught of technological change. A review of the digital natives debate (Bennett et al. 2008) argues that there has been a kind of ‘academic moral panic’ about the changes researchers assume are taking place in learning: The claim that there is a distinctive new generation of students in possession of sophisticated technology skills and with learning preferences for which education is not equipped to support has excited much recent attention. Proponents arguing that education must change dramatically to cater for the needs of these digital natives have sparked an academic form of a ‘moral panic’ using extreme arguments that have lacked empirical evidence (p. 783). Furthermore, research in the higher education sector has found a marked lack of homogeneity among first-year university students and their relationships with technology, pointing to the fundamental problem of assuming universal trends when designing curricula and learning approaches: When one moves beyond entrenched technologies and tools (e.g. computers, mobile phones, email), the patterns of access to, use of and preference for a range of other technologies show considerable variation. (Kennedy et al. 2008, p. 117). The pace of change in technology, and the equally rapid cultural adaptations associated with the adoption of new forms, are issues that researchers trying to assess the validity and scope of these generational differences between students and teachers must deal with. For example, ongoing

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Drama Education with Digital Technology TABLE 1.1

On average, how often do you visit the following websites? 2007 (n = 183)

Daily Frequently Occasionally Never, and not planning to Never, but planning to

2008 (n = 234)

Facebook (%)

Myspace (%)

Facebook (%)

Myspace (%)

0 0 0 0 0

33 23 20 16 8

36 20 12 22 10

24 19 23 31 3

surveys of first-year undergraduate Communication students at an Australian university conducted by one of the editors of this book since 2005 reveals the subtle changes within the digital generation, such that even one year can make a big difference. For example, Table 1.1 compares student responses to a question about how often they visit certain websites. At the start of 2007, the social network site Facebook was not being used at all, while the 2008 student cohort had taken to it in preference to the MySpace service, which is often seen as a key rival in that area of online activity. Social network researcher Danah Boyd has noted apparent class divisions operating among American users of these services, making it apparent that it is not appropriate to make broad assumptions about the take up and use of broad categories of applications labelled together as, for example, Web 2.0 or social media. Boyd found that there was a rush among younger (high school) users to join Facebook when it opened to non-college student users at the end of 2006, partly because it was seen as being ‘cool’, and also because MySpace had been negatively framed by some media reports and was therefore coming under increased parental scrutiny. In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as dangerous and sketchy alienated ‘good’ kids. Facebook seemed to provide an ideal alternative. Parents weren’t nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed ‘safe’ thanks to the network-driven structure. (Of course, I’ve seen more half-naked, drink-carrying high school students on Facebook than on MySpace, but we won’t go there). (Boyd 2007) By way of contrast other researchers are claiming that beyond any generational difference based purely on attitudinal or cultural factors, there is physiological change occurring in the brains of young people. Mabrito and Medley (2008) argue that digital native teachers will need to learn and


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adopt new approaches to teaching to take account of learning styles that have only been found in the new generation of students. This research points to the possibility that N-Gen students are literally wired differently from previous generations, their brains shaped by a lifelong immersion in virtual spaces. Repeated and prolonged exposure to the digital world may mean that N-Gen students process and interact with information in a fundamentally different way from those who did not grow up in this environment. More recently the optimistic hyperbole in Prensky’s early discussions of digital natives has shifted to a focus on enhancing wisdom through technology, regardless of age or experience, as an educational ideal (Prensky 2009). The discussion of digital natives, however, does provide a provocation for education systems that seem unwilling or unable to engage in the potential of technology. The point being made by Buckingham and others is that young people may have ownership of these technologies but lack the skills to use them effectively with around one in five students able to create a web page, create a blog or create a social network profile in Facebook or the like (Bennett et al. 2008). And perhaps this is the central point for educators. While this generation has unprecedented access to technologies, the challenge for educators is to make access mean something in the education of young people. Many of the chapters in this collection are focused on harnessing technologies for creative education, sometimes replacing existing approaches such as blogs for logbooks which are simply transferring old forms to new technology.

The changing classroom There is little doubt that the traditional roles of classroom interaction are challenged by the introduction of technology into the classroom in many historical periods (Carroll et al. 2006). The recent and ubiquitous dissemination of online technologies into the home and the classroom have provided great challenges for those ‘digital immigrant’ educators striving to make pedagogy and technology complement each other. Drama teachers, like other performing arts educators perhaps feel this most keenly. Though teachers are familiar with technology through theatrical technology (lights and sound) the emerging technologies challenge the basis of the drama education experience – the live body in a theatrical

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space. This challenge has provided some questions for those interested in drama education. How has practice shifted in the face of ICT and what is the emerging practice that is born of the marriage of the ‘live’ and the ‘virtual’? How has this changed the relationship between students and teachers, if at all? How has the nature of drama education as a theoretical construct evolved because of this approach? The theoretical framework that emerges from this research will be useful in developing analyses of other curriculum areas, especially in the performing arts. The central underlying premise of the writers in this book is the same. This generation of learners (whether they are called digital natives or Net Gen) still requires teaching. At times that teaching may have changed from what it looked like generations ago but it is still central to learning and teaching in classrooms. In the drama classroom this is especially true. While we may be able to imagine a pedagogical machine of some sort to teach physics or mathematics, it is almost impossible to imagine how the kinesthetic and aesthetic elements of an art form could be taught without the interaction of others. It is the uniquely collaborative nature of drama learning that while technology will always be present it will not replace the human interactivity. The rest of this chapter outlines a learning and teaching model for drama education that recognizes the centrality of the teacher in learning with digital technologies and explores ways that we might meet the potential offered with teaching that enriches the drama learning experience for students.

Generation creative? At the risk of rehearsing the arguments between Prensky and others over generalizing the attributes of any particular generation, there is a particular feature of this current generation of learners that absolutely delineates them from their predecessors. They have an unprecedented access to the tools of digital creation through the technologies available to them. That is not to say they know how to use these tools but perhaps that is one of the points of institutionalized education, providing access to the tools of citizenship (including the arts) so that all may have access to the social capital on offer. Of course because of economic and social divides this aspiration is rarely fulfilled, but it is an underlying motivation for many educators. If this is the case, then teachers have the responsibility to access or in some cases demand equal access to the tools of creativity for their students. As Stephen Heppel says: Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to


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deliver the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses . . . Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago. (Heppell 2007) However, we must be careful not to equate high levels of ownership or comfort with certain forms of technology with a willingness among young people to participate in the content creation processes that may be possible. For example, one of the editors has examined mobile phone ownership and usage among first-year undergraduate students. In 2008, of 256 students surveyed only one indicated that they did not own a mobile telephone. When asked about two aspects of mobile phone content creation – still and video photography – it was apparent that most of the respondents did not use these features regularly for content creation beyond their own personal device-based use, with some occasional sharing with friends and family. The research shows for example, that still image content was commonly created but rarely edited, or moved to a different viewing medium such as online or DVD for public viewing. In an earlier question, 85 per cent of respondents had indicated that they used a still camera feature on their mobile phone. Perhaps not surprisingly, the same survey indicated that the most vital phone features were – in order of decreasing importance – SMS, clock, alarm, voice calls and address book. Features such as radio, TV, voicemail, games and cameras were rated as much less important. Given this increased uptake of technologies the focus should now shift to how these pervasive functions can support learning. Here we refer to learning that does not teach the tool (phones, computers etc.) but teaches the ‘craft’ and in the case of this book that craft is drama and theatre. As Oppenheimer (1997) puts it: ‘Teach carpentry, not hammer’.

In search of drama education’s ‘killer app’ Why does drama education often seem like the last curriculum cab off the rank for technology? Why for instance do maths and science curriculum areas seem more able to embrace this area? Surely with a tradition infused with technology in the theatre there is ample precedent for teachers to engage with new technologies to support their learning. Perhaps it is because drama educators have not yet found the ‘killer app’ for them to

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support learning and teaching in drama. While this may be true there is ample evidence (Anderson and Jefferson 2009) that film for instance offers real potential for learners to extend their creative skills beyond learning about live theatrical experience. Access to technology is the first step but the crucial step in the learning journey is understanding how to control that technology to create meaning, whether that meaning be dramatic or otherwise. The teacher’s role in the drama classroom of today infused (or not) with technology is the same as it always has been: to provide students with the access to the tools of creation and support their growing control of those tools to create meaning. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate how these teaching approaches can support those interested or perhaps compelled to offer digital learning experiences for their drama students.

Creating creative learning spaces infused with technology One of the great challenges for those engaged in developing drama curriculum is the antiquated design features of the physical space many drama teachers inhabit. The classrooms of the past, which the present has inherited, in many cases militates against the collaborative integrated and flexible demands of our current syllabuses not to mention the possibilities that future curriculum holds. The classroom, in which many drama teachers have found themselves, has rows of chairs and tables (sometimes even still bolted to the floor). Other teachers do have flat clear spaces but the question, even in well-resourced spaces, is how can the technology be integrated flexibly as a tool for creation? And not simply bolted on or placed in dedicated computer rooms where most drama teachers have little or no sustained access to the technology. In hindsight, one of the things we were trying to nail down in Real Players was the emergence of new – sometimes non-physical, non-institutionalized and digitally mediated – spaces in which drama could occur. In his critique of traditional schooling, James Gee (2004) uses the term ‘affinity space’ to describe the real and virtual places where people come together to share common interests and endeavours. Gee sees a need to make the distinction between a focus on the space and the activities within it, rather than a concentration on the existence of the group itself common to the concept of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991): An affinity space is a place (physical, virtual, or a mixture of the two) wherein people interact with each other, often at a distance (that is, not


15

necessarily face-to-face, though face to face interactions can also be involved), primarily through shared practices or a common endeavour (which entails shared practices), and only secondarily through shared culture, gender, ethnicity, or face-to-face relationships. (Gee 2004, p. 98) Researchers for the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Youth project have recently highlighted that the lives of young people are experienced within a number of physical and virtual spaces: homes and neighbourhoods, institutionalized spaces, online sites, and interest groups (Ito et al. 2008). Elsewhere in this book are arguments that one impact of digital technology on drama education is the ability to extend the life of the dramatic beyond the boundaries of the physical space in which it may originally, or ultimately, be enacted (Cameron, Carroll, this volume). In many cases, this may mean extending role-based drama beyond the moment of enactment in traditional schoolbased spaces. The adoption and adaption of the participants’ everyday technologies such as online social network sites and mobile phones, especially when combined with dramatic conventions, provides opportunities for dramatic explorations beyond the physical and temporal constraints of the classroom. The case studies in the volume illustrate some of the new spaces in which drama and drama education are taking place, some physical such as museums (Farthing, this volume), some virtual (Flintoff, this volume). Many are exhibiting features of what is now being called ‘blended learning’ approaches (Garrison and Vaughan 2007), where the most appropriate affordances of physical and virtual presence and participation are combined. School design consultant Stephen Heppel claims that ‘design attention needs to be given to the need to share with medium and large groups the work on small screens’ (Heppell 2007). One of the most obvious ways this can be achieved is through mobile telephony (variously called cell phones, mobile phones etc.). Peter O’Connor’s chapter in this collection introduces one such application for the phone. The newly convergent features of modern mobile phones including film, sound and text capture and editing features makes mobile phones potentially the most powerful technological tool for learning currently available to educators. In the face of such potential there is systematic resistance to the potential of the phone. In 2006, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg strengthened a bill dating from 1988 that banned the use of cell phones in school. Notwithstanding the obvious school discipline issues that schools face with any new technology it is surprising that so little has been done to work with this pervasive technology to overcome these issues. In the face of moral panics, often the technology in question is simply banned.

16


The more reasoned and reasonable option is perhaps to look again at the affordances and potential of these technologies to support learning in a flexible collaborative way. If we as educators recognize that a phone is no longer just a phone but an integrated series of creative tools, then the opportunities are only limited by the power of the tool and our management of the tool in the classroom. This re-evaluation will be critical if educators and schooling systems are to redesign learning spaces to make them more amenable to creativity and collaboration. Another source of inspiration for what future learning spaces might be like comes from dramatic artists themselves. Blast Theory is a UK-based team of artists that mix virtual worlds and real life to discuss relationships and intimacy in the modern world. Often their projects such as ‘Uncle Roy All Around You’ take participants through a kind of obstacle course through city landscapes where through digital technology they are forced to rely on and support others. Their latest production for the Royal Opera House took place in September 2008 and ran over three days. The project involved satellite tracking, mobile computer technology and walkie-talkies. They describe the project: Blast Theory and eight young people from the Mile End area of London were linked to the Royal Opera House for ‘You Get Me’, an online chase game where you choose how far to go. At that moment in Mile End Park itself a tracksuited teenager with a walkie-talkie hovers near the green bridge. First, you have to get them. Dive into the virtual park, race past the canal and – if you can walk the walk – break through into the lush nighttime world of pavilions and sodium glows. Take a satellite tracked stroll with them: they have something to say. ‘You Get Me’ is a work about understanding, intimacy and mediation. (Blast Theory 2008) While Blast Theory’s performance work may seem to many as unrelated to the drama classroom, it does allow educators to glimpse the possibility of the technology and the aesthetic. While there will probably always be a place for ‘traditional theatre’ in the study of drama and theatre, Blast Theory’s work provides an example of a performance aesthetic that is far more influenced by the interactivity of the Elizabethan theatres and the expectations of a generation brought up with PlayStation and Nintendo DS. For educators it demonstrates how flexible and collaborative learning might be. The integration of virtual and real worlds in Blast Theory’s productions creates a space where new creative expression is possible. Imagine drama in a classroom that was fully portable and fully networked.


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New approaches to research Drama education research has a strong and sustained base with high quality, international journals and at least one international research event every year. In many countries drama education researchers are leaders in collaborative arts education research gaining national and international grants. As a group, however, we are in danger of being left behind if the research community does not recognize the dawning realities of the technological revolution. An engagement with research around drama and technology is not only required to maintain this position of relative strength but crucially to support drama teachers in schools and to provide evidence for the use of digital technologies in the classroom. Researchers in drama education need to examine how these new technologies might be applied appropriately to learning not as a bolt on, but as a way to extend the creative possibilities of the art form. In our view these are the most pressing issues facing drama education research: z z z z z

How can new forms of performance be taught effectively? How can students be taught theatre making with technology? How can teachers use pervasive technologies to connect to the lives of young people? How can teachers use new technologies to teach traditional drama curriculum theatre making, pre-text etc.? How can drama teachers teach digital video-based technology effectively?

In addition to the subject matter we are exploring ways in which we have been able to use technologies to collect data for research. Some questions that arise are: z z z

How can blogs and wikis be used as data collection for drama? How might mobile learning platforms be used to collect performance work for research? What is the potential for ethnographers to collect and analyse classroom data using new technologies?

Conclusion Of course many of the answers to these questions can be found in the following pages. What is common among the writers in this collection is

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their eye for appropriate technology to suit their learners. And of course that is the point. The so-called technological revolution will come to naught unless we engage with the potential of these technologies for learning. Potential by itself is not enough. The more complex the tools become, the more central the teacher’s role becomes, to give access to these tools and support a growing understanding of their use in the creative arts. It is the editors’ hope that the chapters in this collection will help build practice and research in the area and that the books that are written on drama technology in years to come will reflect the central power of drama education, as Dorothy Heathcote described it in Real Players (Carroll et al. 2006): The big shift is to move from holding the information and doling it out like charity, to creating the circumstances where it is imperative to inquire, search out and interrogate the information we locate . . . we can rely on proven drama systems to create ‘the mirror to nature’ and harness, through identification and empathy, the life knowledge which children will bring generously to meet us half way.

References Anderson, M. and Jefferson, M. (2009), Teaching the Screen: Film Learning for Generation Next. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Auslander, P. (1999), Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture. London: Routledge. Bennett, S., Maton, K. and Kervin, L. (2008), The ‘digital natives’ debate: a critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), September 775–786. Blast Theory, (2008), You get me, retrieved 10 December 2008 from http://www. blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_yougetme.html. Boyd, D. (2007), Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace, Apophenia Blog Essay, 24 June, retrieved 23 March 2009 from http://www.danah. org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html. Buckingham, D. (2007), Introducing identity, in D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning 2007, pp. 1–22. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Garrison, D. R. and Vaughan, N. D. (2007), Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles and Guidelines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Gee, J. P. (2004), Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge. Goodyear, P. (2000), Environments for lifelong learning: ergonomics, architecture and educational design, Chapter 1 in J. M. Spector and T. M. Anderson, (eds),


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Integrated and Holistic Perspectives on Learning, Instruction and Technology: Understanding Complexity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1–18. Heppell, S. (2007), Stephen Heppells Weblog, retrieved at 21 March, 2009 at http://www.heppell.net/weblog/stephen/. Ito, M., Horst, H. A., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P. G., Pascoe, C. J. and Robinson, L. (2008), Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Jenkins, H. (2006), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago: MacArthur Foundation. Kennedy, G. E., Judd, T. S., Churchward, A., Gray, K. and Krause, K.-L. (2008), First year students’ experiences with technology: are they really digital natives?, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 24(1), 108–122. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mabrito, M. and Medley R. (2008), Why Professor Johnny can’t read: understanding the net generation’s texts, Innovate 4(6). Negroponte, N. (1995), Being Digital. New York: Knopf. Oppenheimer, T. (1997), ‘The computer delusion’, The Atlantic Monthly, July, 45–63. Postman, N. (1993), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage: New York. Prensky, M. (2001), ‘Digital natives, Digital immigrants’, On the Horizon, 9 (5). — (2009), ‘H. sapiens digital: From digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom’, Innovate 5 (3), retrieved from http://www.innovateonline.info/index. php?view=article&id=705. Shaffer, D. W. and Gee, J. P. (2005), Before Every Child is Left Behind: How Epistemic Games Can Solve the Coming Crisis in Education, Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Star, S. and Griesemer, J. (1989), Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939, Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420.

Chapter 2

When worlds collude: exploring the relationship between the actual, the dramatic and the virtual Julie Dunn and John O’Toole

This chapter is about role-play, in the very different contexts of computer games and virtual worlds; and real-life drama work in the classroom. In these contexts, role-play takes the shape of ‘process drama’, where the participants make up the drama as they go along and there is no outside audience. The chapter starts by exploring the similarities and differences between these two very different ‘play’ contexts. The authors have devised a simple theoretical model to analyse and compare the structures and dynamics of each medium and how they are manifested – the basic building blocks; the structural and narrative components; the motivational/emotional drivers; and the attributes of role. The chapter continues in a more personal tone with the authors’ description of how, with teachers’ help, a group of 11-year-old children made their own investigation of the links between live drama and computer-generated play and learning, and invented whole new virtual worlds of their own. This lesson both illustrates the theoretical model and challenges it. There may be many more opportunities for learning through collusion between the two different forms of virtual reality – computer game worlds and drama – than we have yet envisaged, and young digital natives may be the ones to help us discover them.

The situation is framed by a dramaturg. He creates the four ‘W’s’: Who? (character, roles) Where? When? (time, duration) and What? (task, status), thus giving a clear description of the improvisational task. The implicit assumption here is that the dramaturg frames a situation which allows the user to experience significant dramaturgical structures. The final ‘script’, i.e. what happens on the stage and

The Actual, the Dramatic and the Virtual

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when (dialogues, gestures, etc.), is then produced by the actors ‘on the fly’ according to their roles and instructions. The improvisational frame establishes a shared interest model upon which the actors can base their decisions. So what we are aiming for is some kind of emergent narrative. In such a performance there is no linear structure in the strong sense but enough potential to ensure strong (emotional) involvement and identification, especially for the child as a participant in the interactive virtual improvisation. Klesen et al. 2000, p. 77

The paragraph above would fit quite comfortably within any drama education literature, describing what happens when participants engage in improvisational forms such as process drama. With its notion of an emergent narrative, generated through the involvement and identification of the participants who are working in-role, its practices are those of drama educators. However, this quotation does not describe a drama classroom, but a computer-based 3-D Virtual World. Is some kind of takeover happening? In fact, the writers of the quotation are practitioners of both computerbased interaction design and drama. Just as some interaction designers are conscientiously scouring the traditional arts literatures of narrative and drama, actively seeking theory to support and extend their work, so must the drama community acknowledge the complementarity that exists between these two disciplines – one ancient and one modern. Unless we do, drama educators will miss out on rich opportunities to extend and build upon our own theoretical understanding. The project described in this chapter is one attempt to do this and comes out of some very enthusiastic and excited conversations between an interaction designer ( Jane ‘Truna’ Turner) and two drama education academics (the authors) – coincidentally, much the same grouping as the authors above. We began with an overall goal of exploring the possibilities of multiplayer virtual environments for education, and discovered, to our delight, an immediate sense of connection and shared enthusiasm for the notion of creating ‘other worlds’. Soon other common interests emerged, including a shared desire for engagement and playfulness. Our vocabularies resonated and we were excitedly envisaging environments where virtual worlds might be used to help create dramatic worlds, and dramatic ones enhanced through the possibilities of the virtual. The ‘Worlds Collude’ project was born. Our overarching concern was to understand what might happen when the ‘being there’ of drama is combined with the ‘being there’ of persistent, virtual worlds. One of our first tasks was to determine the resonances and dissonances between the discourses and vocabularies of our two fields, for while much

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of our vocabulary was shared, its meaning was at times quite different. The first section of this chapter is devoted to the two distinct worlds: (a) the virtual worlds (VW) experienced within persistent 3-D interactive contexts, and (b) the dramatic worlds generated within the process drama genre. We look at understanding how these two worlds are constructed and experienced, using the vocabulary of each discipline. This is followed by a brief outline of the small project that developed as a result of our conversations, and a discussion of the emergent findings.

Background Some forms of drama, like theatre, have been around since ancient times, while others, including process drama, are relative newcomers. O’Neill (1995, p. xvi) describes process drama as a form that generates, like theatre, a dramatic ‘elsewhere’ or dramatic world. However, unlike its more familiar relative, theatre, the texts generated by process drama are unpredictable in their outcome, dependent upon the actions of the participants, impossible to replicate and produced for and by the participants with no external audience. This style of drama is usually facilitated by a leader, who skilfully manipulates the conventions and the elements of dramatic form, to create open-ended experiences for the participants – experiences driven by tension and designed for deep engagement1. In this way, process drama shares several basic characteristics with computer-based virtual environments, where these virtual worlds become ‘a representation of a virtual-universe that players may interact with in order to achieve a goal or set of goals’ (as Truna Turner defined it in our conversations). This description also quite accurately sums up what process drama creates through its participants’ agreement to pretend, for process drama is a form that, properly managed, fully and deeply engages its participants as players. Both worlds are also designed and led or facilitated in order to shape the action or encourage certain forms of interaction, and in both cases the actual action itself is participant-based with no external audience. Both worlds also require from the players an ‘active creation of belief’ (Murray 1997) with their structures demanding engagement in order for them to persist. As learning contexts, dramatic worlds and virtual ones clearly then support what Nicholas Burbules (2006) calls the Four ‘I’s – interest, involvement, immersion and imagination’ (see also Gee 2003), with a core design tenet for facilitators of drama and architects of games being to encourage engagement by providing scaffolded but open-ended experiences for the participants.


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TABLE 2.1 Process drama world design

Multiplayer world design

A. The basic building blocks Context of the setting – drama space and participants Context of the medium – playwright(s), director(s), actors Fictional context – dramatic world/situation Playwright/drama leader Pre-text

Context of the setting – computer(s) and participant(s) Context of the medium – platform, designer and players Fictional context – virtual world Gamewright/gamesmaster Back-story

B. Structural/narrative components Plot and structure Situation Narrative Conventions Setting

Plot and structure Story Narrative Conventions Environmental storytelling

C. Motivational/emotional drivers Absorption Tension Framing

Immersion Tension Point of View [POV]

D. Role attributes Role Character, role-in-context Mask Simulations and role-plays

Role Persona and attributes Avatar Role-playing games – [RPG]

Source: This table was originally developed in conjunction with Jane ‘Truna’ Turner and an earlier version was presented at the Second League of Worlds Conference, Melbourne, 2005.

Table 2.1 shows how some of the key attributes, concepts and practices, of virtual worlds and process drama can be compared. As can be seen, the two ‘worlds’ share quite a lot of vocabulary, and have many identical or similar features, as well as some significant divergences.

The building blocks Both VW and process drama (PD) start with what in drama has been called the ‘context of the setting’ (O’Toole 1992, p. 50), with the participants entering a fictional world from a physical location not necessarily set up for games or theatre, such as a computer lab or a classroom. However, a key difference immediately emerges when considering this setting, for a single participant, with the help of a designer, can enter a virtual world either

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alone or with others, but in drama there is always a group of participants who enter the world together, with each of them acknowledging a shared ‘agreement to pretend’. Next, both sets of participants enter the ‘context of the medium’ where they assume real-life functional roles: the computer has to be configured to represent this world; the space where the drama happens has to be similarly configured, in the participants’ minds at least, to represent that world. One context of the medium comprises gamewrights or designers and players, the other comprises playwrights, directors and actors. Normally in process drama the leader or teacher takes on the initial playwright function but later, the action unfolds as a result of the interactions between the participants and with the facilitator, with the playwright function shifting spontaneously as the action develops. In a similar way within virtual worlds, the main structures, and usually the characters and action possibilities, are preset by the gamewright – though as the alternative title suggests, as gamesmaster, she/he can occasionally take on a more proactive role. The greatest area of difference between these two worlds lies, however, in the way in which the fictional context is built, for within the virtual world, the player is treated to an environment that has been envisaged for them (at least partially) and where the imagination is only required to accept these prepared or self-developed images as ‘real’. In the dramatic world, however, the individual participants must work much harder to create in their minds an ‘illusion of realness’ (Giffin 1984, p. 88) and then, throughout the action, conserve that illusion. Operating in a space where the context of the setting (usually the classroom) is always physically apparent, the drama participants must rely heavily on their imagination to visualize the dramatic one, with the facilitator using a range of dramatic strategies to create shared illusions. These include a sense of the time and place of the drama and the roles within this setting. As such, the facilitator can never be sure if all participants hold a ‘shared illusion’ of this setting, and clearly cannot fully appreciate the range of ‘private illusions’ being imagined by participants (Dunn 2002, p. 290). To create the initial dramatic world, a ‘pre-text’ is required. This term, coined by Cecily O’Neill (1995, p. xv), refers to the stimulus or material that is used as the basis of the drama, with this material being either deeply significant within the ongoing action or just a starting point. By contrast, virtual world game designers talk about the ‘back story’, which provides the excuse for the game. For example, ‘Vice City’ suggests criminals, which in turn suggests the fictional game of playing the part of a hardened criminal visiting Vice City.


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The structural components The structural components of each world are mostly quite similar. Multiplayer game designers sometimes talk about the ‘three-act structure’ – a problematic term borrowed from theatre, but useful to identify the classic phases of a closed-ended game cycle – orientation, complication and resolution. Multi-world designers interested in more open-ended games now tend to prefer to talk only of orientation and complication. This classic theatrical notion, ironically, is not used in process drama, though it is tangentially relevant. Orientation corresponds to the initial phase of establishing the fictional context and characters usually known as enrolment, and complication to the constraints which are imposed on the dramatic action to make the characters’ goals harder to achieve, make the game more challenging. Like the VW designers, process drama practitioners now avoid the word resolution since many process dramas are deliberately left unresolved, with questions for the participants to reflect upon outside the drama – hence the universal use of the word reflection instead. The terms plot, story and narrative are all important but highly problematic and contested in both process drama and VW design, and effectually for the same reasons. The plot in a VW is the ‘arrangement of incidents’. However, unlike a plot in other media forms, causality depends on player performance. Similarly, process dramas are not plot-driven, and some degree of control over the spontaneously emerging action is in the hands of the participants. Story is also problematic in both worlds: in VW it is widely used, usually to denote the reason for the actions of the characters. Process drama practitioners sometimes avoid the word, preferring to refer to the ongoing dramatic situation. Narrative in drama is very different from narrative in a storybook. Dramatic narrative works by exploring in depth a series of key moments from an ongoing dramatic situation (or story!) in terms of their symbolic meaning, the motivations of the characters involved and the dramatic tension they generate. The word narrative intrigues and divides game design thinkers: one school of thought – ‘narratology’ – holds that games are just participatory narratives where the player is a co-producer and narrator. Another group – ‘ludology’ – rebels against this view, pointing out that since the game is the driving force, traditional or linear narratives are not present. A useful and balanced summary of this debate is provided by Janet Murray (2005) whose book on the subject Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) is a very influential advocacy of computer interactivity, relevant to the thinking behind our own project.

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For VW and process drama alike, conventions are central to the concept design. In VW designs, conventions exploit player expectations and assist participation. So the conventions of a First Person Shooter game are that there will be an availability of large weapons and that each enemy can be beaten. Typical conventions focus on acquisition and progression within the game. In drama, conventions are the dramatic and theatrical devices manipulated by the facilitator to develop a process drama experience (Neelands and Goode 1990, p. 4). The central convention is usually, though not always, some form of empathic or ‘living-though’ role-play, which is enriched or interrupted by episodes of less naturalistic and more distanced improvisational techniques. Some of these strategies are used within the enrolment phase to build belief/engagement, while others are more applicable within the experiential or reflective phases. A concept familiar in VW, but apparently alien to process drama, is that of environmental storytelling. Environmental storytelling is where the world design contributes to the player action. It involves, according to Truna Turner, ‘the creation of purposed environments that provide clues to the player actions: dark doors to be explored, twisty little passages, evident pathways, and in social VW, signage and help notices’. In process drama, this is covered by cues and constraints: the cues that the participants give each other and the constraints that the leader places in their way to complicate and enrich the action, and raise the dramatic tension.

Motivational/emotional drivers In VW being involved in the game is known as immersion. It may entail close emotional identification with your avatar, and/or narrow focus on the ingame reality. It may also entail each participant actively trying to cut out meta-game information and view things from the point of view of their character. Detailed graphic design and audio often enhance immersion. In process drama the slightly unfashionable word absorption perhaps best describes the state of being involved in the dramatic action. This consists of a continuum between empathy (the personal identification with the character and the dramatic situation) and distance. Distance in drama terms is the gap between the participants and the roles/characters they are playing, and the degree to which participants can view the situation and their roles from outside the action. Dramatic tension is what drives the action in process drama as in all drama (Haseman and O’Toole 1988, p. 17–32). Tension is also needed to keep the players involved in VW environments, so it is a requirement of game design


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that this aspect be built-in in advance. By contrast, within process drama, the leader can create, augment or fine-tune tension within the moment. Key tensions include mystery, surprise, relationships, task and the meta-tension known as metaxis. Tension of the task is one that is not usually experienced by audiences of theatre, but is specific to both process drama and VW, where the participants are also the characters. Here, the urgency of tasks, along with the importance to the characters of achieving the goals of the task, is significant. For a designer, of either a virtual worlds game or a process drama, getting the tension balance right is critical. Too much tension in relationships, for example, and the dramatic world collapses into outright conflict which, if prolonged, quickly becomes tiresome. Tension of the task must also be balanced (as in VW game-play). If the task for the characters is too difficult (or alternatively too easily resolved), the illusion of the dramatic world as ‘real’ will be lost – participants will simply drop out of role in frustration. Tension of the task is present in nearly all VW games in the form of individual competition, which is very rarely present in process drama. Though the characters and their goals are often – usually – in conflict, as players, they are all engaged in unison in sustaining the dramatic action. Point of view (POV) is another important regulator of the level of immersion, because changing the point of view means changing the distance of the participant from the centre of the dramatic action. A typical graphic VW game will offer choice between the first person POV and the third person POV. The first person POV removes the fourth wall and places the player within the world. The third person POV allows the player to manipulate the avatar within the world. Within process drama, dramatic distance is controlled through framing the dramatic action and the characters’ positions in relation to the centre of the fictional context (Carroll and Cameron 2005, pp. 6–7). In virtual worlds, the tension can sometimes be enhanced by the technical environment – by vivid or shocking graphics, or atmospheric music and sound. As we have noted above, this kind of sensual augmentation is rarely available in process drama, where the participants often have to concentrate hard to avoid the distractions caused by a dissonant context of the setting – a point the students make later in this chapter in relation to the difference between Mt Everest and a regular classroom.

Role attributes The ambiguous word role is unfortunately unavoidable in talking about any dramatic action – particularly improvised. We have already used it above in

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its real-life manifestation, to denote the particular functions which people assume in any activity or relationship – ‘actor/gamewright’. Now we are looking at it in its fictional manifestation, whence its coinage in Ancient Greek theatre. The players in both process drama and VW environments take on the identity of somebody else – which may be a stereotyped figure with generalized attributes, known in virtual worlds as a persona, (for example, in either context a player might become a ‘warrior’ or a ‘negotiator’), or a more individualized character with very particular and individual attributes – more often needed in process drama, where the aim is often to probe or disrupt stereotypes or channel into the dramatic action some of the real personality traits, feelings and attitudes of the participant actors. Most VW games work within comfortably sustainable stereotypes, manifested through an on-screen avatar that is usually a flattering approximation of how the participant would like their character to look. In drama terms, this is the equivalent of a mask, which disguises the real look and characteristics of the player, and permits that character to engage in activities outside the player’s comfort zone. Both virtual worlds and process drama have a similar elderly cousin, some of whose characteristics they often incorporate. For VWs, these are the role-play board and pen-and-paper games like Dungeons and Dragons, many of which transfer to the medium of the computer almost unchanged. Role-playing games tend to offer a narrative structure based on the hero’s quest. Players are sometimes given choices of character and potential to develop character strengths as they work through the levels of the game world. Role-playing games are often limited to top down POV or third person POV. The elder and more limited cousin of process drama is the simulation, which similarly involves a fictional world where the players assume roles (usually generalized ones) and improvise the action. The key difference is that the simulation is pre-designed for very specific outcomes, with the choices at any point available to the participants constricted to pre-ordained options, and usually a pre-arranged outcome. There is usually a very brief enrolment phase consisting entirely of exposition, and very little scope for re-negotiating the narrative and the sources of tension, introducing new constraints or developments, or individualized action. It adheres in form quite closely to that classic three-act-structure of orientation, complication and resolution. Online simulations have in recent times become very popular for learning contexts, where in fact they merge with role-playing games to provide easily controllable virtual environments whose outcomes can be circumscribed and designed to fulfil pedagogical objectives.2


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Although process dramas usually occur in learning environments, they contrast with simulations in their much higher degree of participant flexibility, decision making in the structure and narrative as well as character, and a drive towards complexity. Finding the solution is not as important in process drama as opening up the question/context/situation for raising more questions.

Colliding to collude With this shared understanding of each other’s language and approach beginning to emerge, we pushed on with our research. This research, which was developed and funded under the auspices of the Australasian Collaborative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID), had a specific focus on the educational potential of Massive Multiplayer Environments, with our sub-project falling under the title of The Media Station. Our original plan had been to design a virtual environment that could be used in conjunction with a previously developed process drama. However, problems arose as soon as we began this work. For Truna, the interaction designer, her vision was to create a virtual world that completely replicated the dramatic one, but for the drama educators ( John and Julie) this approach sidelined the core aspect of our imagined world – physical engagement. Our goal in joining this project had never been to replace dramatic worlds with virtual ones, but rather, to look for ways to enhance the overall experience for the learners. We weren’t prepared to spend months creating an expensive virtual world simply to replicate a dramatic world we knew we could generate in moments simply using the power of drama and the imaginations of our participants, but we were very interested in discovering ways of supporting our learners in the development of ‘shared illusions of realness’. With this outcome in mind, we decided to turn our original idea on its head and use the process drama as the vehicle for understanding the potential of this union – examining the possibilities from inside the dramatic rather than the virtual world, with the ideas and perceptions of the learners themselves driving our understanding and action. To this end, we worked with a group of 11- and 12-year-old students and their teachers from a Queensland state primary school, chosen mainly because of the school’s innovative work in process drama (we didn’t have to start from scratch here), and also in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) for learning. Working collaboratively with our team across one full school day, the students and their teachers participated in a process drama, followed

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by a series of interviews. On the day, Truna, our VW interaction designer member, was directly involved in the drama, taking role and co-facilitating with the drama educators. This participation enabled her to enter the shared dramatic world and better understand the tensions that characterize the ‘being there’ of process drama. Two key questions were directed at the learners during the interview period: 1. What aspects of the process drama experience, if any, would have been more engaging if you had also been given opportunities to enter a parallel persistent online world? 2. Which aspects of the experience provided within the process drama, if any, would be best retained within the dramatic world? The drama unit selected as the focus for the day was one we had previously developed, entitled History’s Purchased Page (O’Toole and Dunn 2002). Its original purpose was to provide upper primary children with a direct experience and understanding of the discourses of power that are at play in the recording of history. In its original format, the participants in this process drama were enrolled as historians – staff of a multimedia company called The Virtually Impossible Computer Company. For this event, however, we decided to adjust these roles, organizing the group into pairs – each of one historian and one interaction designer. Their brief within the fiction was to research and propose designs for an educational CD/Game entitled ‘Conquerors of the World: Mount Everest’. The fictional funding was plentiful enough to encourage innovative ideas including interaction possibilities not currently available, thus offering the students opportunities both within and beyond the drama to think about the possibilities that engagement within a fully immersive graphical world might offer for learning. In other words, we were preparing the students for the later interviews about their own learning needs by putting them in-role as experts with the task of developing a learning resource that included participation in a virtual world while simultaneously teaching their fictional learners about the ambiguity of history. This initial experience was intentionally ‘low tech’, using only simple web-based media as a source of information and visual support via images and films downloaded from the web. We hoped this approach would give the students a chance to identify and design the kind of virtual world they themselves felt they needed to support their learning.


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Significantly, our process drama conventions meant that the students were not only investigators of this historical event, but also enactors of it. We disrupted the naturalistic role-play of the Company and its designers with occasional episodes using non-naturalistic conventions, demanding different roles, and orientations to the central event of the climbing of Everest. Conventions such as ‘still images’ and ‘thought tracking’ (Neelands and Goode 1990, pp. 19 and 54) were used to deepen the students’ physical and emotional understanding of the challenges inherent within this mountaineering feat, while the computer-based research provided them with the written and visual material they needed to understand other aspects of this moment in history. At different stages during this process drama, therefore, the students were either in-role as designers/researchers, or as participants in the quest to conquer Mt. Everest. The adults worked both out of role and in-role, mainly as project managers. The adults then, not only had control over the form of the drama work and the selection of conventions, but were also powerful within the dramatic world, though only to a limited extent, as the control of the intellectual capital was in the hands of the students, through their expertise as designers and historians. From an interaction designer’s perspective, it could be argued that much of the action of this drama experience was being directed in a similar manner to the way that a game world environment might manipulate player action. Also similar (and unusual in process drama) was the fact that competition was used as a force to drive engagement – with the Virtually Impossible Computer Company employees striving to outdo each other for the design contract – that was their initial tension of the task. However, tension of the task alone cannot usually sustain a drama and other more powerful tensions were also applied. One of the most significant of these is the tension of surprise, and when introduced here, the results were striking. The surprise for the designers was a visit from a mountaineer (teacher-in-role) who had been part of the 1999 expedition that located the body of George Mallory – a climber who many believe may have conquered Everest 30 years before the generally acclaimed Hillary and Norgay partnership. The climber challenged the group to alter their plans and rewrite their games/CD roms and websites to set the record straight about the ‘true’ conqueror of Everest. This disruption to the confident work in progress set the participants into a frenzy, especially as the climber was a somewhat confronting individual who challenged the integrity of their work thus far. The discussion that ensued was lively indeed, and the students’ became keenly engaged in

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cross-examining him. At this time the truly embodied engagement of drama seemed to kick in and the students’ work moved to a deeper level. The challenge had suddenly become personal and the decisions more urgent, with creating the ‘winning’ design no longer being the only, or even the main issue. Decisions now also had to be made about how best to present history. By the time the pairs were invited to present their proposals to their client (a teacher-in-role), another surprise awaited. The well-heeled financial backer stunned the students by being willing to accept only those proposals that fell in line with her personal agenda and to dismiss any that offered an alternate version of history. There was outrage and the room erupted with loud complaints and intense arguments, with one child shouting loudly, ‘Who do you think you are? You can’t buy history!’ and in this moment the final, but most significant tension of this drama had been activated – the tension of metaxis. (And the child had virtually spelled out the title of our drama, which was quite unknown to her, incidentally). Metaxis has been variously defined, but using Boal’s definition (1979), the students at this moment were expressing real anger about events taking place in a dramatic elsewhere. This metaxis, and its physicality, was of critical interest to the interaction designer in our team, and during the process drama reflective phase, some very important pointers for such design became apparent.

Metaxis and the virtual: where three worlds collide De-briefing after a process drama is always an important phase, precisely because such dramas often invoke metaxis and also because it is often in unpacking this tension that the most exciting learning outcomes are generated. For our research, too, this reflection process not only needed to examine the participants’ experience of the drama, but also how the students thought potential virtual worlds might be used to extend, enhance or even replace the dramatic one they had just experienced. These student reflections immediately highlighted the fact that many of them were very experienced in virtual world and multi-user communication, being habitual MSN messenger users and players in shared online environments such as Runescape. This online game-play experience was reflected in the submissions presented to the financial backer, with the majority pitched as part of the Conquerors of the World highlighting the possibilities for online interaction.


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Given their enthusiasm for multiplayer and rich graphic environments, the two drama educators in our team were immediately concerned that perhaps after all, our interaction design colleague, Truna, had been right. We feared that the student responses might suggest that dramatic worlds had become redundant ones, with only the virtual being necessary for deep learning. It was salutary then, to hear the participants steadfastly insist on maintaining the dramatic world and its inherently physical interactions: G3: I think you should keep the arguing live because you can see the facial expressions and you can, you know, like it feels more real when you’re doing it in-role. G2: I kind of think the same as Lauren, like you can’t really have an argument on the computer, well you can, but it’s more, it would be more fun having it live. (Students all resoundingly agree and chuckle.) And with the role plays and stuff, or the freeze frames of the climbing, it would be a bit hard to do them on the computer. Like, and it’s more better if you actually do it, not on the computer, out in the open. By expressing these viewpoints, the students appear to be highlighting the intense engagement that the dramatic world generated for them – engagement that their previous experiences within virtual worlds alone had presumably not provided. However, in spite of the overwhelming advocacy they expressed for the dramatic experience, the students also outlined for us details of how engagement within a specially designed virtual world could enhance the work. Significantly, it was once again the physical domain towards which they directed most of their comments. J: Would you like to have had some way of experiencing this event within a virtual environment? G4: Yeah because then you feel like you’re kind of there and you’re, yeah you just feel like you’re in that position and everything is around you. J: How important would it be to get the sound and the noise [of the mountain] . . . G4: Pretty important really. G1: I think people will get a better picture in their mind about it.

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G3: ’Cause if it was just a picture, you’d sort of go ‘ok I can’t hear anything and I can’t do anything apart from see what’s in front of me, so what now?’ J: Do you think there will ever come a time on computers where you can actually feel cold, and feel tired as you got to the top? And can you imagine . . . would that be useful? G8: That would be really like good information because people would actually feel what they felt when they actually did it. And like (’cause some people go) ‘oh that would be easy’ and then they know how it feels. J: Ok, so what kind of touch? What sort of things would you – B1: Like so you can feel what you’re meant to be feeling. B1: Like if you were climbing up Mount Everest you would feel cold, or if it was like rock through the snow, it would like hurt your fingers if you had no gloves on. G6: I think like seeing and hearing are the main ones, ’cause they’re more possible to do on the computer. J: What would you want to see and hear? G6: I don’t know, just like you know say we were doing Mount Everest, like you can hear the wind and you can like hear the snow, and like when you’re walking like the snow and that crunching under your shoes and like, you know seeing actually everything. G7: I think it’d be heaps better cause you could feel things . . . They also suggested that a well-designed avatar would have supported them in what we have elsewhere described as the process of creating sensate private and shared dramatic worlds (Dunn 2002). For the students, the dramatic world could also have been at least partially enhanced through engagement with a deeper graphic environment, with their suggestions including z

z

provision of online chats with the historic figures involved in this debate (although interestingly they insisted that this chat be conducted as text only – voice/image would destroy the illusion) development of an online environment to be used as part of the belief building and enrolment process of the drama. Here the students would


z

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enter the Virtually Impossible Computer Company as staff, being able to access their briefings and record their work inclusion of an Experience Room that would offer the researchers a virtual experience of the Everest environment.

However, they insisted that while these additions would enhance engagement and support their visualizations, they could NOT be a replacement for the physical presence of the drama and the opportunities it afforded for them to experience metaxis (this is our terminology, not theirs, but they expressed the sentiments).

Designing for a future collusion: what have we learnt and where do we go from here? This small research event seems to offer some critical pointers for the design of educational experiences exploiting these two connected but different worlds. The first of these relates to the very aspect of design that almost brought our partnership unstuck in the first instance – physicality. Multiplayer world designs – both game worlds and social – have a history of confrontation with the physical world, with these environments attempting to replicate it, but generally doing so with the ‘safety protocols on’, ensuring that experiences within the virtual remain distanced from the actual. Drama educators, on the hand, construct and craft their experiences to ensure that the participants have the opportunity to cognitively, emotionally and physically experience dramatic worlds. Beyond this ‘safety protocol’ concept lies the deeper issue of simulation versus play that tends to raise its head when the virtual game world exhibits rich detail of the less salubrious kind. For example, much of the public’s current concern over recent versions of Rockstar Games – Grand Theft Auto is about the high resolution graphic detail of some of the mission activities and the fact that within this game the players become the thief, adopting a first person role that is essentially the ‘bad guy’. This important debate, and whether the same potential risk exists in process drama, is beyond the scope of this chapter. The participant group clearly articulated their desire to experience the pleasure of the physical. They suggested that virtual designers might be better off supporting the process of visualization, rather than attempting to replicate physical engagement. The clear consensus on the part of the students was that the virtual can best be used to aid and abet imagination by

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providing rich graphic visualizations and sense-based inspirations – such things as the look, feel and sound of snow. They were very aware of where they wanted assistance in their imagined worlds (crunching snow) and where they viewed such assistance as intrusive (embodied online chats with historical figures). As we move towards more widespread exploitation of virtual worlds in our teaching, this leaves us with some critical questions to explore: z z

What kind of virtual environments can we design where the fragile world of the imagination is not obfuscated by the virtual world itself? How can we re-invent the depth of sensory immersion required to aid visualization for the imaginative world without damaging it?

The worlds can both collide and collude, and the excitement we first felt about the resonances between our worlds has now been replaced by the challenge of creating for all of us a ‘bigger place to play’ – a place to boldly play where no one has played before.

Acknowledgement The authors are grateful to Jane ‘Truna’ Turner for her enthusiastic collaboration, and her knowledge of virtual worlds and interaction design. We are equally grateful for the teaching arts of Claire McSwain who provided students who were skilled in process drama, and some of the teaching in the session; and to the Year 6 students of Mooloolaba State School, Queensland, who provided the substance of this chapter, through their dramatic engagement and ideas. Some of this material was given its first publication at the 2nd League of Worlds International Conference on Computer Simulations and Gaming (O’Toole, J., Dunn, J. and Turner, J. Conference presentation, University of Melbourne, November, 2005).

Notes 1

2

(See also Bolton 1979; Bowell and Heap 2001; Morgan and Saxton 1987; Neelands and Goode 1990; O’Toole 1992; O’Toole and Dunn 2002). See for example: Vincent and Shepherd, Journal of Interactive Media in Education (1998), http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/98/11/vincent-98-11-t.html, Wills [Project enrole (2008) http://www.cedir.uow.edu.au/enrole/rp_repository.html]


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References Boal, A. (1979), Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Bolton, G. (1979), Towards a Theory of Drama in Education. London: Longmans. Bowell, P. and Heap, B. (2001), Planning Process Drama. London: David Fulton. Burbules, N. (2006), Rethinking the Virtual in Education, Contemporary Questions in Curriculum Seminar. University of Melbourne, July. Carroll, J. and Cameron, D. (2005), Playing the game – role distance and digital performance’, IDEA/ATR Journal, vol. 6, www.griffith.edu.au/centre/cpci/atr. Dunn, J. (2002), Dramatic worlds in play – creating and sustaining illusions of realness, in B. Rasmussen and A. Ostern (eds), Playing betwixt and between: The IDEA Dialogues 2001. Bergen: IDEA Publications, pp. 288–294. Gee, J. (2003). What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giffin, H. (1984), The coordination of meaning in the creation of shared makebelieve reality, in I. Bretherton (ed.), Symbolic Play: The Development of Social Understanding. New York: Academic, pp. 73–100. Klesen, M., Szatkowski, J. and Lehmann, N. (2000), The Black sheep – interactive improvisation in a 3D Virtual World. Proceedings of the i3 Conference, Jönköping, September 2000, 77. Morgan, N. and Saxton, J. (1987), Teaching Drama – A Mind of Many Wonders. London: Hutchinson. Murray, J. (2005), The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies, retrieved 12 June 2008 from http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/digra05/lastword.pdf. —(2007), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon & Schuster. Neelands, J. and Goode, T. (1990), Structuring Drama Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds. Portsmouth: Heinemann. O’Toole, J. (1992), The Process of Drama. London: Routledge. O’Toole, J. and Dunn, J. (2002), Pretending to Learn – Helping Children Learn Through Drama. Sydney: Pearson Educational, pp.120–131. O’Toole, J., Dunn, J. and Turner, T. (2005), When Worlds Collide. Paper presented at the 2nd League of Worlds International Conference on Computer Simulations and Gaming, University of Melbourne, November 13–17.

Chapter 3

Lip Sync: performative placebos in the digital age Paul Sutton

This chapter describes applied theatre company C&T’s work in the field of online and onstage lip syncing: the act of making mimed dramas synchronized to popular music and the sharing of these in performance and via the internet. C&T’s venture in this field – the company’s online participatory drama, Epiphany Virus (www. epiphanyvirus.net) – is highlighted as the conduit by which this popular form can be appropriated for educative purposes. The chapter goes on to locate the Epiphany Virus project within the pedagogic, cultural and ethnographic interests that have informed the development of C&T’s wider paradigm of practice. Next, it explores the role of music in youth culture and the impact that digital distribution has had on the way we consume music in the twenty-first century. The chapter then proceeds to describe the cultural significance of lip syncing both historically and in contemporary culture, exploring the formative work of other practitioners such as Dennis Potter. After examining C&T’s experiences of lip syncing in educative contexts the chapter culminates with an analysis of the Epiphany Virus itself as a catalyst for performative actions (actual and virtual) and its synergies with wider youth and digital culture.

C&T is an applied theatre company based in England and predominantly working with children and young people in formal and informal educational contexts. Our company name, ‘C&T’, is shorthand for the interests that form the core of our practice and values: Computers & Theatre, Creativity & Technology, Culture & Theory, Community & Theatre-in-Education. Building strength through such binary forces is key to our vision. Finding simplicity from such apparent complexities is the way we make our work.

Performative Placebos in the Digital Age

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As a company we aim to teach and to learn, to be pedagogically sound and ethnographically sensitive, digitally enabled and theatrically viable, playful and truthful, stylish and intelligent. These may sound like flip, sound-bite values. However, for C&T, colliding these hallmarks is crucial to shaping meaningful interventions with young people in the emergent digital landscape of the twenty-first century. In this chapter I will try to make explicit the value of these values and their creative, ethnographic and educational purpose, by exploring one of C&T’s online participatory drama projects, Lip Sync. Talking of traditions in a phenomenon as young as digital culture seems somewhat pre-emptive. However, when it comes to shaping C&T’s practice, the company actively tries to accentuate these emergent ‘traditions’ for the benefit of our work and our audiences. We do this in three ways: firstly, by identifying the ways in which digital technologies have become culturally habitual for young people; secondly, by finding synergies between these habits and drama’s processes, or its performative outcomes; and thirdly, shaping an original dramatic context that both exploits these potentials and locates them in a drama praxis that is simultaneously live, applied and digital. In this description of Lip Sync I shall try to illustrate how these processes play out in our paradigm of practice, a paradigm we refer to as Dramatic Property. Lip Sync collides drama and popular music, seeking to harness the potential of the two within an online drama facility designed to encode the authentic, ethnographic, lived experiences of young people. At its heart is a desire to build for drama some performative capital from the phenomenon of online lip syncing. Lip syncing (or ‘lip dubbing’ as it is sometimes branded) is the act of miming to songs, recording these performances with accessible technologies such as home computers and web cams and then posting these videos on user-generated content websites such as YouTube, Vimeo or other social media platforms. In the early years of the twenty-first century the phenomenon has exploded in popularity, with literally thousands of such lip synced performances being shared online, with some leading exponents of the genre often gaining global public recognition for their witty performances. But C&T’s venture aspires to move beyond this anecdotal, egocentric form of performative action. Through a web-based fiction, C&T has created a persuasive motivational drama structure that both acts as a sympathetic context through which to be an audience for our lip synced dramas, but more significantly acts as a subversive, digitally based agent for harnessing the energies of young participants. At the heart of this fiction is what C&T believes to be the world’s first placebo computer virus – Epiphany.

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I describe the virtual drama of the Epiphany Virus later in this chapter, but first it’s important to explore and explain something of the cultural context lip syncing occupies for young people, that was the genesis for C&T’s project. Music plays a pivotal role in the lives of the young. For many it offers the defining hallmarks of their culture, particularly when synergistically linked to fashion and music television, offering, as the latter does, a 24-hour landscape of seductive, multi-layered music videos. By turns, music signifies both the here and now – the zeitgeist that distinguishes each new generation from its predecessors – and it works as a sophisticated trigger for our memories, (Laughey 2006, p. 1) taking us back to times and places that have personal and social significance. This is not something unique to young people today; it has been the case for many generations. However, with the rise of the ubiquitous iPod and the MP3 player, pocket-sized, portable music libraries of perhaps 40,000 songs can now be programmed to conjure music for every mood, a song for any occasion and playlists that provide the soundtrack to our daily lives. And if the right song for the right mood is not in your current music collection, you know that via downloads, or peer-to-peer sharing websites, it is only a click away. In many ways the transformation of how we use and consume music exemplifies the wider trend towards personalization that is at the centre of the digital revolution, as well as in education and wider social and political cultures. For C&T, this seemed exciting territory: the potential of music as a stimulant for performative behaviours; the capacity for digital media to distribute informally created performance texts (music and video) to distanced but connected audiences; the potential relationship between the aesthetics of music videos and live performance. Clearly, C&T was not alone in recognizing this potential. Conduct an internet search for ‘lip sync’ or ‘lip dub’ and you will find yourself in a seemingly endless stream of uploaded videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, featuring bedroom DJs miming to their favourite pop acts. Some, such as the Dormitory Boys, have gone on to become international celebrities. The majority, thankfully, slide into obscurity. However, for C&T this potential needed to extend beyond the purely performative to something more pedagogically viable. While the Dormitory Boys are always performative, their videos are rarely, if ever, dramatic. Meaningful drama needed to be at the core of our lip syncing. Apart from the evident success of the form online, C&T looked for other templates that might influence our appropriation of the form. Of course, lip syncing is not a new phenomenon. Long before the internet, the term was commonly associated with pop stars miming to hit songs


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on music TV shows such as the BBC’s Top of the Pops. In Hollywood, the term evokes associations with actors’ voices being dubbed – famously Audrey Hepburn by Marni Nixon in the 1964 film My Fair Lady, or as the name of the animation process whereby cartoon characters’ lip movements are synchronized with pre-recorded dialogue. However, it was British television writer Dennis Potter who re-defined lip syncing, transforming it from a technical process into a creative, performative technique. His seminal TV series Pennies From Heaven (1978) told the story of a 1930s sheet-music salesman who avoids the frustrations of his life by escaping into a fantasy world of songs from the period. At key moments of the drama, the central characters drift away from the narrative flow into surreal, dream-like sequences, lip syncing to authentic recordings of 1930s popular songs. Subsequently, Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) refined the technique still further, locating lip synced songs within a complex narrative centring on failed novelist Philip Marlow’s re-imagining of his life from within the fiction of one of his own detective novels. Ostensibly, Potter uses the technique to construct a film musical. In reality, the technique is very different in intention and outcome: dislocating the audience, creating a disturbing, multi-layered dramatic experience, which by turns has been described as non-naturalistic, psychological realism and, conversely, formulaic and tricksy (Prys 2004, p. 185). However, Potter’s mixing of music and drama, his complex juxtaposition of image and content and his use of song to reveal (fictional) characters’ motivations, aspirations and memories would all prove significant in C&T’s development of the technique onstage and online. Of course, Potter was writing for the medium of television. Tightly focused headshots of performers ensured screen audiences could read the lip synced actions more clearly than might an audience in a theatre. However for C&T, the dramatic potential of the lip sync form owed more to the fabric of our wider digital, dramatized society than the purely televisual, filmic template offered by Potter. In today’s dramatized society, what Raymond Williams describes as the ‘drama of habitual experience’ (1991, p. 12) is a characteristic many can recognize and one that must have become even more prevalent since the rise of the MP3 player. The notion that the rise of the MP3 player – be it an iPod, mobile phone or other such device – provides ‘the soundtrack to our lives’ has widespread currency and it is a notion that neatly encapsulates the dramatizing qualities we now attribute to the role and function of music in the narratives of our daily lives. As works of authored fiction, Potter’s dramas can only hint at this latent ethnographic potential. If our digital music collections increasingly embrace

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‘the lived dramas of our personal social lives’ (Neelands 1997, p. 1) what is the potential in using these music collections as the catalyst for creating contemporary, authentic ethnographic dramas?

Lip sync and networked theatre In embracing the challenges of the digital revolution C&T has had to do more than just transform the form and content of its work. The structure of the company has also changed. When the company was founded, C&T looked like a classic Theatre-in-Education or applied theatre company. A small team of actor/facilitators worked with an administrator and artistic director supported by other freelance artists employed as individual projects required. The company toured schools, colleges and community venues in the West Midlands of England. In the early twenty-first century, while many of the core values that underpinned the company’s work remain the same, the company itself is shaped radically differently. Because most of C&T’s projects have a strong online component and are designed to enable collaboration over distances, the company now operates simultaneously in a number of geographic locations. Consequently C&T now commonly describes its practice as Networked Theatre. This notion of Networked Theatre is most transparent in the company’s day-to-day relationships with schools, teachers and young people. In recent years, C&T has negotiated a series of partnerships with schools, colleges and universities who share with C&T a commitment to learning through drama and Information Communication Technology. Together these partner schools form what the company calls the C&T Network. Each network partner has its own resident C&T animateur based permanently within the school. These animateurs then work to ‘animate’ (or ‘bring to life’) C&T projects for students, teachers and the wider local community. C&T itself acts as a creative infrastructure, enabling young people to collaborate with their peers in often remote geographic locations. The urban can work with the rural, primary can work with secondary, the able can work with the disabled. At the centre of the C&T Network is the C&T Network website (2008: www.candtnetwork.org). This elaborate online presence, built using the same open source Drupal software that the www.epiphanyvirus.net utilizes (allowing for the fluid migration of content between both websites), allows young people and teachers across the network to share drama work, opinions and creative ideas. The site is personalized to reflect individual participants’ different points of engagement with C&T and allows users to upload


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their own work and view the work of others: audio, video, text or images. The site also acts as a virtual facilitator for C&T’s projects, enabling the company to centrally structure and disseminate templates of its projects across the network. This has numerous benefits, notably enabling C&T to coordinate network collaborations (such as Lip Sync) as well as providing mentoring to students, teachers and animateurs. In many ways, the C&T Network website enables a collaborative drama practice close in ethos to Dorothy Heathcote’s Rolling Role model of drama. Heathcote explains that the term derives from the processes of rolling ‘. . . base [drama] work from teacher to teacher and [thus allowing] many classes to share in the common context’ (p. 36). Although originally developed in the 1970s, Heathcote is herself still alive to the potential of the model in the digital age, commenting ‘what a website opportunity a rolling role provides!’ Just as the internet enables people to build virtual communities of interest through social networking utilities like Facebook and MySpace, so participants in a Rolling Role can ‘build beliefs in the lives of the people and the events they are meeting’ (Heathcote 2000, pp. 37–38). The C&T Network site goes some way to build synergies between these two models of collaboration. Through the network site, C&T also seeks to constructively engage with the internet as a force of globalization, transforming the phenomenon of glocalization (‘a complex interaction of the global and local characterised by cultural borrowing’ (Steger 2003, p. 75)) into a process drama technique, enabling geographically dispersed groups of participants to mark out the particulars of their localized experiences and then contextualize these within a universal dramatic framework. In the spirit of the Rolling Role, participants can research, dramatize and document their creative journeys and publish them to the central website for other participants to use as learning materials for their own drama work. As Boal puts it, referencing Paulo Friere: I like especially when he writes that you cannot teach if you don’t learn anything from the person to whom you teach. To teach is a learning process. It is not only about throwing things at people it’s about getting things back and learning. (Boal 2002, p. 22) The C&T Network site provided a rich environment for developing the lip sync practice. Animateurs based in C&T Network schools in Worcester, Bradford, West Sussex, Birmingham, East Yorkshire and Reading all contributed to this process, involving young people aged between 11 and 18.

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Techniques and strategies were piloted and refined in a range of contexts, including traditional subject areas such as History (for example, syncing dramatic reconstructions of the French Revolution to Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’), Citizenship (lip syncing scenes of inter-gang violence at local bus stops to ‘I Predict a Riot’ by the Kaiser Chiefs) and Modern Foreign Languages (one Animateur boldly arranged for Year 10 pupils to lip sync in French to rapper MC Solarr). At other points, animateurs set up longer term interventions. For example, a group of Year 9 boys in the village of Cullingworth, on the outskirts of the City of Bradford worked with their C&T animateur for over a year, devising a lip synced performance linking together eight of their favourite songs. In allowing young people to choose the ‘playlists’ for these plays (rather than the usually predetermined choices made by animateurs in the formal classroom settings), the plays they developed seemed to offer unfettered insights into the way young people perceived their lives and their relationship to the adult world. Typical themes were the pain of family break-up and its impact on children, the apparent arbitrariness of school disciplinary procedures, and their own fearfulness of rising levels of knife crime among the young (a serious issue for young people living in urban Britain). None of these themes may sound unusual for teachers or youth workers familiar with the lives of young people. However, what was unfamiliar was the way these themes gained prominence within their dramas: not by a conscious or deliberate process of facilitation, but by young people’s often tangential choice of music from which to devise their plays. For example, who might have thought that choosing The Carpenters’ 1970s classic ballad ‘Close to You’ might be the catalyst for a cynical analysis of perceived insincerity in parental relationships? Many of these achievements were the culmination of sustained explorative processes, but for all participants there were numerous staging posts and discoveries en route to these destinations. Across the C&T Network the sharing of materials, the distillation of experimental practices and the critical reflection of these experiences through the multimedia functionality and social networking conventions of the website enabled many crucial discoveries about how to effectively lip sync with purpose and meaning. In creating initial lip syncs with a group, we learnt that structuring first steps in the drama through simple sequences of frozen images related to the content of songs and then performing these to the music helps groups begin to ‘feel’ the dramatic potential of the form. Also, not all lip syncs need to be lip synced. At times, synchronizing physical actions to music can be enough.


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Similarly, we learnt that often the lip synced song does not need to stand alone. Contextualizing drama clarifies the content under examination. For example, such contextual drama might provide exposition with regard to characters, relationships and scenario or it may problematize the themes and issues under exploration in the subsequent lip sync. Sometimes, in devising, the song is not enough. Providing a juxtaposing stimulus to the song can galvanize imaginations. For example, one group were given the Boys II Men song ‘End of the Road’, traditionally interpreted as being about the break-up of a boy/girl relationship. However, as part of early devising, participants listened to the song while watching a PowerPoint presentation of images of car crashes. This use of a simple slideshow, complete with cinematic Ken Burns effects, added texture and irony to the song. The resulting drama was no teenage romance, but a hard-hitting melodrama about drink driving. Juxtaposition is crucial. Re-purposing a song so that its original meaning contrasts with the significance of its dramatic context (as with the earlier Carpenters example) gives the lip sync weight and significance as well as glocalizing meaning for young people, giving them ownership of the material. In groups working towards a lip sync performance rather than a completed video, filming rehearsal versions of the songs/performance process will nevertheless galvanize imaginations and empower the group creativity. On stage or on screen, individual and group performances can be amplified through the use of complementary digital technologies such as back projections or live video feeds. This not only helps create context, it can amplify the impact of intended juxtapositions through striking imagery. Projections can also heighten individual performances, helping stop solitary lip syncers being lost on often large, open stages. Being playful with multimedia projection also helps to echo the visual vocabulary of music videos, which frequently provides strong cultural reference points for lip syncers. For example, as part of one C&T lip synced performance the animateur used Apple’s Keynote presentation software (very similar in function to Microsoft’s PowerPoint) to sequence every sound and visual cue for a 45-minute performance. Elaborate background videos were finalized as QuickTime movies and inserted into the Keynote presentation alongside sophisticated merging and synchronization of music, sound and visual effects and even blackouts. The resulting presentation required a separate hard drive to power the presentation and resulted in company animateurs (in homage to this rather extreme usage of a package primarily designed as an audio-visual aid for speech makers) renaming the software ‘iTheatre’.

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Similarly, when making videos of lip syncs it is possible to replicate many of these onstage juxtapositions of mediated images and live action through the use of simple blue screen techniques (or colour chroming), thus enabling an onstage performance to reach a wider audience online. Readily available software packages such as Final Cut Express HD or iMovie can achieve superb visual effects with little expertise or energy required. In terms of performance style, the lip sync needs to be either Grand Opera or ultra cheesy. As Dennis Potter realized, there is no place for realism in this performance convention. When videoing a lip sync, it is important to make sure that the performers know the lyrics. A badly synced lip sync can do more harm than good, to both audience and performer. Finally, lip syncs can be technically easy to achieve. To create them live, all that is required is a music system – MP3 player and speakers or a CD player. To create lip synced videos, a web cam and computer with CD drive will suffice, although a digital video camera will allow you to create better quality videos. In post-production, overlaying the original music track over your video recording heightens the professionalism of the performance. In an age of celebrity-dominated popular culture and with the democratization of internet participation through Web 2.0 technologies, lip syncing means anyone can become a rock star. This is an attractive proposition to many young people and is further evidenced by the popularity of video games such as the Guitar Hero series, SingStar and Rock Band, each of which simplifies the skills needed to make music by amplifying (literally and metaphorically) and enhancing a player’s ability to, for example, press keys and buttons in a particular musical rhythm. Like these games, lip syncing ‘professionalizes’ the quality of otherwise ‘unprofessional’ performances, by using technology to add a veneer of production values. This observation is not designed to patronize. In an age where professional singers use pitch correction software such as Auto-Tune to enhance their voices, why might not today’s bedroom DJs aspire to mimic the same musical quick fixes? A recurrent feature of C&T’s experiences of lip syncing is seeing some of the most marginalized, insecure young people in school communities given an apparent dramatic rise in confidence through losing themselves in the moment of syncing. Secondly, while there are always exceptions to the rule (particularly if using the technique in curriculum-based subjects), allowing young people to choose their own songs usually results in richer drama. While it is true that some genres of music can provoke entrenched, almost tribal, reactions from some young people, it is important to enable participants to see beyond their musical instincts, responding instead to these songs as texts


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rather than as their particular cultural property. The best lip syncs are the ones where the song leads participants (and the animateur) to the content, not the other way round. Norman K. Denzin’s aspiration of autoethnographic theatre comes close to identifying why, in terms of lip syncing, surrendering this ownership is not only democratically but artistically important: ‘a safe, sacred aesthetic place, a space where texts, performers, performances, and audiences come together to participate in shared, reflexive performances’ (2003, p. 80). Thirdly, within the values of a disposable, digital media culture, lip syncs are authentically postmodern texts. The form itself is inherently inter-disciplinary and self-referential. They combine elements of parody and alienation and are playful with genres, styles and influences. It is these qualities that in part give successful lip syncs credibility with young audiences. As Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel argue: The people best fitted to thriving in the world of postmodern knowledge described by Lyotard will include people who have strong multi- and cross-disciplinary expertise, who can cross-dress conceptually, theoretically and methodologically in order to come up with new rules and new games … this kind of expertise and competence is developed in performance. (2003, p. 176) Celebrating these qualities, encouraging participants to indulge their postmodern playful instincts will most likely enhance the authenticity and calibre of the finished product.

Lip Sync online: The Epiphany Virus At the centre of lip sync’s fiction is a website: www.epiphanyvirus.net. This site forms the basis of the fictional drama, acting both as a repository for uploaded content and as a provocation to participation. There are two routes to discovering epiphanyvirus.net. Young people who are working with C&T and its animateurs are directed to the site through the C&T Network site. This route contextualizes the site as a drama and frames participants for what is to follow. Alternatively, the URL for the website is freely accessible to anyone who enters it or clicks through to it from a search engine. These visitors engage with the site without the filter of understanding its intention as drama. They encounter the site as if it were real.

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Whatever the route, visitors who enter the site find themselves plunged in to a fiction, but a fiction that superficially parades to the uninitiated user as a reality. The Epiphany Virus website appears to be the construction of a lone teenage boy called Todd. Todd is clearly a gifted amateur computer programmer: the site looks glossy, sophisticated and contemporary. However the blog-like language of its author is faltering, insecure and insular. A careful exploration of the site reveals that, when it comes to computers, Todd has little to be insecure about. His programming skills have shaped a remarkable tool: the Epiphany Virus. As we explore Todd’s site we discover that the Epiphany Virus is a computer virus with a difference: it is something you’ll want to download. Todd tantalizingly promises us that with a few simple clicks you can download Epiphany. He explains that it will then synchronize with your MP3 player, iPod or mobile phone and then sit dormant in your music collection. Until one day – one moment, one song – when Epiphany will boot up and kick in. As you unsuspectingly listen to your music on the bus to school, as you walk home, or in the privacy of your own home, the virus will simultaneously take control of your MP3 player and your consciousness. For a few short moments real life around you and your music will appear to synchronize in a Dennis Potter moment. Suddenly you will experience a musically inspired epiphany: clarity, insight and understanding enabled by the virus and your personal music collection. Todd’s website provides instructions on how to download the virus, and Epiphany is itself available in a number of forms, including versions for Windows and Max OS X. Clicking on the download button generates a graphic showing the download in process. It also offers pages and indexes through which users of the virus can upload and share their epiphanies as lip synced videos reconstructing those experiences. Some are individual songs, others are ‘playlists’ arranged in a narrative sequence that can be clicked through. The songs can also be cross-referenced, enabling visitors to see how the same songs have been ‘experienced’ under the influence of the virus by others.1 Of course the website and the virus work as devices within the narrative and are designed to motivate participation. To those who are already part of the C&T Network the nature of the fiction will be made transparent by their route to discovering epiphanyvirus.net. For them, their transition from the C&T Network site to epiphanyvirus.net clearly signals their progression from a facilitated, reflective drama realm which consciously signals when suspension of disbelief is required, just as a classroom teacher might signal the beginning and end of moments of pretence. However, for


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those not associated with C&T and visiting epiphanyvirus.net as the result of an enquiry to a search engine, I would suggest that downloading the virus represents a playful act of wish fulfilment, just as playing video games like SingStar does. These people’s willingness to risk downloading the virus (who in their right mind chooses to download a computer virus?) suggests a kind of psychosomatic desire to be ‘infected’ by its performative visions. How many ‘casual’ users of the virus might begin to see the ‘drama of habitual experience’ (Williams 1991, p. 12) unfolding in the fabric of their daily lives, once their awareness has been raised of these possibilities by Todd and his virus is an interesting question. Within the conventions of process drama practices some may regard this as wilful deception. In normal classroom drama, teachers clearly recognize their responsibilities for protecting students from the often raw glare of life and drama. After all, one of the great strengths of drama is, as Tag McEntaggart puts it, ‘imagining the real’ (2004, p. 12), not experiencing fiction as if it were reality. The argument is a coherent and plausible one: C&T could be guilty of shaping a dramatic dishonesty. However, with the target audience for this project being young, digitally enabled citizens of our twenty-first-century, postmodern culture I would suggest the strongest justification for this ambiguity is the fabric of the very media culture that has given rise to Lip Sync in the first place. Appropriately, for the Lip Sync project, the strongest precedent for validating this apparent dishonesty comes from the music industry itself. Gorillaz are a highly successful band of cartoon musicians, all of whom are apes. The band has enjoyed a string of successful albums, singles and live concerts as well as a plethora of accomplished music videos and media-rich websites that flesh out the history of the band and the personalities that make it up. Nowhere on the sleeves of their compact discs does it say that Gorillaz are not real, but rather a construct of musician Damon Albarn and comic book artist Dave Gibbons. That is because there is no need to. Young people are natives of this culture. These are not deceptions of any worth. It makes sense making little sense. I would suggest the same is true of epiphanyvirus.net, Todd and his virus. If such fakery and deception is deemed culturally playful for a real band why not for a fictional drama? It is in this playful territory that the Epiphany Virus and lip syncing has its greatest pedagogic potential. Dennis Potter’s initial television work during the 1970s and ’80s modelled lip syncing as a viable filmic device in terms of its performative vocabulary. C&T has tried to build on this work for the benefit of young people as participants in educative dramas (be they live or virtual). Through the company’s work, lip syncing has been fashioned as a

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set of theatre-derived practices through which young people can deploy the latent digital values they have learnt through their immersion in the virtual realms and dramas of YouTube, SingStar, MTV and LimeWire. Colliding techniques hatched in the television age with conventions born in the digital era and refracting them through the pedagogy of applied theatre practices has proved a productive route to enable students to critically reflect on either or all of these performative media, their forms, values and content. However, beyond this, C&T has seen time and again that it is the fiction of the Epiphany Virus itself that offers the most lucid root to understanding through lip syncing. Asking young people to perceive the complexities of an issue, subject or text through the hermeneutic values of another – a song – reframes their expectations of the learning encounter. The concept of the Epiphany Virus piques their imaginations and thereby works as a mechanism through which they can contextualize something (knowledge, perceptions, values, aspirations) that is initially alien to them. It offers a framework for achieving new understandings within the boundaries of a text that they do understand and have an intuitive, native understanding of – a song. For C&T, this fiction – and its performative constraints – regularly facilitates profound, moving, culturally resonant and cognitively challenging learning encounters, both live and virtual.

Note 1

The fiction of Todd and the Epiphany Virus were developed by C&T through a lengthy drama process involving groups of young people across the C&T Network over a two-year period. Lip syncing itself featured heavily as part of this process alongside process drama techniques and improvisational activities. In July 2008, a group of some 15 young people performed the story of Todd and the Epiphany Virus at C&T’s base at the University of Worcester, United Kingdom. While created as a stand alone piece of youth theatre for local audiences, the play actively promoted the virus website and the lip syncs that made up the narrative of the play were immediately available on the Epiphany Virus website.

References Boal, A. (2002), ‘Parallel Worlds’, Drama, 22, summer, 21–25. Denzin, N. K. (2003), Performance Ethnography. London: Sage. Heathcote, D. (2000), Contexts for Active Learning, Drama Research, 1, 1, pp. 31–45, retrieved 20 June 2008 from http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/, retrieved 20


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June 2008 from http://www.candtnetwork.org, retrieved 15 June 2005 from http://www.themegahitmovies.com/highconcept.htm. Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2003), New Literacies. London: Open. Laughey, D. (2006), Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McEntaggart, T. (2004), Imagining the real and realising the imagined . . ., Journal of Drama in Education, 20, 2, 12–23. Neelands, J. (1997), Beginning Drama 11–14. London: David Fulton. Prys, C. (2004), ‘The Singing Detective’, in G. Creeber (ed.), Fifty Key Television Programmes. London: Arnold, pp. 183–187. Steger, M. B. (2003), Globalisation: A Very Short Introduction. London: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1991), Writing in Society. London: Verso, pp. 11–21.

Chapter 4

Mashup: digital media and drama conventions David Cameron

Web developers use the term ‘mashup’ to describe new applications that emerge when complementary elements are combined from two or more sources. This chapter considers how some educational dramatic conventions can accommodate contemporary and emerging digital media forms. Increasingly, these media forms regarded as ‘everyday’ communication are based on digital technology and networks that have moved from computers in academic and government settings into a range of devices for domestic and personal use. Digital media are everywhere, ‘taken up by diverse populations and non-institutionalized practices, including the peer activities of youth’ (Ito et al. 2008, p. vii). As its starting point, this chapter takes the widely used conventions and techniques for structuring drama outlined in the books Structuring drama work (Neelands and Goode 2000) and Beginning drama 11–14 (Neelands 2004). Many of the drama conventions discussed in those books make use of, or are modelled upon cultural uses of, common media forms. In some cases the digital media forms suggested here are presented simply as being a more contemporary form to substitute directly into the drama, for example making use of an email message rather than a letter or facsimile. In other cases, the media forms suggested can be considered as a means by which the drama activity itself can be conducted, for example making use of a discussion forum as the means by which participants can engage in a drama activity beyond being physically present in the same space. As with earlier drama conventions, the digital media forms and possible applications are presented as a selection of elements and ideas that individuals and practitioners can adopt and adapt in whatever ways are appropriate to them. They are offered as a means of thinking about the possible advantages of mixing established drama forms with new technologies.

Mashup: Digital Media and Drama Conventions

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Using drama conventions Drama facilitators, particularly those working in a school system, must somehow find enough time with the participants to produce meaningful outcomes from the drama activities. Although ‘it is better to spend the time doing drama rather than preparing to do it’ (O’Neill and Lambert 1982, p. 147), already limited face-to-face teaching time is often soaked up by school administration including taking attendance or altering a classroom layout to suit the drama activities. Establishing the drama can itself take time, such that students often tend to be more fully engaged only towards the end of a school period. Similarly, the impact of the drama activity can be lessened as it crashes to a halt to the sound of the school bell, and students move on physically and mentally to their next subject. It is therefore understandable that drama facilitators in these time-poor situations would look to effective scaffolding approaches to help establish and build the drama. One of the strategies adopted by drama facilitators is the development of ‘particular conventions that can be quickly produced without the need for lengthy preparations or rehearsal’ (Neelands 2004, p. 51), allowing a variety of activities within a single lesson or session. While being aware that the conventions are not the drama in the same way that a ‘map is not the territory’ (Korzybski 1994), they nevertheless can help teachers implement elements of belief quickly in order to establish or carry forward a drama.

Using digital media to establish the drama: pre-text Pre-text is the term O’Neill uses to characterize the nature and launching strategy of non-scripted collaborative dramatic enactment (1995, p. 5). This concept will be familiar to many drama teachers and facilitators, even if they may use other terms to define it. Unlike drama forms that follow an established text (for example, script), processual and improvised drama forms are initiated by a pre-text that launches the dramatic action and establishes the world of the drama, the range of characters that can inhabit it, and the likely encounters and actions that can take place within it (O’Neill 1995). Pre-text can be based on all manner of things, including images, objects, conventions or texts, but should always provide a rapid entry into the world and action of the drama. Carroll and Cameron (Carroll 2004; Carroll and Cameron 2003) have argued that drama teachers and practitioners can capitalize on the

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pervasiveness of digital media forms, particularly in the world of young people, by utilizing some of the features of this everyday technology as the basic elements for the development of a digital pre-text. One of the obvious applications of the blends between digital media forms and drama conventions outlined in this chapter is the ability to create a digital pre-text that is a good fit with the information, communication and media channels commonly used by many school-aged participants, such as email and mobile telephones. An aim is to enhance the ease with which the pre-text can initiate the drama in a seamless transition via an interface so familiar that it seeks to ‘erase itself so that the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of the medium’ (Boulter and Grusin 1999, p. 22).

Using digital media within the drama: fidelity Another aim when combining new and emerging media forms with drama conventions is simply to update the cultural references surrounding them to suit contemporary drama groups, particularly those involving younger people. This raises questions about what level of authenticity is required to reduce obstacles to acceptance of the drama, and to help participants rapidly suspend disbelief. The nature of many of these digital media forms is that they carry with them an element of meta-information. There is a certain level of fidelity required when using these media forms in drama to avoid participants being distracted by what they might perceive as errors. For example, if a facilitator were to use an email as a form of introducing new information to the drama activity, participants may be just as interested in the email address of the sender or who else the message has been copied to as they are in the contents of the message itself. The metadata carried by many of these digital forms can convey important information about the source of the information. This becomes even more significant if a facilitator chooses to use these digital media forms as the main medium for the drama activity itself, for example using a forum or chat tools to bring together distributed participants. Participants may need to be guided about what aspects of the medium are relevant to the drama, and which are just a function of the medium in which it is taking place and can be seen as the limits of the ‘frame’ of the drama (Carroll and Cameron 2005).


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Using digital media to continue the drama: expanded universe Another aspect of the possible blends of digital media forms and drama conventions is their ability to extend the life of the dramatic beyond the boundaries of the physical space in which it may originally, or ultimately, be enacted. For example, a facilitator can engage the participants with some elements of a pre-text prior to a drama session by using activities that can be conducted online. Students can engage with materials, characters and information in various forms. These can be real resources in the sense of research materials found online, or they can be fictional elements ‘seeded’ into online spaces. Similarly, online and digital media forms can be used to extend the life of a drama session beyond the limits of the time allowed in say a school timetable. There can be follow-up activities conducted online, perhaps from home or a computer laboratory or library, as an extra-curricular activity. To students now familiar with the marketing and narrative uses of online technology to support television and cinematic productions, there is probably nothing unusual in using digital and online media to establish or extend a dramatic activity. The term ‘expanded universe’ (Kapell and Lawrence 2006) has been used to describe the process of creating new narratives in a range of media using established characters, such as with creative franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek. Elsewhere in this book, Paul Sutton uses the term ‘dramatic property’ to describe a similar phenomenon.

Three basic digital media forms for drama Online and mobile communications have developed into a range of what are increasingly being labelled ‘rich media’ platforms – a term that describes levels of interactivity and engagement beyond traditional forms. These technologies allow for information seeking, content production and delivery, identity maintenance and communication on a range of digital devices. In particular, the mobile telephone has shifted rapidly from a telephony device towards a portable, personal media hub that enables a range of personalized and customized communication, entertainment, relationship management and service functions (Cameron 2006). As part of a trend towards active participation in the production and sharing of content

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(Jenkins et al. 2006), young people are using these platforms to engage with their culture and practice ways of being within it (Stern 2008, p. 113). The collaborative nature of many digital media forms appears to create new opportunities to develop frameworks for drama. Jenkins et al. (2006) refer to this collaboration as the ‘collective intelligence’ of digital audiences. David Weinberger (2007, p. 131) describes it as ‘the wisdom of groups, employing social expertise, by which the connections among people help guide what the group learns and knows’. This is the same impulse that allows cooperative improvised role-play to operate in drama. The generalized cooperative social expertise operating in the digital environment has the possibility of being used in hybrid drama forms. Drama appears to be particularly well placed to make use of the dramatic tension generated between individual and group shared knowledge within the various intertextual forms that make up digital media. These networked sites are now the places where young people learn how to use cultural symbols (Stern 2008, p. 114) for their own purposes. For simplicity, this chapter breaks digital media forms into three categories: first, those that are largely text-based, in some cases reflecting their origins in a period where screen technology did not allow for graphical representations (for example, email); secondly, those that can be grouped under the term ‘participatory media’, reflecting the content sharing and social network functionality typical of twenty-first-century, online applications; and thirdly, mobile media-based convergence of computing, multimedia and wireless telephony. These forms have different features, functions and modes of use that offer a range of opportunities for application to drama. 1. Text-based media forms Despite more recent developments, the online environment has been for much of its history thus far a very text-oriented medium. Communication forms such as email, discussion forums and chat have relied on keyboard input. Even the first decade or so of the World Wide Web’s popular consumption has been dominated by its use for text-based applications. Digital media forms have, of course, long offered a mix of media forms, and some applications have pushed the technological boundaries of audio and graphical representations – computer games, for example. Some common textbased digital media forms are email, forums, message boards, discussion groups, newsgroups, instant messaging and chat. Note that although treated as a mobile media form, use of Short Message System (SMS) or ‘texting’ via


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mobile telephone can also be considered a text-based media form and many of the conventions described in this section apply to SMS as well. These text-based media forms illustrate different time/space conventions that might be used or manipulated for dramatic effect. Email and discussion groups are asynchronous forms suggesting a time delay between a message being sent, received and responded to. Within the drama, the sender and user do not have to be using the service at the same time in order to have a discussion. Chat and Instant Messaging imply a synchronous form, in which the participants are engaged in the discussion at the same time. These forms also play with the notion of space, as a chat or IM session suggests occupation of the same virtual space created by the software (such as a chat room). These spaces may be private or public and mirror aspects of role-based drama. Text-based communication forms are built around the ability to reply to a previous message. In email, this means automatically replying to the original sender, or perhaps using the reply-all function if there have been multiple recipients. Multiple recipients can be added in using the Carbon Copy (CC) function, in which case each recipient can see who else has received the message, while a Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) function hides this wider distribution list from individual recipients. A message can also be forwarded by re-addressing it to new recipients. Some of the CC and forwarding functions are not always present in forms such as chat and discussion groups. The ability to easily (even accidentally) reply-all, CC and forward email has interesting dramatic potential, and has even led to some real-world dramas where information has been revealed accidentally or deliberately released. Although these forms are text-based, they often allow for other content to be attached to the message or post. Documents, files, movies, sounds (and indeed, computer viruses) can be shared and forwarded in this way. For dramatic purposes, this means that although a text-based form might be used as the communication medium there is still scope for participants to share non-text content. These text-based forms of communication can also be collected into private and/or public archives. Individuals might collect copies of sent and received emails on their own computer or Web-based ‘mailboxes’. Discussion groups are often archived into online repositories, or content is stored in retrievable ‘caches’ by search engines such as Google (www.google.com). Dramatically, the notion of searchable archives might allow for participants to explore past conversations or comments made in these forms. Connections can be made, or perhaps inaccuracies or lies could be revealed. Similarly, text-based messages might be ‘lost’ if they

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are deleted from storage, raising a broader issue of the ephemeral nature of mediated conversations and the volatility of digital media storage. Opportunities exist in a drama for alternative or conflicting reminiscences or accounts of events in the absence of more concrete records. 2. Participatory media forms One of the terms emerging to describe the latest online applications, particularly those that allow a high degree of user-generated content, is ‘participatory media’ ( Jenkins et al. 2006). There is particular interest in how these forms can relate to educational settings, as by their nature they are built upon technologies that provide easy access to involvement, and generally allow for novices to engage with more experienced producers to learn and share skills and knowledge ( Jenkins et al. 2006). Thus participatory media seem a natural fit with many social learning and constructivist educational approaches. Examples of participatory media forms are blogs, podcasts, vlogs, social bookmarks, games, mashups, micro-blogs, media sharing, virtual worlds, wikis, simulations, tags and social network services. Jenkins et al. (2006) note that these media forms encourage participation by offering low barriers to involvement. Commonly they are relatively simple means by which people can publish a range of media content. Blogs, for example, have become a simple means for people to create a personal website without a need to learn web design skills and HTML coding. Similarly, many of these media forms have inbuilt tools and technologies that allow for content to be rapidly shared between users. Traditional media forms such as television are increasingly taking advantage of these features to incorporate user-generated content into their own productions, or to provide another form of marketing by allowing users to easily share content. Another basic form of user-generated content is the use of ranking or rating schemes that allow users to score their favourite content, or to add a review or comment about content or products. In the same way, data that is generated automatically by users to a website can be turned into ranking or rating content such as most popular or most viewed content. This data becomes a significant factor in attracting people to some of these sites, as they become engaged in a process of wanting to improve their ranking or attain a kind of celebrity within that particular online community. Reputation rankings such as online auction site eBay’s rating system for buyers and sellers may even have commercial consequences for some users. The ability


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for users to add their own opinion or comments to existing material, or to enhance its meaning for other users, is a fundamental driver behind use of many of these participatory forms. Many of the applications described in this section allow for a meta-commentary of published content in some way. In the case of blogs for example, the amount of ‘traffic’ generated as user annotations can be a key measure of your success as a contributor to that media form. These forms present a range of opportunities for drama facilitators, from using them as contemporary forms to replicate in class forms familiar with participants, through to the potential use of some of these forms as a channel to conduct the dramatic activity itself. The popularity and functionality of many of these forms appear to lend themselves to a wide range of potential uses for drama. 3. Mobile media forms One of the ways in which digital technology has allowed for convergence is in mobile media devices. The modern mobile telephone for example is becoming a multi-purpose digital tool combining telephony and multimedia messaging, media playing, gaming, photography, videography, Web access, file sharing and mapping. The take-up of wireless and mobile technology around the world has been rapid and widespread, and in some cases may even be the means for overcoming the so-called digital divide between nations well served by communication infrastructure and those less capable of adopting other forms of telecommunication (Cameron 2006). It is in the embedding of mobile media, particularly mobile phones, in youth cultures around the world that the greatest opportunities exist for blending them with drama conventions. At the very least, the mobile phone is the one digital media production and reception device that most young people are likely to have in common. Examples of mobile media forms are SMS text messages, geotagging (adding location data to images and other media using GPS technology), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), mobile blogging (moblogging), ringtones, screensavers, voice telephony and graphic wallpapers. Mobile devices are a highly personal media device, which – in Western cultures at least – tends to be closely guarded in terms of privacy and intimacy. Landline telephone numbers are traditionally associated with a geographical location, such as a house or business, while mobile telephone numbers tend to be associated with a person, regardless of their

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physical location. This sense of ‘always on’ communication has led to increased attention towards mobile phones as a technology for educational purposes. The addition of GPS technology to mobile devices is leading to greater consideration of location-specific interactions with mobile phone users. There are already examples of games that use GPS tracking technology to pit players against each other in real environments. This feature has also been used to explore the potential for new forms of dramatic engagement. Although the capacity to create, share and consume media content on these devices is rapidly evolving at both a device and infrastructure level, there are still limitations to the broader functionality of these devices as media players. Storage capacity is often restricted on these devices, although portable storage media such as flash cards are developing to contain more and more digital data. Small screen sizes and limited sound outputs have hampered their take-up, although there is a trend towards slightly larger screens (for example, iPhone) within product lines to appeal to the mobile video/TV market. In many countries it is the cost of downloading data that has prohibited the wider adoption of these devices. Nonetheless, the limitations of these devices has contributed to a production and dissemination form that allows for small ‘snack-size’ versions of content which invite a casual approach. Mobile/casual gaming is also an example of this.

Drama conventions and digital media forms – some examples of ‘mashup’ Web developers use the term ‘mashup’ to describe new applications that emerge when complementary elements are combined from two or more sources. For example, the Google Maps tool combines street address information with geospatial data to create a search engine that can indicate a business location on a map. This chapter will now give examples of how each of the media forms (text-based, participatory and mobile) may be combined with some dramatic conventions that may already be familiar to many educators or practitioners. They are drawn from the descriptions collated in Structuring Drama Work (Neelands and Goode 2000) and Beginning Drama 11–14 (Neelands 2004). Page references for these sources are cited with each basic description, along with discussion on the adaptations made possible by digital media forms.


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Text-based media forms ‘Overheard conversations’ The group overhears a ‘private’ conversation, allowing for new information or tension to be introduced (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 37; Neelands 2004, p. 103). Email is a good match here as the ability to replyall, forward or copy an electronic message to other recipients lends itself to this dramatic convention. A simple mouse click can ‘accidentally’ send content to unintended recipients, thus allowing participants to ‘eavesdrop’ on the electronic conversation. Other dramatic opportunities can exist for participants to sneak a look over someone’s shoulder at onscreen messages, to guess a password based on their knowledge of a character, or even to ‘hack’ a character’s electronic message account to spy on their communications.

‘Diaries, letters, journals, messages’ Information is delivered by the facilitator to the whole group or a subgroup to introduce new ideas, information or tension. It can be written by participants in or out of character. (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 16; Neelands 2004, p. 102). All of the text-based forms provide an opportunity for delivering new information to the group, perhaps as an email that has just arrived in the inbox, a new forum post, Twitter ‘tweet’ or a comment made using IM. Similarly these forms can be used by participants to reflect in or out of character on the drama experience. The archiving nature of the forms can allow for a cumulative account of the work for the teacher.

‘Conflicting advice’ A character is offered conflicting advice as to which course of action to take in a given situation. Other participants in character can offer the advice, perhaps as different aspects of the same character’s internal voice. There can also be debate between participants (Neelands 2004, p 101). The discussion group forms accommodate this dramatic convention where the ability to thread replies to an initial message would enable participants to track responses. These online tools, such as forums, are often used in this Question/Answer format as support or advice services.

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Participatory media forms ‘Alter-ego’ One participant adopts the role of the inner voice of another participant’s character in order to express how they are feeling, thus explicating to the group the text/subtext relationship. (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 47; Neelands 2004, p. 100). The annotation features of many applications can allow for an alter-ego style exploration of a character’s inner voice. For example, the character could ‘speak’ via a blog entry, while another participant provides a subtext using the comment function. The ability to append comments is also found in media sharing sites, and may even move beyond text, for example the video sharing site YouTube allows for video comments to be linked to a video clip in addition to text comments. Subtextual commentary can also be built up through the keyword tags that are used to describe an online media artefact, for example images in a photo-gallery. Or social bookmarks can be used to comment on a character by linking to online resources that can reveal more information or an alternative view. Wiki tools also allow for use of the alter-ego convention, with the subtext revealed through edits made to a page, or via a commentary function.

‘Collective character’ A character is improvised by the group, with any participant able to speak as the character. There is no need for conformity in the responses they make, and differences of opinion or attitude allow for group discussion about the character. (Neelands 2004, p. 101). Games, simulations and virtual worlds often incorporate a stage or process of creating an online character to represent each participant (known as an avatar). This is particularly the case in 3-D graphic spaces, where the construction of the avatar can involve a ‘paper doll’ style process of selecting attributes such as physical appearance and clothing. The creation of personal profiles in social networking sites is also a process similar to character creation, in which personal details, physical attributes and likes and dislikes can be shared with others.

‘Unfinished materials’ An object provides a clue or partial information as a starting point for the drama. (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 28; Neelands 2004, p. 104).


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Collaborative publishing tools such as a wiki can be used with this convention, with participants invited to edit and complete an unfinished article. The edit history and discussion features used by wikis to track changes can be brought into play here as clues to the origin of the materials. Video, audio and photographic materials can be made available online through content sharing sites, with the comment and tagging functions used by participants to discuss the information and build upon it with their own contributions.

Mobile media forms ‘Making maps/diagrams’ Participants make maps or diagrams within the drama to reflect on experience or to aid problem solving (Neelands and Goode 2000, p 19). Mobile devices that include GPS functionality can be used by participants to incorporate real geospatial data (for example, latitude, longitude, altitude) into the drama. Geotagging allows for geographical data to be attached to images. GPS-equipped devices can often download maps of areas to be incorporated into the drama. ‘Objects of character’ (or ‘private property’) A character is introduced or fleshed-out through consideration of carefully chosen personal belongings. The objects can be ‘found’ at any point in the drama, and can even suggest a contradictory subtext to their behaviour (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 20; Neelands 2004, p. 103). Private property left behind can include the device itself (contextually, it is quite easy to believe that someone can misplace a mobile phone) or personalized mobile content such as ring tones, wallpaper, screensavers, personal greetings on voicemail. ‘Soundtracking’ (also ‘Soundscape’) Sounds are used to accompany or describe an environment, to create a mood, or can perhaps be taken from one situation to illustrate another. Sounds can be natural or stylized, live or pre-recorded, and can include dialogue and musical instruments. (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 24; Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 73). Many of the latest model mobile phones have the capacity to play sound files, either as ringtones or as a media player func-

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tion. Portable media players such as Apple’s iPod are a popular consumer digital device, and most can be connected to smaller speaker units to be played to a group. Software to record and edit sound files is available freely for most computer systems; software also exists to help users create their own mobile phone ringtones. Some phones also include an audio recording feature, either as a note-taker or perhaps as part of recording video. ‘Telephone/radio conversations’ These are used to illuminate a situation or to break news or inform. They may be two-way conversations between pairs, or one-way in which the group hears only one side (Neelands and Goode 2000, p. 42; Neelands 2004, p. 104). The mobile telephone simply replaces the landline analogue that a drama facilitator can use when adopting this convention. Participants in a drama are likely to accept that mobile phone conversations are easily overheard in many everyday contexts, establishing a reason within the drama to consider whether the conversation contains private or public information.

Conclusion, and moving forward This chapter suggests some of the ways in which drama teachers can tap into their students’ real-world experiences with digital and mobile media to generate contemporary classroom-based drama. Making use of the means of cultural production familiar and applicable to the participants can reduce the amount of time required to establish the drama, which is an important issue when working within the strictures of most educational systems. Further work is required to consider how realistic the digital media forms – real or simulated – need to be when working with these dramatic conventions. These digital forms often carry meta-information (for example, Web domain names or email addresses) that drama participants can scrutinize closely for accuracy and veracity when such forms are used in drama sessions (Carroll and Cameron 2009). Facilitators need to be wary of this phenomenon when designing such resources, or at least be prepared to negotiate a level of accepted dramatic fidelity and frame the drama with participants. The use of technology such as mobile phones and social media within the drama context also emphasizes issues of privacy when using usergenerated – particularly student generated – content. Teachers and facilita-


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tors using these digital media forms, especially the online publishing sites, will need to consider and develop suitable protocols and conventions for maintaining the safety and privacy of participants, while making use of their rich potential for exciting drama sessions. The use of these media forms in drama contexts can in itself provide a way of discussing and negotiating issues like privacy and appropriate behaviour with young people in a meaningful and productive way. The combinations of digital media forms and dramatic conventions discussed in the chapter are presented as a selection of elements and ideas that practitioners should experiment with to find the recipes that best suit their individual contexts. They are not asserted as concrete approaches to practice, but rather are presented here as a means of thinking about the possible advantages of mixing established drama forms with new technologies. It is hoped that drama practitioners will continue to share their experiences of working with new and emerging media forms in a range of educational settings.

References Boulter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (1999), Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cameron, D. (2006), The rocket in your pocket: how mobile phones became The Media by stealth. Paper presented at the JEA/JEANZ Conference. Carroll, J. (2004), Digital pre-text: process drama and everyday technology, in C. Hatton and M. Anderson (eds), The state of our art: NSW perspectives in educational drama). Sydney: Currency, pp. 66–76. Carroll, J. and Cameron, D. (2003), To the Spice Islands: interactive process drama. Paper presented at the Digital Arts & Culture (DAC) Conference. —(2005), Playing the game: role distance and digital performance, Applied Theatre Researcher 6, Article 11.htm (6), 1–11. —(2009), Drama, Digital Pre-text and Social Media. Research in Drama Education. Vol.14 no.2 (in press). Ito, M., Davidson, C., Jenkins, H., Lee, C., Eisenberg, M. and Weiss, J. (2008), Foreword, in D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. vii–ix. Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson, A. J. and Weigel, M. (2006), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, retrieved 22 March 2009 from www.digitallearning.macfound.org. Kapell, M. W. and Lawrence, J. S. (2006), Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics, vol. 14. New York: Peter Lang. Korzybski, A. (1994), Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (5th edn). Englewood: Institute of General Semantics. Neelands, J. (2004), Beginning Drama 11–14 (2nd edn). London: David Fulton Publishers.

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Neelands, J. and Goode, T. (2000), Structuring Drama Work: A Handbook of Available Forms in Theatre and Drama (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama. Portsmouth: Heinemann. O’Neill, C. and Lambert, A. (1982), Drama Structures: A Practical Handbook for Teachers. London: Hutchison. Stern, S. (2008), Producing sites, exploring identities: Youth online authorship, in D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Weinberger, D. (2007), Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books.

Chapter 5

Open the loop Peter O’Connor

In New Zealand more than 3.8 million New Zealanders – or about 92 per cent of the population – are now estimated to have a mobile connection (Vodafone NZ 2008). Although it is difficult to accurately quantify the use of cell phones by young people, one recent survey suggested that by the age of 14.84 per cent of New Zealand children have their own cell phone (Educate NZ, 2008). The cell phone is ‘a ubiquitous, pervasive communication device which young people find it difficult to be without’ (Stald 2008, p. 146). In one survey young people ‘rated the importance of a cell phone as between eight and ten on a scale from zero to ten’ (Stald 2008, p. 147). Surprisingly therefore, despite the central importance of cell phones in young people’s lives, it appears to be rarely used as part of class room teaching and learning. Cell phone policy in many schools bans the use of cell phones by young people within school environments. This chapter describes a theatre in education project where this central device in young people’s lives became the focus to initiate discussion around cell phone usage and the issues around bullying. Open the Loop was a theatre in education programme delivered to middle school students in the Waikato region of New Zealand in 2007. Over a 10-week period 2,434 students in 37 different schools participated in the programme. The program was funded by the Waikato Primary Health Organisation to provide a forum for young people to discuss issues around peer relationships, specifically centring on cyber-bullying. The theatre program involved students using several cell phone technologies, including ringtones, wallpapers, video clips and photographs. The theatre program’s narrative was that the use of these ⇒

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conventions or technologies would free people trapped in a time warp created by these same cell phones. This chapter discusses and analyses the similarities between these cell phone technologies and process drama conventions and looks at how they might be used in the classroom. The use of cell phone technology also developed new conventions for the use of drama teachers including virtual teacher-in-role which offers exciting possibilities for future development. The central place of the cell phone technology within the drama provided students with an opportunity to reveal their expertise not only in their use of the technology but also in the cultural practices that surrounds its use. This shift in the traditional pedagogic hierarchy of the classroom occasioned by the cell phone technology was an important factor in the success of the project. As a result of the project students were able to begin the process of defining appropriate use of the cell phone in an environment where they took the lead on the issues because of their deep understanding of the technology and the issues related to its use. This chapter, therefore, builds on the understanding that there is ‘exciting untapped potential in marrying applied theatre approaches with appropriate technology’ (Carroll et al. 2006, p. 107). The Open the Loop project demonstrates that such an alliance can lead to powerful and rich learning through, in and about drama and technology.

Cyber-bullying Cyber-bullying is a covert form of bullying undertaken through a range of electronic media such as cell phones, websites, chat rooms and email. A recent Canadian study of middle school students (Li 2005) revealed that 23 per cent of students were bullied by email, 35 per cent in chat rooms and 41 per cent by cell phone text messaging. Cyber-bullying shares many of the features of real-time bullying. It can be random or discriminatory, incorporating racial, sexual or homophobic slurs. The bullied are often selected as a result of social exclusion based on difference. It differs from more traditional forms of bullying in a range of ways that complicates and intensifies the experience for the bullied and perpetrators.

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Unlike most school-based bullying, cyber-bullying is anonymous because the technology shields and protects the identity of the perpetrator. For the bullied the sense that ‘everyone is against you’ is heightened by the anonymity and scale of the bullying. Through internet sites there is an almost infinite audience who can choose to be onlookers and bystanders, or to be actively involved in the abuse. The bullied are often reported as worried that friends at school are part of the thousands laughing, ridiculing or abusing them in the virtual world (Shariff and Strong-Wilson 2005). Unlike schoolyard bullying, where there is potentially a refuge at home, intensive cyber-bullying pervades the private and public spheres of a young person’s life. It can persist 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Cell phone text messaging makes the bullied always accessible and vulnerable. Internet sites continue bullying even while the bullied is not online or even awake. And often cyber-bullying in adolescent years is marked by a prevalence of sexual harassment, especially in homophobic bullying of male peers and increased sexual harassment of female peers by their male classmates (Tolman et al. 2001, cited in Shariff 2005). Not surprisingly, therefore, cyber-bullying in New Zealand has resulted in a number of suicides, and it was within the context of a recent suicide that the Waikato Primary Health Organisation (PHO) contracted Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd, of which I am a co-director, in October 2006 to run a ten-week theatre in education program into middle schools.

What might applied theatre achieve? The PHO was realistic in what it hoped the theatre in education program might achieve. It recognized that the program would not stop nor necessarily significantly lessen the amount of cyber-bullying taking place. It was interested in how the theatre might provide a space for young people to think and talk about the issues. The creation of a forum was not, however, an end entirely in and of itself. It was imagined that from the forum, students would construct their own answers to the issues and begin to construct their own behaviour codes for the appropriate use of cell phones. The PHO was determined that the theatre experience would be part of and complemented by a range of strategies already existing within the schools. The theatre in education program was therefore planned not as a stand alone approach to the issue. It was to be offered as part of a whole school approach which acknowledges that bullying is a systemic problem and therefore needs to be addressed at a range of levels within a school community.

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The central tenet of taking our program in to schools was ‘to do no harm’. This age-old maxim of health promotion has particular resonance in antibullying programs. Evidence has suggested that, on occasions, well-meaning programs have increased the incidence of bullying (Smith et al. 2004). In discussions with the PHO, the target audience for the program was clearly defined. Salmivalli (1999) identified five roles which can be played out in bullying situations. He suggests there are the perpetrators, the bullied, the assistants who participate by helping the bully act, the reinforcers who in a cyber-bullying context send the message on in group or chain emails. Finally, there are onlookers who although not directly engaged in the bullying are in the cyber-bullying context acting as an audience and provide the raison d’être for the public sharing of the bullying. In this sense, cyber-bullying becomes a highly theatricalized event with multiple roles and multiple audiences. In devising the theatre in education programme it was important to remember that the young people we were to work with may well have played many of these roles. One advantage of using drama is in its fictional distancing. This allows an investigation of these varied roles without the usual blame and oversimplification of bullying which can so easily occur in antibullying programs where the focus is on the real stories of those involved. Simply buying into a moral ‘good versus evil’ debate where the easy answers might be given, the dramatic fiction was used to complexify and problematize the issues.

Devising the program Some early decisions were made by the team, that was brought together to devise the program (O’Connor et al. 2006). Our program would use a format Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd (ATCo) had used in a number of similar programs (O’Connor P. et al. 2007). In this format a team of teacheractors create the pre-text for the work in a short performance piece. Following this, the students are enrolled to assist the teacher-actors, who remain in the role they present in the performance, in a three- to four-hour interactive drama. We decided that, in the performance at the centre of our drama, each character would play all the roles that Salmivalli had identified as existing inside bullying situations. Cell phone bullying, which had been the basis of the abuse which had triggered the recent suicide, would be a central

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part of the performance, but would be only one form of bullying investigated. Over a period of intense improvisation, a series of three vignettes was developed which showed bullying between three teenagers at different stages in their lives. In the scripted performance, each character takes turns at bullying, being bullied or acting as a bystander. The final scene shows someone being harassed over a cell phone. The theatrical device to tie the three episodes together is also a cell phone, an identical one owned by each character. The performance makes it clear that the cell phone has the characters trapped and destined to repeat these moments of bullying until they can understand the reasons for being caught ‘in the loop’ to be trapped. As a metaphor for the cycles of violence and also the way in which people play varied bullying roles throughout their lives, the performance was designed to provide a fictional account of everyday life for many of the students who would be participating. At the end of the performance the students are asked to help each of the characters escape from the time loop. Instructions on how to escape the loop are found within the cell phone and they are told that it will be their expertise in using the cell phone that will free our time travellers. The time-travelling aspect – a new and exciting futuristic technology for cell phones – was designed as the hook to draw the students into our drama. It later became the tool they would need to master to break our actors out of their time loops. Independent research (Holland 2007) undertaken into the efficacy of the program suggested the central use of the cell phone was an important feature in drawing students into the program. One student commented: The story line . . . It was different cos of the cell phone, the cell phone brought everyone’s attention oh, it’s technology! Cos everyone liked it. (Holland 2007, p. 9) After the performance each teacher-actor returned to a separate class with his/her team of helpers. The cell phone then gave them instructions on how to escape the loop. The tasks set to help our teacher-actors all use technologies which are found inside cell phone technology. These technologies are similar in design and application to many common place conventions used by drama teachers (Neelands and Goode 2000). The technologies offered by the cell phone provided a context for the use of specific conventions to deepen the students’ understandings of the issues behind the narrative.

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Cell phones and process drama conventions Cell phone technology and enactment of the expert The teacher-actors played roles that required the students’ expertise in the use of cell phone technology. The opportunity to help our hapless adults with a demanding new technology was one many young people relished. It also allowed for a significant shift in the power dynamics of the classroom. Our students could teach about the use of the technology and in doing so, could also obliquely teach about bullying. This shift meant the teacher-actors and the students could work together to solve the puzzle of the time loop, rather than the students having to work out what they thought the teacher already knew the answers to be. This shift in traditional power relationships is described by John Hughes as ‘enactment of the expert’ (2004, p. 58). Hughes suggests the use of this pedagogic tool creates a space where students cease operating from a deficit position and act with ‘an expanded sense of self’ (2004, p. 64). The students showed great delight in being able to manipulate and understand the instructions preset within the cell phone more readily and easily than by our teacher-actors. Their ability to demonstrate their dexterity with the cell phone conventions became one of the strongest motivations for the students within the drama process. From being able to demonstrate their mastery over cell phone technology and their greater wisdom in doing this, it was a very small step for the students to then be able to teach about bullying from the expertise and wisdom they had in this area too. The cell phone technology levelled the traditional power dynamics of the classroom which then created an environment conducive to creating a genuine forum for talking about the issues.

Time travellers incorporated and virtual teacher-in-role The central teaching strategy was to position the cell phone as a virtual teacher-in-role. The cell phone is operated by Time Travellers Incorporated (TTI), an organization which placed the teacher-actors into the loop. Although students never met anyone from TTI, the tasks and instructions they received for freeing the time travellers were preset inside the cell phone. In a sense, the whole lesson plan for the program was loaded into the cell phone as a series of planned instructions and responses from TTI. These instructions were read off the cell phone by the teacher-actor.

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The cell phone was also used to record information required by TTI (sound, video, images and codes) which was then transmitted to TTI. Through preset voice and text messaging TTI replied with new instructions and or feedback. The physically absent but always present TTI was then able to probe for deeper learning, support and build on ideas, and yet also questioned the work, accepting and/or rejecting answers. Our teacheractors worked assiduously to use the cell phone to problematize and challenge simple answers. This was all controlled by the teacher-actor who used the cell phone as the authority he/she could check in with, while of course determining what the response would be. The cell phone utilizes what Morgan and Saxton describe as a second in command role (1987, p. 42). Desperate to get out of the loop the time travellers have to defer to the cell phone to discover what must be done. This automatically shifts the status of the teacher-actors to a middle status where, because they always have to check with the cell phone whether they have ‘got it right’, everyone involved in the drama has to make decisions and try things out. This rather sophisticated use of teacher-in-role is sustained by the willing suspension of disbelief that the cell phone can also be a time-travelling device and the unerring way in which the teacher-actors manipulate the preset texts to meet every demand and turn of the drama. In this sense the teacher-in-role reinforced the shift in traditional class room power dynamics established by the enactment of the expert approach. Holland (2007) suggests students enjoyed the TTI role. They on occasions challenged the teacher-actors on whether the text from TTI had really come through the cell phone. Students were clearly aware that they were preloaded messages but were generally willing to suspend this disbelief so as to continue with the drama. One student who seemed to understand how the texts were being manipulated by the teacher-actors commented: . . . and when they could see that we were wearing off a little bit they would design something that was a little bit more enthusiastic – so we didn’t get bored cos everyone was waiting to get the next text message. (Holland 2007, p. 23) Using the cell phone so that it gave the correct instruction or feedback at the right time required constant practice and care by the teacher-actors. The program was over three hours long and on several occasions, teacheractors struggled with a middle status role where more overt management

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strategies were necessary to sustain classroom discipline. And of course the cell phone technology could let you down (especially during a ten-week tour on the road when it is not recharged in the hotel the night before). Our own lack of experience and willingness to play with live technology meant we resisted the option of having the messages and instructions being played live, either from a central program or from someone off site. An additional person would have impacted on the costs of the program for the PHO, but the possibility of using artificial intelligence software such as chatterbot and fine tuning its responses was not investigated. We assumed the unreliable response times would unnecessarily complicate the issue for our teacher-actors. The answers given by TTI, however, were similar to a chatterbot – a chatterbot is a computer generated program designed to simulate actual conversation – in that ‘the sense of presence generated by such artificial characters does not come from giving factually correct information but from demonstrating dramatically appropriate behaviour’ (Murray cited in Carroll et al. 2005, p. 107). What TTI as virtual teacher-in-role does effectively is to aid students to play a game of make believe with the cell phone. It went beyond assisting students to suspend disbelief, it allowed them to construct belief in both the fiction and the dramatic tasks set within that fiction (Carroll et al. 2005, p. 105). The cell phone’s virtual role also provided the time press for the action. The performance had expressly stated that everything had to be resolved before the cell phone battery ran out or the time travellers would be stuck in the loop for ever. The teacher-actor could use this to control the pace and tension of the drama depending on the ‘internal rhythm of the work’ (Morgan and Saxton 1987, p. 41). The cell phone’s instructions for the tasks to get the time travellers out of the loop used simultaneously the conventions of cell phone technology and those of process drama. It meant our teacher-actors could always refer to the dramatic modes they were working in as working within the context of the cell phone task, rather than as drama activities outside any context. Meaning for these dramatic tasks was given by TTI and many students were largely oblivious to the notion they were doing drama. They were doing ‘things you do with cell phones’ and they were doing that with the purposes established by the owner of the cell phone. Many students (Holland 2007) thought they were involved in a technology project rather than a drama process. The high level of engagement from students was most likely because it was both.

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Ringtones and soundscapes The short performance begins with the one of the characters listening to a new ringtone on her cell phone. The cell phone provided the backing track for a song written especially for the purpose. One of the first tasks TTI required our time travellers to create was a new ringtone for the phone. This ringtone was to be the sounds of the character’s life they were attempting to free from the cycle of bullying. The ringtone convention places a number of constraints useful for sustaining the drama work. Ring tones are short and often have repeated tonal and textual phrases. They also often have significant shifts in volume, rhythm and pitch. The students were given the task of creating new ringtones, which would be recorded by the phone and sent for verification to TTI. These ringtones had to have the sounds of the role’s life and explain what they needed to do to get out or the loop or explain why they were in it. The roles of both the time traveller and TTI meant our teacher-actors were able to push for precision and clarity in what the ringtone was saying about the character. They were also able to work for strong aesthetic presentation of the ringtone piece so that it could be recorded for sending through to TTI. Holland (2007 p. 18) notes: In the schools observed, the ringtones are powerful. Most worked excitedly on the project, and produced relevant and seamless ringtones: – Give it here! Give it here! – Your lunch! Your lunch! – I’ll tell on you! I’ll tell on you! – Give Me Your Lunch NOW! I’m sorry I took your lunch, Jess. – Say sorry for the first time ever. Say sorry for the first time ever. Give it here, give it here, give it here. As the teacher-actor sent the ringtones through to TTI he/she was able to question what the sounds said about each of the time travellers. She/he would ask questions such as what they might have learnt about their situation and what TTI was hoping to achieve by first trapping them in the loop and then setting up these tasks to free them. By using the context of ringtones, the task became more easily manageable for the students and understandable within their own context than the highly stylized convention of soundscaping. They had the opportunity to

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enact their expertise in creating ringtones and demonstrate this to the teacher-actors who were genuinely surprised at the aesthetic quality of the ringtones, and also what they revealed about each character.

Frozen images and screensavers In the performance, students were introduced to the drama convention of freeze frames by the teacher-actors acting out the screensavers on their cell phones. In these screensavers we saw key moments in each of the teenagers’ lives. Back in the classrooms TTI required the time travellers to create other pictures which might explain why the characters were in the loop. Again, students understood the convention readily and easily as one they regularly use and have expertise in making. They recreated moments in the characters’ lives, which were then photographed into the cell phone and sent to TTI for verification. New technology on the phone was introduced by TTI which allowed for a thought button to be pressed. This button was designed to capture the thoughts of the people in the wallpaper/frozen image. Students readily accepted this convention and never questioned the possibility of the technology. Students in one class I witnessed discussed at some length the ethics of such a button. The ever decreasing life in the cell phone battery kept the pressure on as did the actual recording of the images. It required groups to be perfectly still and quiet, to consider issues of focus and the angle the photo would be taken from. The text which the students had to create to accompany the photo required the same clarity of thinking as a short caption. Teacheractors were able to construct feedback from TTI so that they could on occasions ask for clarification, probe for deeper analysis or congratulate groups and classes who achieved the task. Students delighted in helping and explaining to the time travellers the possibilities and limitations of the cell phone technology for the screensaver freeze frames. They also worked to produce images which would meet the requirements established by TTI. In doing so, they created strong pieces of image theatre which told stories of bullying and also of resistance to it.

Video clips as improvisations From screensavers it was a very small step to using the cell phone to record short improvisations. This had also been modelled for students in the performance where the screensavers were activated and short clips were

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presented live to the students. The cell phone again provided a series of useful in-built constraints for the work. The cell phone limitations require the improvisations to be short, clear, focused to one camera filming. These constraints were also useful for providing dramatic structure and provided a clear context for their use. Students created powerful small improvisations which demonstrated both their understanding of cell phone technology (and coincidently dramatic form) as well as the issues behind the bullying. Much of the conversations students had as they prepared for these video clips centred on the form of the improvisation rather than the content. It was almost as if the bullying aspect on occasions would get lost in the excitement of using the technology. This, however, was seen as a positive by teacher-actors who saw students distracted from the idea they were in a class about bullying. This meant that students didn’t work towards scripting ‘right answers’ but rather worked to meet the needs of TTI instead. Text messages as writing-in-role The final bullying which traps all of our characters in the time loop involved a series of text messages. One of the tasks set by TTI was to write a series of text messages in reply which would diffuse the situation. Teachers were surprised at reluctant writers who quickly took the opportunity to write in-text language, often with a fluidity not seen in their usual classroom writing (Holland 2007). One student commented: I liked when we were writing the text . . . You could really decide what to do and you feel good cos you were helping someone who is stuck in this position and doesn’t know what to do and it’s like Shane’s helpless cos he doesn’t know anything about it . . . People were being really truthful. And they were thinking deeply. (Holland 2007, p. 23) For another student, it was clear that the writing occurred in a blame-free non- judgemental environment. Something really effective on that phone one was one of the girls in our class had writ: ‘I heard Nicky wasn’t going to show up so do you want to come to my place?’ Instead of saying like, what happened, on Claire’s bad side, she still had that loyalty thing so she didn’t want to get someone in trouble . . . You don’t really expect that and you, wow! (Holland 2007, p. 23)

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Codes as reflection, summarizing out-of-role To free each of the characters TTI required codes to be sent through explaining what they needed to understand or do to get out of the bully loop. These codes served as a reflective convention. Students understood the cell phone convention and so understood the constraints of limited word count, the need for the words to sum up what had been learnt, and also choosing the specific words which were powerful enough to unlock the loop. The cell phone technology, limited in its form provided highly useful structuring for the dramatic learning which took place. Once the final codes were loaded into the game, the cell phone took considerable time to reconfigure to free the time travellers. Teacher-actors were then able to use this wait to build the tension before announcing that TTI had accepted all the tasks completed and the time travellers were free. Time after time students genuinely cheered and clapped when they learned that they had succeeded in freeing the time travellers.

Conclusion Open the Loop did more than integrate cell phone technology into a theatre in education program. The in-built possibilities and constraints of cell phone technology, enlarged to contain the even newer technology of time travelling and the omnipotent TTI became the central framing and teaching device within the drama. Students saw themselves as primarily involved in a technology program rather than a theatre or drama program, working to solve the puzzle of our fictional time travellers by their expert manipulation of the cell phone conventions. Subsumed in the form of their work, they were freed to think deeply about its content. Holland (2007) spoke of students’ delight at doing something which was difficult and therefore fun to do. They said: I was surprised that we could talk to each other, we don’t usually do that sort of thing. We shared ideas, and we had the time to. Like usually we don’t have that time. Everyone got to have a turn nearly everyone got to share what they actually thought. This is really a time that actually you need to think with each other. Cos it doesn’t happen much in our classroom. It’s usually an individual thing, but because we were working together it wasn’t individual. (Holland 2007, p. 26)

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These and other similar comments from students and teachers suggest the program was successful in providing a much needed forum for young people to discuss these issues. One student recognized that the enactment of the expert approach had been effective because ‘we made the decisions, cos of that I think we learned heaps’ (Holland 2007, p. 26). Students were also proud of the codes they created, they saw them as guidelines for bullying situations. A month after the program one student commented: Those guidelines that we came up with they were actually good and they were something we could work on . . . With the codes how everyone came up with everything, I’d take them with me cos they are really thoughtful. (Holland 2007, p. 32) Cell phone technology is ubiquitous. Young people use cell phones as extensions of their body, with expertise and genuine fondness for the possibilities they provide. The conventions of cell phone technology are closely related to those used to structure process drama. This strong correlation provided a meaningful context in which students were free to explore issues without reverting to the simple moral positioning inherent in many antibullying programs. This allowed for more complex and honest reflection on the issues. This project signals an opportunity for greater use of cell phone technology in classrooms. This technology has the potential to become the medium whereby students think about and express themselves in a range of curriculum areas. For young people who are already expert in cell phone technologies and conventions beyond the classroom, that pre-existing knowledge can, with further exploration, become a valuable tool in enhancing their drama work. Finally the cell phone provides unique opportunities for young people to bully and harass others on a scale previously impossible. Open the Loop reminds us that young people need to establish guidelines and codes of behaviour for themselves which outline appropriate use of the technology.

References Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Educate, NZ (2008), www.educatenz.com/general, retrieved 28 August 2008. Holland, C. (2007), Remember How We Did This: Evaluation Report on Open the Loop. Prepared for Waikato Primary Health.

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Hatton, and Anderson, M. (eds) (2004), The State of Our Art: NSW Perspectives in Educational Drama. Sydney: Currency Press. Hughes, J. (2004), Researching Drama as a Learning Medium for Text Comprehension, in C. Li, Q. (2005), Cyber-bullying in Schools: the nature and extent of adolescent’s experience. Paper presented at the American Education Research Conference in Montreal, Canada, April 2005. Morgan, N. and Saxton, J. (1987), Teaching Drama. A Mind of Many Wonders. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd. Neelands, J. and Goode, T. (2000), Structuring Drama Work (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connor, P., O’Connor, B. and Dallow, S. (2006), Open the Loop. Theatre in Education Programme devised for Waikato Primary Health. O’Connor, P., O’Connor, B. and Holland, C. (2007), The everyday becomes extraordinary: conversations about family violence through applied theatre, in Applied Theatre Researcher/Idea Journal, vol. 8, 21 retrieved May 2008 at [email protected]. Salmivalli, C. (2001), Group view on victimisation: empirical findings and their implications, in J. Juvonen and S. Grahem (eds), Peer Harassment in School: The Plight of the Vulnerable. New York: Guildford Press. pp. 263–278. Shariff, S. (2005), Cyber dilemmas in the new millennium. School obligations to provide student safety in a virtual school environment, McGill Journal of Education, Fall 219–240. Shariff, S. and Strong-Wilson, T. (2005), Bullying and New Technologies. Classroom Teaching: An Introduction. New York: David Lang. Smith, J. D., Schneider, B. H., Smith, P. and Ananiadou, K. (2004), The effectiveness of whole school anti-bullying programmes: a synthesis of evaluation research, School Psychology Review, 33, 548–561. Stald, G. (2008), Mobile identity: youth, identity and mobile communication Media, in D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth Identity and Digital Media. Boston: MIT Press. Tolman, D. L., Spencer, R., Rosen-Reynoso, M. and Porches, M. (2001), He’s the man! Gender Ideologies and early adolescent’s experiences with sexual harassment. Paper presented at The American Educational Researcher’s Association, Seattle, Washington. Vodafone NZ (2008) at www.vodafone.co.nz.

Chapter 6

Point of view: linking applied drama and digital games John Carroll

This chapter examines sub-forms of applied drama that utilize dramatic conventions as pedagogical practice: Mantle of the Expert and the Commission Model (Heathcote 2003). These forms are compared with their counterparts in the digital game-based learning area: Epistemic Games and Simulation ((Nielsen et al. 2008, Shaffer 2006). The chapter then considers how a dramatically framed professional problem-solving view of education might ultimately enhance the learning potential for both the serious games and drama. Drawing on the work of Shaffer, the concept of ‘epistemic frames’ (Shaffer 2006) provides a useful design approach for developing digital game-learning environments based on real professional practice. Shaffer calls the resulting teaching approach ‘epistemic games’, that operate by providing learners with the skills, knowledge, identities, values and epistemologies they need in project-based tasks and require as problem-solving strategies. Teachers and practitioners with a strong educational drama focus have similarly adopted a form known to them as applied drama – a role-based drama form with a history that draws on the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ educational drama approach of Heathcote (1991) and Bolton (1999). This approach has led to the development of a range of dramatic techniques that engage participants in producing works or solving problems as if they were professionals in that field. In both cases, the techniques can be seen to replicate elements of the learning behaviour of professional communities of practice (Wenger 1998). A digital approach to both forms allows for greater engagement between learners and professionals than might otherwise ⇒

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be feasible or possible. In drama, the participants develop expertise by dramatically replicating community of practice behaviour or accessing rich information sources via role-based drama. Epistemic games, while designed for students, are also built around the real practicum of a profession, focusing on key features of how members of a particular professional community actually solve problems.

Introduction I believe that the way forward for schools if they are going to come forward into the 21st century is that they are going to have to let the real world come into the classroom. (Heathcote 2005)

This chapter draws links between the techniques of applied drama and digital games and positions them both as successful learning approaches for educators to use in the twenty-first century. This focus on drama and technology becomes a useful approach when it facilitates new kinds of interactions among teachers, pupils and the external world beyond the classroom. The comparison draws on the long history of research and practice in applied drama and drama-in-education to suggest how some of the techniques developed in this field may be compared with currently developing collaborative digital game-based learning techniques. It outlines the striking similarities between some forms of educational drama, such as Mantle of the Expert and educational games such as Epistemic Games. The chapter also explores the similarities of drama and gaming as techniques for successfully shifting the point of view of the learner in relation to curriculum content and the synergies that may be developed by combining them together within the classroom environment. An array of approaches has recently emerged in an attempt to describe the intersections between learning, teaching, games, role-play and drama. (Carroll et al. 2006). This growth has in part been driven by the expansion of digital learning devices available in the classroom, from small netbook computers to multi-platform handheld learning devices (Facer 2008). The exponential growth of technology, inherent in all digital entertainment and mediated drama, in live events, and in computer gaming, is transforming popular culture forms (Jenkins et al. 2006) including drama (Carroll 2005),

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through the expansion of social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. The influence of this transformation is being felt in the classroom ( Jenkins 2006; Boyd 2008) as well as in audience attendances and performance preferences in the theatre (Carroll 2005). This shift in focus is most strongly evident in school-aged young people for whom digital technology is simply part of their everyday cultural life (Gibson et al. 2007, p. 82). In popular cultural terms, the technologically mediated ‘live’ (Austander 1999, p. 3) performances of physical theatre and music have allowed audience size to grow far beyond anything possible at an unmediated performance form. As traditional entertainments such as music or drama are being transformed by technological enhancement, they have taken on the qualities of digital exponential change and produced hybrid forms that require a shift in conceptual frameworks and vocabulary for audiences to appreciate them. A qualitative change in communication occurs involving the compression of time, distance and presence (Virilio 2000), which, in turn, generates practical and theoretical considerations around role, drama and performance that impact on education and society in general in the same way. These changes in performance and drama conventions are largely being driven and produced through digital, social media technology and increasingly the use of computer-based interaction by young people (Boyd 2008, p. 121). This chapter maintains that these technological and cultural trends can be used for education and at their core, both the applied forms of drama and digital games share an ability to use relatively simple, mediated rolebased interactions as a ‘pre-text’ (O’Neill 1995, p. 19) for engaging students in a dramatic frame (Carroll et al. 2006, p. 89), which can provide an impetus for powerful, curriculum-based learning. The game and drama forms described here also reflect a wider cultural/educational shift to a communities of practice approach (Lave and Wenger 1991) to learning, which is based on an engagement with professional knowledge that exists outside the boundaries of a subject-based school curriculum. The specific forms of applied drama, Mantle of the Expert (Heathcote and Bolton 1995) and the Commission Model (Heathcote 2003) are compared with the digital form known as Epistemic Games and Simulation (Shaffer 2005).

Mantle of the expert The growing popularity of the dramatic form Mantle of the Expert as a pedagogical practice in the United Kingdom (Abbot 2008) mirrors the

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growth of the digital gaming form known as Epistemic Games (Shaffer and Gee 2005) in the USA. Heathcote and Bolton (1995, pp. 15–24) have developed the applied drama technique Mantle of the Expert, over many years, in which participants assume a role of professional expertise to run an imagined enterprise for a (dramatically imagined) client as a tool for teaching and learning. This dramatic-inquiry approach to teaching and learning is deeply embedded in drama-in-education pedagogy. When participants engage in these educational drama activities they are actively framed by a drama pre-text (O’Neill 1995, p. 22) by the teacher, which establishes the dramatic world of the action, and which enables them to take on appropriate dramatic ‘roles’ for the drama. As Goffman (1974, pp. 128–9) points out, in everyday life we make sense of the world by interpreting the situations we are in through perspectives, including socio-cultural roles or ‘frames’ which define our behaviour. Professionals, in their work life, also share the same ways of framing themselves in relation to work activities (Shulman 2005) which often constitute a particular community of practice approach adopting work-based roles. Both applied drama and digital games practitioners and theorists think it is possible to harness this social enactment of reality as a way to position and enhance students’ learning. The aim of this technique is to enable students and teacher to share a dramatically constructed ‘expert’ point of view or frame where they consistently position one another as work colleagues with professional roles and tasks to be done. This dramatic Mantle of the Expert approach allows the students within the drama to assume z z z z z z

adult power, authority and responsibility – based on an attitude of an expert towards dealing professionally with a problem; a stance of professional competence towards relevant content and processes; a need to share knowledge and the ability to collaborate with colleagues; a need to find out and interpret information; a purpose to engage in activities/tasks like reading, writing, making diagrams, drawing or interviewing; a need to pay attention to how particular audiences will react to their work. (Edmiston 2008, p. 1)

This point of view is reinforced by the ‘dramatic frame’ (Carroll and Cameron 2005) of the drama which is provided by the pre-text and used by


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the teacher to pose the problems and tasks that have been set up in the drama and more broadly, to engage with learning and curriculum content.

Epistemic games The dramatic frame and the epistemic frame of games exhibit some striking similarities when comparing Mantle of the Expert drama and Epistemic Games teaching. Shaffer (2006 p. 164) defines an Epistemic Game as: . . . a game that deliberately creates the epistemic frame of a socially valued community by re-creating the process by which individuals develop the skills, knowledge, identities and epistemology of that community. Shaffer argues that a professional in any field will hold a particular epistemic frame that shapes the way they approach real-world problems. The concept of the epistemic frame also draws upon the work of Goffman (1974) where he also describes how work performances are dramatically framed in a sociological sense. This same technique can also be used to describe how the dramatic frame of an Epistemic Game works, in which a participant operates ‘as if’ a game-based learning situation is real. Epistemic Games are also founded theoretically upon Schon’s (1995) concept of reflective practice, in which ‘professionals learn to think in action and learn to do so through their professional experiences. Reflective practice involves both taking action and then reflecting on the results with peers and mentors’ (Shaffer 2004b, p. 1402). Shulman’s(2005, p. 52) signature pedagogies similarly describe ‘the forms of instruction that leap to mind when we first think about the preparation of members of particular professions’. The epistemic frame of a profession therefore shapes the way a novice in that field becomes a professional. Of course there is always a knowledge gap that must be bridged, and in many modern professions this is bridged by a combination of formal learning, mentoring from practising professionals, legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), and through structured practical experience (the professional practicum) of situated learning. Shaffer argues that an Epistemic Game can bridge that gap between novice and professional by assisting with rapid adoption of innovative realworld problem-solving skills, even for people who do not necessarily want to

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become true professionals in that field. Working primarily with school-age students, Shaffer and his colleagues claim from their research that their use of game technologies empowers young learners with a new range of innovative problem-solving abilities to equip them for success in the real modern world (Shaffer 2004a).

Mantle of the expert and epistemic games Like Mantle of the Expert drama, Epistemic Games enable players to become engaged in solving real and significant problems, using a professional world view (the epistemic frame), under the mentorship of a professional in that field. This can be directly compared to the specific pedagogy of Mantle of the Expert drama, which engages participants dramatically in producing works or solving problems, as if they were professionals in that field, for a dramatically constructed client. Thus for many applied drama educators and practitioners there is no surprise to be found in Shaffer’s observation that in relation to Epistemic Games Getting players to take on the identity of a professional is relatively easy. In fact, there is a kind of recipe – a heuristic or rule of thumb – for how to get someone to see themselves as a professional, and for others to see them in that way. To make players feel like a professional X in an epistemic game, it seems they need someone to tell them they are a professional X. They need a badge of office or prop of profession X. They need to do something that they expect a professional X to do. They need to learn about something that a professional X does that they didn’t know was part of the profession and then do that thing. They need someone they know (a peer, perhaps, or a parent) to see them as a professional X. And the virtual world of the game in which they are a professional X needs to be consistent in treating them like professionals rather than school students. (Shaffer 2006, p. 164) What Shaffer calls ‘a kind of recipe’ for Epistemic Games is actually a set of well-tested dramatic conventions that have been used in educational drama settings for several decades. The participant’s clear suspension of disbelief is a fundamental condition in drama, echoing the focus on concepts such as ‘immersion’ and ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) common to many discussions on the power of games as learning environments. Increasingly, applied


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drama conventions are drawing upon conventions from the digital gaming environment, making use of familiar and everyday technologies to initiate and enhance the experience for audiences because of this appropriation of technology. At the level of Mantle of the Expert and Epistemic Games it appears that many of the distinctions between digital games and applied drama that formerly applied may be beginning to blur pedagogically. Table 6.1 builds on Carroll and Cameron’s (2007) comparison of the fundamental elements, which define Mantle of the Expert and Epistemic Games. While educators who use drama or digital game-based learning may use differing terms, it is clear that they share similar conceptual understandings regarding the use of role-play and identity, about the task at hand – the initial pre-text and the approaches to problem solving, the simulation of reality, the relationship between participant (player) and any relevant audience, the performance outcomes and connections to real-world expertise, as an approach to engendering learning. In Table 6.1 we can see that Mantle of the Expert relies upon the elements of drama to engage participants in the world being explored; a dramatic frame enables participants to act ‘as if’ they are experts engaged in real tasks and as members of a community. Similarly, Epistemic Games require that students enter the professional world being simulated in the games setup. This does not mean that a high fidelity virtual reality system is required. Rather, it is the authenticity of the problem, and the professional approaches to solving it, that will engage learners to act ‘as if’ they are members of a professional community. Both pedagogical forms are built upon the concept of giving students an entry into an appropriate and authentic professional perspective with which to view, explore, define and solve problems. There are a number of dramatic techniques used in Mantle of the Expert that inform and define the nature of participants’ functioning within the drama and optimizing results from these learning moments. The technique

TABLE 6.1 Comparison of elements in Mantle of the Expert and Epistemic Games

Participants Frame Entry Stance Focus Enactment Exposition

Mantle of the Expert

Epistemic Games

school students dramatic frame enterprise pre-text attitudinal role client dramatic tension in-role expert to client

school students epistemic frame professional task authentic language project disciple discourse game solution to peers

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allows for participants to quickly engage in the profession being simulated by adopting an attitudinal role (Carroll and Cameron 2005, p. 6) that does not initially require deep knowledge, experience or high-level acting ability. By adopting the attitude and entering into the discourse of the professional field defined in the pre-text, students can start to engage in the tasks at hand, often inducted into the role as a trainee. In Epistemic Games, the participants take on the task in the similar way to real professionals, using the language of that professional community to define and tackle a problem that would be encountered in that profession. In both forms the epistemic or dramatic frame engages the students in role identification, requiring them to think as if they were professionals by prompting them to adopt the skills, knowledge, identity, values and reflective learning methods of that profession. Shaffer emphasizes that Epistemic Games should focus on authentic problems of significance in order to engage the learner in a valid and powerful task appropriate to the future needs of the students, and to give them a sense of power over their learning. He says: If schools are going to adapt to new social and economic conditions, we need to develop viable alternative models of learning that excite parents, teachers, administrators, business leaders, politicians, and others who care about what happens in schools. And of course it would be important that these alternatives actually help prepare kids to be innovative thinkers in a complex, post-industrial world. (Shaffer 2006, p. 191) The designers of Epistemic Games seek to identify and apply insight about the real ways in which real professionals learn, and to replicate those elements of the practicum that lend themselves most effectively to the digital environment. Although game-based, the tasks and problems need to be authentic. In Mantle of the Expert, again the enterprise or project needs to have an authentic aim, albeit within the fictional dramatic setting. Whether being approached from a drama or a game perspective, the tasks at the centre of the learning experience need to be founded in a real-world representation of the professional problem-solving methods required. A key part of the authenticity of tasks in both drama and game-based learning approaches comes from the focus on successfully producing work for an imagined client, rather than for assessment by the teacher. The enterprise being explored by Mantle of the Expert is based around needs the needs of a dramatic representation of a client. With Epistemic Games, the participants need to be working on a project that is considered appropriate and authentic to the profession. Again, this may involve a


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fictionalized employer, but an engagement with a professional task and contact with practitioners where possible is an important element. Similarly, both approaches are based around a problem that needs to be solved. In Mantle of the Expert, the dramatically framed problem is personalized, which increases the in-role tension for the participants, thus building their levels of commitment within the enactment and intensifying their focus on producing a creative solution for the client. By adopting the values of the community of practice with which they are identified while in-role, the learners engage, as far as they are able, with the skills, knowledge and values required to solve the problem. Epistemic Games are also built around the real-world problem-solving methods of a profession, and creative solutions arise from the tensions in the ‘conversations’ or professional discourse that take place between the student participants and the task. By adopting the reflective practices of professionals, learners simulate the real processes that tend to separate the professions from other endeavours. Learners adopt a professional approach to creatively solve previously unseen problems, and to effectively reflectin-practice. The tension inherent in this complex role-performance drives the game. The difficulty with this approach is that it may not provide the same level of ‘role-protection’ (Carroll and Cameron 2005) for the participants in the same way that drama does. Therefore, the task component in Epistemic Games needs to be very carefully designed so that it will not be outside the reach of the participant’s competency. Finally, Table 6.1 illustrates how participants in both Mantle of the Expert and Epistemic Games are required to display the product of their professional labours. In the drama, outcomes are often displayed in the form of an in-role presentation to the representative of the dramatized client. The learners are protected in their dramatic role as professionals, and can talk from a position of expertise rather than as students. In Epistemic Games, learning is also often displayed in the form of a creative outcome to the problem being addressed. Where possible, this takes the form of a presentation of outcomes to an audience, such as peers, a mentor, or even parents. The framing of this event tends to echo professional presentations to clients in an industry model.

The commission model and simulation We can also consider a recent, more radical, case study application of work/ school integration devised by Dorothy Heathcote (2003), which draws on elements of simulation and a communities of practice approach to drama.

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In her article, ‘A Vision Possible: The Commission Model of Teaching’ (2003), she draws on a case study of pupils operating within a dramatically framed commission as design professionals planning a garden design. This Commission Model approach is presented as an alternative model of teaching and educational organization. It operates in parallel and outside the normal school environment in much the same way that Shaffer advocates for Epistemic Games or in the same way training simulations operate in industries such as aeronautics and mining. In this highly specific approach to drama, participants are engaged by the clients as real consultants and producers of actual content for a real project, in this case a hospital garden. This technique sees participants, even relatively young students, engaged in the production of a commissioned task, requiring contact with real professionals to solve actual problems. This differs from Mantle of the Expert in that the task embedded in the drama pretext is not a dramatic fiction but an actual commission that requires real-world, concrete outcomes. Heathcote (2003) describes how a class of Year 9 students was commissioned with the responsibility of designing the garden for a newly completed hospital. This was an actual commission, for a real hospital, as the garden was to be used by patients, staff and visitors when the hospital was opened. Some drama practitioners consider this blurring of the frame between the fictional and the real as a departure from more traditional models of applied drama. However, for Dorothy Heathcote, setting up the dramatic frame in this way allowed the students to assume the role status and responsibility of garden designers. This provided natural routes into talking, reading and writing and particularly into developing confidence in a public voice required for the acquiring of skills in design and delivery of the garden plan. Students were able, when dramatically framed, to enter into dialogue with the community of professional practice of architects and landscape gardeners and adopt the epistemic frame of such specialists within the world developed through the drama because they had access to professional mentors – in this case, a biology teacher who had worked at Kew Gardens (Heathcote 2008). As Heathcote says about commission based drama: . . . it is above all a social art, and places the human ‘face’ and affairs of humans at its very centre . . . a strong emphasis upon tasks, in social circumstances, with a sense of productive tension. (Heathcote 2003, p. 17)


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The principles that provide the tension at the heart of the dramatic structure of the Commission Model as outlined by Heathcote can be summarized as: z z z

z z z z

z

z z

z

Throughout the work the participants’ focus is on the needs of the client and the task. There is an absence of institutionalized pupil/teacher talk. Communication is role-based and at a professional level. Professional language has to be found in practice, in collaboration between the commissioner’s skills and knowledge and the student’s questions. No pre-planned curriculum mapping occurs. Research into the problem dictates a varied and complex curriculum based on the needs of the commission. Time scales operate in both real-time, long-scale development and short-term, dramatic form. Tasks are formulated by the needs of the commission. This requires flexibility as tasks are designed to fit need and the terms and time available. The ordering of study is driven by commission requirements. Information in depth is concentrated specifically on the tasks to be completed. All completed task work ‘banked’ to be reused and developed. Classification and access to information are important for new insights. A dynamic learning environment using digital tools, phones, computers and the internet is required as well as constantly reconfiguring the physical environment. Openness to participants’ contributions is valued. The language used in the project is based on task contribution not power or status. (Adapted from Heathcote 2003, p. 18)

The Commission Model when delivered in this way provides a new sense of authenticity and responsibility for participants because while it is dramatically framed, there are real clients with real requirements and the final work is published and acted upon. The actual implementation of the project, however, while drawing on the expertise of the expert mentors, may be passed on to specialists to complete. With younger pupils, parents and teachers may act as ‘internal’ publishers and the work can be ‘presented’ to school gatherings or parents. Essentially the Commission Model is about engaging students with a community of practice approach to learning (Wenger 1998). Such

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communities, which exist in the wider world of work, are where much real learning in our society occurs. However, not everyone has the cachet, contacts, time or resources to develop real commissions using the Commission Model of drama, particularly if it extends beyond school boundaries. In its current form as developed by Heathcote, while it can require access to actual physical professional practitioners such as doctors, lawyers, architects and designers it nevertheless can access this expertise in the digital world as well. The Commission Model, while it provides a bridge between school learning and a communities of practice approach of real professional learning, leaves the world of drama and joins the world beyond the drama frame and school curriculum. The difficulties of this approach in a school environment are all too obvious. It becomes a form of simulation that uses authentic inputs as part of an educational training model. Game-based simulation also needs a level of ‘fidelity’ at the operational level that evokes a totally authentic response from the participants that is also outside the school experience. Process-orientated simulation games try to mimic concrete, real-world activities and work best at the level of mastering the challenges of the game’s interface. Consequently flight simulators and other complex manipulation play are often favoured over human interaction in the design and implementation of such learning activities. However, a possible alternative that ties these approaches back to education does exist through increased access to the technology inherent in social media. If access is required to more complex human interactionbased, communities of practice than the limited school resources and environment can provide, then by using dramatically situated role (Carroll et al. 2006, p. 8), which utilizes online sources of expertise, an alternative approach to a personal presence is made available. This is where it appears that the intersection of drama and online information can be of benefit to the teacher in designing opportunities for learning. Within the Heathcote’s memorial garden design project, a range of digital technologies were used to extend the expertise of the students and these could be adapted to any classroom project. By accessing the UK Meteorological Office (Met Office) through its website, three Year 9 girl students were able to obtain expert information on the elevation of the sun throughout the year and the effects that the shadows would have on the plants that would be in the garden. This expertise enabled them to work out the amount of sunlight available for growth on any day of the year and its effects on the garden.


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In the same project, another group of Year 9 boys accessed online information resources relating to plants that would grow in shadow and consulted a biologist on soil drainage problems. Still other students used a computer aided design program to lay out the plantings they wished to place in the garden as well as designing labels for them. A further group accessed tree leaf structures in online encyclopaedias to provide a design template for a blacksmith to use in the wrought iron gates of the garden. At the end of this commissioned project, which used technology for a real purpose, one student said publicly, ‘I would just like to say that this is the first time in all my life at school that I have ever done anything that is good to anybody at all’ (Heathcote 2005). In terms of sustainability and transfer of learning the same mixed ability Year 9 class were then commissioned to design a second garden for a special school, because a teacher from another area saw their exhibition and commissioned them. This commissioned work has also been carried out (Heathcote 2008).

The garden revisited As already demonstrated, Dorothy Heathcote’s garden design needed access to the professional world and discourse of garden designers and the real-world, non-condescending knowledge of experts. The digitally mediated Commission Model proposed in this chapter also used role-based drama and online situated role (Carroll et al. 2006, pp. 87–108) to achieve this. At the same time, the games-based approach put forward by Shaffer uses Epistemic Games to achieve the same ends. The simulation of real tasks is directly connected to the recent technologically driven computer games movement while the Commission Model draws on the powerful traditions of Drama and Education and Applied Drama. The Epistemic Games movement calls for ‘richly authentic settings’ (Shaffer 2006, pp. 195–215), while the Commission Model of drama actually provides those settings for students to work and learn within.

Conclusion At the centre of applied drama and digital gaming is a shift to a new view of what is valuable in education. In the new digital environment, what is most valuable is what is scarce, personal, customized, tangible and non-reproducible. In such learning environments it is the presence, time and attention of

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wise or interesting people (Whitney 2007). The similarities between games and drama lie in the application of a process to a task that has been derived in part from a technological access to expert information and a form of learning through role-based apprenticeship based on the replication of a professional community of practice, and of a new way to enact a ‘pedagogy of the professions in action’ (Shulman 2005, p. 53) which seeks to balance ‘the intellectual, the technical, and the moral dimensions of practice’ (Shulman 2005, p. 58). This convergence of thinking from two very different educational perspectives demonstrates the developing synergies at every level between drama and digital games, Mantle of the Expert and Epistemic Games, as well as the Commission Model and simulation. They share a common pedagogy based in collective design, as distinct from a ‘classroom-based pedagogy’. It is in the shared aims of attempting to create opportunities for student participants to learn ‘as if’ they are professionals that the potential benefits of applying drama conventions to serious game design are most apparent. If, as Shaffer points out, professionals use judgement to solve complex problems that can’t be addressed by rote formulas, and they learn to think as professionals through exposure to practica (Shaffer 2006, p. 191), then this shift in theoretical perspective might just be useful for both serious games designers and drama practitioners. Game-based learning may be enhanced by adopting an existing dramatic approach that is already close to the nature of gaming, rather than designing structures and conventions from the ground up, or using ones based on the superficially similar narrative conventions of other forms such as cinema. Similarly, drama practitioners may benefit from the extended access to content that online technology and gaming approaches use as a pre-text to task involvement. Both pedagogies may find that the learning insights developed by Wenger (1998) in the professional world are applicable to the evolving social media environment of the students and the fragmented curriculum of the twenty-first century. The comparison made here suggests a powerful synergy is possible between two seemingly parallel developments in learning and teaching. By using digital learning techniques to develop a pre-text for the drama or for games, both educational fields are enriched. This new approach combines the potential teaching benefits of a digital game-like focus with emotionally engaged drama-based problem solving. The proven conventions of applied drama, when used to rapidly engage participants in effective role-play scenarios can be linked to digital games-based learning to provide an innovative new pedagogical approach. The new curriculum for the real world


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that Heathcote and Shaffer envision needs to blend intellectual discipline with a real-world context that makes education relevant. Perhaps the development of digital technology and drama can help bring this about in the future.

References Abbot, L. (2008), Mantle of the Expert.com, retrieved 30 June 2008 from http:// www.mantleoftheexpert.com/about-moe/articles/. Auslander, P. (1999), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge. Bolton, G. (1999), Acting in the Classroom: A Critical Analysis. Heinemann: London. Boyd, D (2008), Why youth (Love) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life’, in D. Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, John D. and Catherine T., MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 121. Carroll, J. (2005), YTLKIN2ME? Drama in the Age of Digital Reproduction, NJ Drama Australia Journal, 29(1), 15–23 and IDEA Journal, 3, 15–23. Carroll, J. Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Carroll, J. and Cameron, D. (2007), Epistemic videogames and Mantle of the Expert: a communities of practice approach, IDEA conference, Hong Kong. —(2005), Role distance and digital performance, Applied Theatre Researcher, 6, 6. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Edmiston, B. (2008), Expert Positioning/Frame/Roles, retrieved 15 April 2009 from http://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/about-moe/articles/ p.1 Facer, K. (2008), Re-imagining teaching in the 21st century: challenging some assumptions, Handheld Learning 2008, retrieved 6 November 2008 from http:// www.handheldlearning2008.com/handheld-learning-conference-andexhibition/papers. Goffman, E. (1974), Frame Analysis. Peregrine: Norwich. Gibson, D., Aldrich, C. and Prensky, M. (2007), Games and Simulations in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks. Idea Group Inc.: London, p. 82. Heathcote, D. (2005), Audiotape interview with the author, 6 July, Spondon, Derby. —(2008) Audiotape interview with the author, 16 October, Spondon, Derby. —(2003), A vision possible: the commission model of teaching, Drama, 11(1) Winter, 16–27. —(1991), Collected Writings on Education and Drama. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Heathcote, D. and Bolton, G. (1995), Drama for Learning: Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert Approach to Education. London: Heinemann Drama. Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robinson, A. J. and Weigel, M. (2006), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for

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the 21st Century, retrieved 21 May 2008 from www.henryjenkins. org/2006/10/confronting_the_challenges_of.html. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nielsen, S., Smith, J. and Tosca, S. (2008), Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. New York: Routledge. O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Schon, D. A. (1995), Knowing in action: the new scholarship requires a new epistemology, Change, Nov–Dec, pp. 27–34. Shulman, L. S. (2005), Signature pedagogies in the professions, Daedalus, 134(3), 52–59. Shaffer, D. W. (2006), How Computer Games Help Children Learn. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —(2005), Epistemic Games, Innovate, 1(6), retrieved April 15, 2005 from http:// www.innovate.info/index.php?view=article&id=79. —(2004a), Epistemic frames for epistemic games, Computers & Education, 46, 223–234. —(2004b), Pedagogical praxis: The professions as models for postindustrial education, Teachers College Record, 106, (7), July, 1401–1421. Shaffer, D. W. and Gee, J. (2005), Before Every Child is Left Behind: How Epistemic Games Can Solve the Coming Crisis in Education, WCER Working Paper, 2005-07, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, p. 24. Virilio, P. (2000), Polar Inertia. London: Sage. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System, Systems Thinker, retrieved 7 August 2005 from http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledgegarden/cop/lss.shtml. Whitney, P. (2007), Electronic Learning Record: Learnt, John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, retrieved 28 October 2008 from http://electroniclearningrecord.org/.

Chapter 7

Audio drama and museums: informal learning, drama and technology Anna Farthing

Audio can go anywhere, do anything, at a fraction of the cost and effort and sheer hype of the picture business. In fact our downfall is that we don’t make enough fuss about how great it is. Dirk Maggs 2007

Audio drama has been somewhat neglected as a learning medium in both formal and informal educational settings at all levels of study. With the advent of new forms of portable digital technology, audio drama has become technically more accessible and is attracting renewed interest. However, creating educationally effective audio drama is not merely a matter of attending to the technical requirements of its production or replicating the processes of professional radio drama. In order to maximize the educational and aesthetic impact of audio drama for learning, its form as a dramatic medium needs to be fully considered in the context of the participants’ needs and capabilities. In this chapter I will describe, contextualize and discuss my recent professional practice and practice-based research, working with audio drama as a learning medium for young people. This has been undertaken in the informal learning setting of The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, using themes around the history and legacies of slavery and abolition. The discoveries made and the potential suggested by this experience have since inspired me to undertake practice-based collaborative doctoral research into how museums could more generally engage the public with difficult and sensitive histories through various forms of participatory live and mediated drama.

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What follows does not describe a particular incidence of practice, but reflects upon practice that has been developing over a period of four years and is ongoing. I hope that it may inspire readers to further explore the potential of audio drama in their own practice settings.

Background Over the last ten years, there has been a paradigm shift in how museums conceptualize education (Anderson 2004). All visitors are now conceived as learners, whatever their age. The learning outcomes to which museums aspire have been identified as generic, contributing to audience engagement and widening participation as well as curriculum support (MLA 2004). Conversation and discussion are now regarded as effective ways to make meaning (Leinhardt and Knutson 2004) (Falk and Dierking 2000). Rather than absorb the grand narratives of the past, visitors are encouraged to construct their own narratives (Roberts and Smithsonian 1997). Opportunities for interactivity are now provided through high-tech computer touch screens and low-tech handling objects as well as human interpreters (Caulton 1998). Following extensive research into how visitors learn in museums, it has been established that the best practice is located in the nexus between education, interpretation and communication (HooperGreenhill 1999). In the ideal constructivist museum (Hein 2001), learning is personalized and knowledge is constructed by the visitor from their own individual hermeneutic interpretations. In our post-colonial, post-modern and multi-ethnic society, museums are increasingly being challenged to exhibit subjects or concepts, rather than the objects in their collections. The Bicentenary of the British Parliamentary Abolition of the Slave Trade, commemorated in Britain in 2007, brought into sharp focus this changing relationship between objects, subjects and concepts. This event demanded that the heritage industry respond to and represent, interpret and memorialize the historical subject of slavery, alongside philosophical concepts such as freedom and prejudice, to a diverse and divided audience. The narrow provenance of the existing objects in museum collections demanded that they be re-interpreted critically and from plural perspectives. There were many voices to be heard, and imagination and creativity were required if we were to hear them speak. In 2003, The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum became a key partner in the Understanding Slavery Initiative, which was tasked by government to research and create educational resources for the teaching

Informal Learning, Audio Drama and Technology

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of the history of slavery in anticipation of the 2007 Bicentenary. The museum already had considerable experience of representing difficult and sensitive histories through exhibitions. Partnership in the USI enabled the museum to explore specifically the potential of drama-based approaches to slavery education, interpretation and communication through the development of creative active learning workshops. Earlier research by the USI revealed that the narrative of transatlantic slavery had been absent from mainstream history education for generations. Slavery was regarded as black history rather than British history. Educators in schools and museums were both unfamiliar with the subject and unsure of ways to approach it, particularly in multicultural classroom settings. Avoidance of open debate about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade had moreover contributed to the development of inaccurate but deeply held mythologies. These mythologies were strongly tied to identity formations and it was recognized that challenging them would require sensitivity. Research by The Historical Association had found that officially sanctioned history as taught in schools could be rejected if it clashed with what they described as ‘the narrow and highly partisan versions of family or communal history in which some pupils have been reared’ (Historical Association 2007, p. 15). This concurred with observations from living history sites that ‘in the process of identity formation it is what the individual or societies choose to believe to have occurred that may be more important than what actually happened’ (Goodacre and Baldwin 2002, p. 31). This link between the construction of knowledge, personalized learning and identity formation strongly influenced the way that we considered using drama for learning in the museum. The legacies of slavery such as racism, prejudice, blame and denial were part of contemporary lived experience. We had, therefore, to find ways of getting under the skin of the participants and encouraging them to engage with the complex and plural narratives of the various ‘others’ that made up this history.

Initial explorations The museum initially proposed using costumed interpreters working in the first person with groups of children through participatory role-play; an established form that has been researched and examined as performance, learning and heritage by Anthony Jackson (Jackson 2007). But, as Scott Magellsen (Magelssen 2007) observes, heritage professionals often deny that this is ‘drama’, ‘theatre’ or ‘performance’ at all, fearing that associa-

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tions with art and artifice can damage claims to ‘authenticity’. This conceptual divide between heritage interpretation and the performing arts, between objective authenticity and subjective authenticity, can be said to have restricted the development of non-naturalistic modes of performance in the heritage sector. The primacy of material authenticity in museums has, I believe, led to the establishment of role-play models in which costume and visual appearance serve as the primary signifiers of character. Moreover, motivation and subtext are neglected as the thoughts of those living in the past are impossible to verify. This emphasis on material evidence means that well-documented characters from history are represented in considerable detail, as protagonists, while the illiterate, undocumented, unrepresented masses are sketched in like a chorus of supporting artists. In representing the history of slavery, I was reluctant to use visual signifiers of character as they could restrict role options according to the ethnicity of the role-player. I also considered naturalistic performance modes to be inappropriate and unethical for the enactment of damaging human behaviours such as racism. Some teachers consulted by the USI had suggested that black students played slaves and white students played merchants, or that they could not use drama for this history as they had no black children in their class. Such comments revealed that their concept of drama was limited by a vision of naturalistic performance. I was also concerned that the status relationships inherent in much traditional participatory role-play work would inhibit imaginative and intuitive exploration of the motivations of the enslaved. First person interpretation frequently puts the actor/interpreter in a position of high status in order to maintain control. There are numerous factories, workhouses and stately homes in which children take on the role of child labourers, paupers or servants while the actor/interpreter takes on the role of governor or overseer. Such interactivity can be dictatorial rather than dialogic. The children have an authentic experience of fear and powerlessness and are encouraged to appreciate their contemporary freedoms. This inverse nostalgic representation of the past can be said to inhibit critical appraisal of the present (Hewison 1987). The limitations of this kind of fixed role-play have also been highlighted by Philip Taylor who warns that being ‘locked into one role for too long a period can limit the global perspective participants can develop’ (Taylor 2000, p. 15). As a participant, stuck in the low status chorus and placed in a purely reactive relationship to the protagonist, it is difficult to engage one’s critical faculties, consider internal motivation or subtext, or create plural narratives.


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Having agreed to reject first person interpretation for the reasons stated above, but not quite knowing what to do instead, we embarked upon an exploratory action research project with a group consisting of museum education staff, four freelance participatory arts facilitators and twenty children aged eleven to thirteen.1 Many of the children were from black minority ethnic backgrounds, and many had statements of special educational need. We met for four days spread over a period of six weeks. The children were not studying slavery at school. Together we devised and played creative active learning games and activities that were process oriented, exploratory, experiential, intuitive and aesthetic. They were deliberately multi-sensory and took into account the full range of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles. As many of the children had literacy difficulties, we used mini-disc recorders, digital cameras and video to document and review our progress. z z z z z

z

z z z z

We cut and tasted sugar cane, and then recorded a rap song about harvesting a bitter sweet. We handled museum artefacts such as manilas, cowri shells and trade beads, and then developed trading games. We moved around the room doing repetitive physical work while bonded together both with and without a drum rhythm. We tested our perceptions of time according to whether we knew what was happening or not. We harnessed familiar experiences, such as long, hot, cramped whole school assemblies, in order to ground and access unimaginable experiences such as the Atlantic Crossing. We thought about what we could take with us if we were transported to another place without our possessions in order to understand the concept of intangible heritage in diaspora. We played games that explored the control of status through eye contact and use of space. We devised games that explored the control of language as a means of oppression. We researched and shared the meanings of our own names and of those in the slave registers. We experimented with concealing acts of resistance in apparently compliant behaviours.

These drama-based workshop activities, relying on subjective rather than objective notions of authenticity, were designed to accommodate and

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acknowledge the importance of doubt in history (Fines and Verrier 1974). By exploring the spaces between the available material evidence and our own hunches and experiences, we were able to reveal and engage with the processes of historiography. These dialogic processes also enabled the facilitators to encompass and, if necessary, challenge the students’ previously held beliefs. However, we still wanted to generate some kind of performance to share. Slavery had relied upon dehumanizing and depersonalizing individuals so that people could be bought and sold as objects of property; we wanted to use embodied enactment to restore the individuality of these people, even if there was little material evidence from which to create their characters. The preservation of personal identity through living subtext was already becoming a core theme for our explorations, when a teacher of Caribbean descent disclosed that she had been brought up with the mantra ‘they can’t get you for what you are thinking’. It was then that we saw the potential of using the radio room to create audio drama.

The radio drama experiment The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum was unique in having a radio production studio. This studio had been used to generate programs for local community broadcast under the banner of ‘Commonwealth FM’, combining news and interviews with sound artefacts from the museum’s extensive oral history and world music collections. Students had also created journalistic audio outputs from research on the gallery. It had not, until that time, been used for audio drama. Initially, we replicated the write, read, rehearse, record and edit model which professional radio drama production has used since its inception in the 1920s. In this model, it is in the process of scriptwriting that most of the generative creative thinking happens. However, the performances sounded stilted and formal, and the students were not really enjoying the process. Writing scripts based on historical information and reading aloud too closely resembled formal schoolwork for this group, many of whom had literacy difficulties. The struggle to master the production process was preventing them from establishing any emotional engagement with the characters they were trying to create. No-one was that impressed with the results. We then adopted a process drama approach in which material could be generated from improvised action in the present tense, combined with


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a media literate method of structuring dramatic text from editing. In our new model, editing replaced writing as the crucible of creative thinking. It became the means not only to create the narrative, but also to communicate aesthetic tone and rhythm through layering, overlapping and repetition. Walther Murch, film sound editor likens editing to the creation of poetry as both editing and poetry composition require the paring away of excess in order to communicate through metaphor (Murch 1995). Creating authentic metaphors that communicated meaningfully became our new goal, rather than historically accurate replication. The material cultural artefacts in the museum provide evidence of certain actions together with those words that were documented, but we encouraged the students to consider this evidence in the same way that forensic psychologists would a crime scene. In a game that has since been called ‘Thought, Word and Deed’, we explored and gave voice to the contrasts and contradictions between what historical characters had done, what they said in public, what they might have said in private, and what they might have secretly thought. By using thought tracking, (Bowell and Heap 2001) to create parallel and interior monologues, we were able to explore in and around the evidence. This ‘double role structure’ is known to be conducive to the revelation of authenticity in dramatic role-play, in which characters are seen to be ‘living with the inner tension of trying to conceal their understanding of the world from those around them’ (Carroll et al. 2006, p. 122). Significantly, the playing out of duplicitous roles was also the lived daily existence for both slaves and masters living on plantations. Published slave narratives and letters from plantation owners revealed that dissembling and posturing were key to the upholding of the oppressive structural regimes, and acts of passive resistance such as slow working and feigning ignorance needed to be understood from a motivational viewpoint. Multiple viewpoints on a single role enabled the students to express the past regrets, present concerns and future ambitions of characters who are nonetheless acting in the present tense. Separately framing the thoughts, words and deeds of characters in this way also enabled them to connect the particular history to more generic and familiar human behaviours. The process of speaking thoughts transferred easily to the radio studio, where we dimmed the lights and encouraged the students to get into a focused state of creative flow before they began. The close range of the microphones and the quietly reflective nature of the improvisation did not require the projection of performance energy. The mediating shield of the technology also helped the students to dispense with performance nerves. As they were not struggling with their own self-consciousness, they seemed

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more able to engage in the emotional lives of the characters and objects that they were giving voice to. Simple auditory signifiers were used to convey period and place. We began with a selection of music from the eighteenth century, and later had four backing tracks made by a film post-production facilities house. These represented the interior of a ship at sea, a noisy coffee house, exterior West Coast of Africa nature sounds and the manual harvesting of sugar cane. The students could hear these playing in their headphones as they improvised their spoken word text, and it supported them to focus on their imagined realm rather than listen to their own voices. Objects in museums are usually inanimate and silent; the same objects in use would produce evocative sound, but often they are too fragile to be handled. Nonetheless an audible mise en scène needs to provide sufficient reference points for the listener to ‘actively complete the fictional scenery’ (Beck 2002). Creating foley, live sound effects from the manipulation of objects in the recording studio, gave students an opportunity to engage in an additional level of dramatization while remaining at a safe distance from the action. For the refined taking of tea with sugar, those students responsible for the foley literally rattled modern cups and spoons along with the developing dialogue. However, to represent objects of oppression such as whips and chains, the students had to consider how to create foley from like-sounding materials. Students were challenged to consider kinaesthetic and auditory representation rather than the visual representation prevalent on the galleries, so that their audiences could ‘hear, as it were, the event of the thing, not the thing itself’ (Connor 2004, p. 157). They were often surprised that quite unlikely objects could produce a more convincing sound image of an event than the genuine article. Over several workshops we gathered together a box of objects that could, depending on how they were manipulated, create a number of very different sounds. These included broken umbrellas to flap and close, boxes of unspooled VHS tape to wade through, trays of gravel, sand and flour and fabrics of various textures as well as a range of percussive instruments. What follows is a transcription of a short solo improvisation created by a 13-year-old girl after a period of highly physical exploratory learning. (Outdoor atmos. Pre-recorded sound of machete harvesting sugar cane. Foley of feet trampling cut cane) It’s too hot. Water. I must sit down. I need to. Fftff Aaagh. What must I do in these conditions? There’s nothing I can do.


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I have been captured, and now I belong to somebody else. This is not my home; this is not where I belong. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. There’s a man over me with a whip all the time. I can do nothing. What have I ever done? I have been put on a ship full of people, innocent people. And I have been brought to this. I’m not myself anymore. I’m not myself anymore. I’m not myself anymore. This short piece lasts for two-and-a-half minutes. It has since been made into a digital story with a timeline of intercut archive still images. The first image is of children cutting cane. The final image is a photograph of an elderly slave woman sitting on a stool. When I play this piece to colleagues, I ask them whether the child is black or white, and whether it matters.

Reflections on audio drama in learning and interpretation In his seminal work, first published in 1957, Freeman Tilden (Tilden 2007) proposed that heritage interpretation was not instruction, but an art form akin to poetry that could be taught. He insisted that good interpreters communicated through provocation, speaking with rather than to the visitor, and that most history could be interpreted effectively by provoking the thought, ‘Under like conditions, what would you have done?’ (Tilden 2007, p. 42). In representing the history of slavery and other histories of ethnic or colonial oppression, the temptation is to create a classical tragic narrative, in which audiences are invited to identify with protagonists and antagonists cast from the named and documented figures of history, and observe a chorus of the unnamed ‘ordinary’ people who are affected by the impact of political, military or economic action. In this model the tragic narrative is framed neatly between historical events that provide a classical dramatic structure: an expository beginning, a period of conflict, a dramatic climax and a cathartic conclusion. This structuring of tragic historical narratives is not only adopted by dramatists, it can also be seen in some museum exhibitions. Process drama is not bounded by traditional dramatic structures. However, as process drama often leaves no material artefact, it can be

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undervalued as a learning medium. Fortunately, at The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, oral histories and recordings of world music dominate the collections. The creation of audio artefacts as dramatic interpretive art forms was therefore seen as complementary to the core activity. For most young people, their experience of audio is talk radio and music. At the BBC, readings are produced for young children, music caters for the teens and twenties, but drama is produced primarily for the over-50’s audience of Radio 4 (Howe 2008).2 In order to help students conceptualize what audio drama can do, we found it more effective to refer to story-tapes, quiet bedtime stories or an oral tradition of myths and fables rather than to radio drama. The power of the disembodied or unseen voice, particularly in cinema, has been powerfully written about by Michel Chion (Chion 1999, p. 174). He concludes: The voice is ceasing to be identified with a specific face. It appears much less stable, identifiable, hence fetishizable. This general realisation that the voice is radically other than the body that adopts it (or that it adopts) . . . seems to me to be one of the most significant phenomena in the recent development of the cinema, television and audiovisual media in general. The concealing of identity and ethnicity in audio drama is beneficial in several respects. Pragmatically, audio media practice is easier to negotiate with school authorities when fears over using images of children has meant that even the taking of photographs is regarded with suspicion. Practically, participants seem more confident exploring characters of different ethnicities, ages or genders to their own when they cannot be seen. Crucially, when listeners imagine the experience of those that they hear with empathy, they cast them in their minds eye as like ‘us’ rather than ‘other’. This is the reason why radio advertisements for charities will often begin the speech of someone asking for help in the accent and idiom of the listener, before segueing into the foreign or unfamiliar accent. I believe that the creation of audio drama, combining language, music and the sounds of action, can broaden not only the auditory but also the visual and kinaesthetic capacity of the imagination. Sound can therefore support learning in many subtle and nuanced ways. Sound requires energy and movement – the movement of the airwaves to carry it, and an initiating energy force to create it. ‘How something sounds is literally contingent, depending on what touches or comes into contact with it to generate the


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sound’ (Connor 2004, p. 157). Sound has duration and temporal reality. A moving picture, generated by our persistence of vision and the replacement of so many frames per second, can be stilled for closer examination, but when sound is stilled, it is silenced. Sound is therefore essentially dynamic, its production kinaesthetic and its reception, through hearing, intensely corporeal. Sound literally moves, and it can metaphorically move the listener. As Tim Crook asserts, ‘radio drama is not a blind medium’ (Crook 1999). We see with the mind’s ear, for the sound of an action conjures the image of that action in our mind’s eye, and can prompt an unconscious physical or emotional reaction. The factors of sound, such as timbre, pitch, rhythm, volume and tone, are a form of aesthetic communication that connect directly to the unconscious amygdale, triggering the emotional and memory centres of the brain. Nathan Ng, sound designer, illustrates this point very effectively by playing the sound of a dentists drill. The knowledge that is created in the learner may not necessarily be expressed through verbal or logical means, but it may produce ‘subtler intimations of knowing, such as inklings, hunches and aesthetic feelings’ (Claxton 2005, p. 10). . . . hearing provides intensity without specificity, which is why it has often been thought to be aligned more closely with feeling than with understanding . . . We might, for instance, think of it as an orientation towards the future in sound, rather than toward the past: hearing, we might say, is usually more provocative than evocative. (Connor 2004, p. 157) These provocative intimations of knowing, generating corporeal aesthetic responses in real time, can help learners of all ages connect the past with the present.

Developing and extending this and similar models While media technologies from Claxton to Jobs have been driven by text and images, our oral and aural skills and traditions have been neglected. With the greater availability of inexpensive digital recording devices and the expansion of opportunities for online dissemination, audio is undergoing a renaissance in education, but I question whether it is being explored as an art form or as drama. Radiowaves is a UK-based organization that supports schools in setting up the means to generate audio material for podcast. However, by their own

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admission, very little of the spoken word material that the schools choose to make is drama. Even when working in-role, young people tend to adopt journalistic characters using a question and answer format. In South Africa, instrumentalist audio drama, particularly for health education, is well established and supported by UNICEF. Community Media for Development Productions provides training and resources for those wishing to make audio drama with young people on educational themes, but the purpose of the drama is didactic rather than interpretive or exploratory. Both Radiowaves and CMDP advise young people wishing to make audio drama to follow the pre-scripted professional broadcast production model that was designed for static studio production. Fortunately, audio drama no longer needs to be recorded in a studio. Jeremy Howe, now Commissioning Editor of BBC Radio 4, pioneered recording on location. He says; ‘What you lose in precision, you gain in a different kind of energy.’ His 1998 production of Cider with Rosie was recorded in the Slad Valley where Laurie Lee’s autobiography is set. He took ‘the production to where the children were, to capture them in their comfort zone, rather than bring them to the place of production’. He recounts recording a snowballing scene, in which the children were able to yell ‘using full lung power’, the physicality of the action contributing significantly to the performance. He agrees that with inexperienced performers ‘you can hear when they are reading’. Jeremy cites the late writer and director Anthony Minghella encouraging his actors to take ownership of their own exploratory processes, even if this generated an excess of material to be edited afterwards. Editor Walter Murch, referred to earlier, was closely associated with Minghella. The alternative model of creating audio drama that we developed followed our research cycle of action and reflection. As editing in this model is generative and formative rather than summative, there is always the possibility for the material to be reworked and re-interpreted. One possibility is to use the audio track as the basis for a digital story. This is an approach that I have begun to explore, particularly as a form of active and participatory memorialization.3 In his work on holocaust memorials, James E. Young warns against the creation of conventional memorial objects for, ‘In shouldering the memory work, monuments may relieve viewers of their memory-burden.’ (Young 1993, p. 5). He has subsequently suggested, ‘The best way to keep them animated is . . . allow them to become teaching spaces. This way, memorial becomes much more of a process.’4 The Me Deya!, is a space for viewing community created audio-visual media in the Breaking the Chains exhibition at The British Empire and


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Commonwealth Museum. Me Deya! can be read as it sounds – that is, ‘Media’ – but it also carries a more profound meaning, as producer Rob Mitchell explains. Inspired by Jamaican patois, ‘Me Deya!’ is a typical response to a greeting. In response to ‘How are you/What you saying?’, ‘Me Deya’ is simply ‘Me There’ or ‘I am here’ . . . The most poignant meaning that can be derived from the full title of the multimedia archive, Me Deya! is the call from ancestors reminding us of their unceremonious dumping in the Atlantic Ocean, during many voyages on the middle passage. In this case the shout ‘Me Deya’ reminds us of unsettled souls, still buried, unnamed and forgotten after their abduction and watery deaths. Me Deya! is a memorial. Me Deya! – or ‘I am here!’ is also an expression affirming existence, and in the wake of the Transatlantic slave trade, and an expression of Survival, particularly by the African diaspora.5 Making audio drama can be an active memorializing process, providing the means to know, to remember and to creatively interpret, linking personal imagined experience with public memory by bringing the past of another vividly into one’s own present. Just as the recording of audio drama can be kinaesthetic and locative, so can its reception. It was proposed to develop the Me Deya! in the virtual and permeable realm by making the material available online as ‘droplets’ in an OCEaN, (Online Creative Exchange and Network) and inviting contributors to upload their own creative content. However, these plans have had to be put on hold. The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum is preparing to close its Bristol operations, including the radio room, and move to London. There are however expanding opportunities for engaging with the material outside. The audio guide is the most obvious and well-established use of audio in museums and heritage sites. The potential to create individual audio guides with and for portable digital appliances is being researched by Nesta Futurelab (Hawkey 2004). We can therefore envisage a wider range of consumer created content, including audio drama, being used both within the museum and, combined with GPS technology, as locative media in the years to come.

Conclusion In an environment in which museum education programs are seeking learning outcomes that are generic rather than specific, and museum

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interpretation of difficult and sensitive issues is facing the limitations of object display, I believe that the creation of audio drama can provide processes for generic learning, personalized interpretation, active memorialization and public exhibition. Using museum stimuli as dramatic pre-text enables students to develop a greater understanding of the history making process, and to consider material evidence critically. Conceptualizing the making of history and the making of dramatic narrative as parallel activities helps to alleviate potential clashes between authorized and lay versions of difficult and sensitive histories. By incorporating the use of digital media tools, moments of action in process drama can be captured, edited and assembled. Audio drama has certain advantages over visual media when the themes and subjects are historical, intercultural or multi-ethnic, or when work made by children is to be shown in the public domain. This mediated product can serve as a dramatic pre-text for further process drama work, or be returned to the museum’s collections as contemporary interpretive artworks. In whatever format it is made, used, stored or received, audio drama certainly makes a better building block for future multi-model learning in museums than a pile of crumpled work sheets.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the artists who have collaborated on these projects, particularly sound designer Nathan Ng, education staff at The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Professor Anthony Jackson and the Performing Heritage research team in The Centre for Applied Theatre Research at Manchester University and The Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my collaborative doctoral research.

Notes 1

2 3

4

The artist facilitators, along with me, were Dr Katherine Hann, Head of Education and Interpretation; Deborah Hodson and Carlton Romaine, museum educators; Shango Baku, Theatre in Education practitioner; Nathan Ng, sound designer; Christopher Moll, videographer; Barnabus Nyakunu, drama and media student. Interview with Jeremy Howe, Commissioning Editor BBC Radio 4, 11th July 2008 See the following link for two digital stories made with archives http://www.watershed.co.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Watershed.woa/wa/news?object=124 http://www.sassonmagazine.com/pageed.php?m_id=46

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This is how Rob Mitchell, curator of Me Deya! and director of First Born Creatives media production company described the Me Deya! in the funding application.

References Anderson, G. (2004), Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Beck, A. (2002), Cognitive Mapping and Radio Drama, Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, 1. Bowell, P. and Heap, B. S. (2001), Planning Process Drama. London: David Fulton. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Caulton, T. (1998), Hands-on Exhibitions Managing Interactive Museums and Science Centres. London: Routledge. Chion, M. (1999), The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Claxton, G. (2005), The Wayward Mind. An Intimate History of the Unconscious. London: Abacus. Connor, S. (2004), Edison’s teeth: touching hearing, in V. Erlmann (ed.), Hearing Cultures Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Oxford: Berg, p. 153–172. Crook, T. (1999), Radio Drama: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Dirk Maggs Productions Website, http://www.dirkmaggs.dswilliams.co.uk, retrieved 22 March 2009. Falk, J. H. and Dierking, L. D. (2000), Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Fines, J. and Verrier, R. (1974), The Drama of History: An Experiment in Co-operative Teaching. London: New University Education. Goodacre, E. J. and Baldwin, G. (2002), Living the Past: Reconstruction, Recreation, Re-enactment and Education at Museums and Historical Sites. London: Middlesex University Press. Hawkey, R. (2004), Report 9: Learning with Digital Technologies in Museums, Science Centres and Galleries, Futurelab Series. Bristol: Futurelab. Hein, G. E. (2001), Learning in the Museum, London: Routledge. Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry. London: Methuen. Historical Association (2007), T.E.A.C.H., Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3–19. London: Historical Association. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (ed.) (1999), The Educational Role of the Museum. London: Routledge. Howe, J. (2008), Interview with Jeremy Howe, Commissioning Editor of BBC Radio 4, A. Farthing (ed.). London. Jackson, A. (2007), Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings. Art or Instrument?, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leinhardt, G. and Knutson, K. (2004), Listening in on Museum Conversations. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Magelssen, S. (2007), Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance. Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. MLA (2004), Inspiring Learning for All, in MLA Archives.

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Murch, W. (1995), In the Blink of an Eye (2nd edn). Los Angeles: Silman-James Press. Roberts, L. C. and Smithsonian, I. (1997), From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators in the Changing Museum. Washington, DC, London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Taylor, P. (2000), The Drama Classroom: Action, Reflection, Transformation. London, New York: Routledge Falmer. Tilden, F. (2007), Interpreting Our Heritage (4th edn expanded and updated). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Young, J. E. (1993), The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chapter 8

Digital storytelling and drama: language, image and empathy Kirsty McGeoch and John Hughes

Digital storytelling, as examined in this chapter, involves compiling a two- to three-minute multimedia movie using digital still images, background music and voice-over narration. The stories, told in the first person, are inspired by significant events in the narrator’s life and/or can be based on a certain theme. This chapter starts with a brief background to digital storytelling; its genesis in live theatre, its development into a genre and democratic movement, and its application in a variety of contexts, including education. The authors then give an overview of The Culture Connection – a research study of the implementation of a digital storytelling project with groups of adult English Language Learners at a university-based ELICOS centre. (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students). They describe the steps taken to develop digital stories in the classroom, highlighting how drama techniques, such as the enactment of the expert and tableaux were used to enhance this process. The chapter continues by giving the responses of the participants to the drama activities in particular, and a brief commentary on the wider findings of the project, which link digital storytelling to the theory of empathic intelligence in education. ‘Empathic intelligence’, as conceived by Roslyn Arnold, describes and elaborates what occurs in quality learning encounters, and aligns on many levels with the aims of drama education. The authors move on to explore resonances between digital storytelling methodology and drama education, including how digital storytelling in the drama classroom could be used to deepen an awareness of the elements of drama itself. The chapter ends with a discussion of how the intersections between drama and digital storytelling can be explored in the future.

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Digital storytelling Digital storytelling, as examined in this chapter, involves compiling a two- to three-minute multimedia movie using digital still images, background music and voice-over narration. The stories, told in the first person, are inspired by significant events in the narrator’s life and/or can be based on a certain theme (BBC 2007, p. 1; Ellum 2005, p. 4; Lambert 2002; Meadows 2007, para. 3). According to the Digital Storytelling Association, digital storytelling is ‘the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling’ (DSA 2002, p. 1) and: Digital stories derive their power through weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, and insights. The digital environment provides a unique opportunity for stories to be manipulated, combined and connected to other stories in an interactive, and transformative process that empowers the author and invests the notion of storytelling with new meaning. Using the internet, and other emerging forms of distribution, these stories provide a catalyst for creating communities of common concern on a global scale. (DSA 2002, p. 2) The genre was first developed in the 1990s by the late Dana Atchley, stemming from his interactive live theatre performance, Next Exit (Atchley 2000). His artful fusion of personal storytelling and new media inspired observers to want to capture their own lives in this way. Atchley responded by founding the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS), with colleagues Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen in Berkeley, California, to give workshops in this medium. What then developed into a movement also gained considerable momentum in the United Kingdom with Capture Wales – an award-winning digital storytelling project born out of a collaborative partnership between Daniel Meadows (documentary photographer and lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University) and the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC), Wales. Between 2001 and 2008, workshops were conducted for members of the Welsh community to create digital stories which were then broadcast on one of the BBC’s digital channels, as well as via the BBC website (BBC, date unspecified). It is the model developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling that will be examined in this chapter, as opposed to a generic conception of digital storytelling which could potentially encompass any kind of digitally rendered narrative, including fiction.

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The Center for Digital Storytelling has developed its own methodology, underpinned by the following assumptions: Everyone has a story to tell; listening deeply and carefully is difficult but will ultimately nurture voice; people perceive the world in different ways and as such there is no hard and fast rule about what constitutes a ‘good story’; creativity is a human activity; and computers offer ‘inexhaustible potential’ for creative endeavour (CDS, date unspecified). The CDS has distilled the structure and design of digital stories into seven main elements, all the while acknowledging that there is no strict formula (Lambert 2002, pp. 45–59). 1. Point (of view): The author must define the point of the story. 2. Dramatic question: Does the story set up some tension that is later resolved? 3. Emotional content: Truthful stories that deal with themes of love, loss, death, confidence, vulnerability, acceptance and rejection improve the likelihood of holding the audience’s attention. 4. The gift of your voice: Record a natural-sounding voice-over. The teller’s voice is unique and conveys its own special meaning. 5. The power of soundtrack: Choosing music which complements or adds an extra layer of meaning. 6. Economy: Being selective with the script, editing out text which is shown and may be conveyed by the images. The general guideline is about 250–300 words, which translates into a three-minute story. 7. Pacing: The rhythm of the story is crucial in sustaining the audience’s interest. Ellum (2005, p. 4) describes the appeal of digital storytelling as being ‘about two things that people enjoy – watching and creating movies and talking about themselves.’ This medium has not only been embraced by individuals telling personal stories, but also by organizations, businesses, activists and community workers (Ellum 2005; Lambert, 2002). In terms of education, it has been used in a variety of contexts: From teaching content and multiliteracies in K-12 classrooms (Banaszewski 2002, 2005; Ohler 2005), to developing agency and self-esteem in youths from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds (Hull and Katz 2006; Woodson 2004). Digital stories have also been used for reflective practice among school students, for teacher professional development (Barrett 2006; Hlubinka 2003; Tendero 2006), and vocational education training (VET), (Ellum 2005). In second-language learning contexts, however, there has been very little research into the uses of digital storytelling.

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Research Project The first author (Kirsty McGeoch) works as an English language teacher and wished to explore the potential of digital storytelling in an ELICOS context. She conducted two action research cycles of the ‘The Culture Connection – Digital Storytelling Exchange’ at an Australian universitybased ELICOS centre, with groups of advanced-level English Language Learners (ELLs) aged between 19 and 52. In the first group, there were 13 women and four men from the following countries: South Korea, Japan, Mexico, Uruguay, Austria, The Netherlands, Taiwan, China and Saudi Arabia. In the second group there were three women and three men from China, South Korea, Japan and Mexico. The participants were studying English in Australia for a minimum of five weeks; some were studying English as part of a holiday, some had come on study abroad programs, and some were planning on undertaking postgraduate study at an Australian university. The first author led the groups through the process of developing digital stories over a five-week period: one 4-hour session a week with the first group, and one 4-hour plus one 1.5 hour session per week with the second group. The first step in designing the program was for the first author to make her own digital story. The aim was not only to create a model for her students, but also to experience the process first-hand. She attended a digital storytelling workshop at the Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI), which uses the Center for Digital Storytelling format and instructional model. The Center for Digital Storytelling usually runs three-day intensive workshops for people to create their own digital story. Often participants come to these workshops with stories in mind or first drafts of their scripts already written. They are shown examples of digital stories, and analyse and discuss these in light of the seven elements of the genre. The next stage is considered pivotal. With first drafts in hand or seeds of an idea in their heads, the participants join in the story circle process of sharing their scripts out loud to an attentive group for supportive peer feedback. The scripts evolve further through peer feedback in pairs and the guidance of the facilitators. In conjunction with the written script, participants also develop storyboards mapping out the visual aspect of their narratives and gradually eliminating text which can be ‘shown’ rather than ‘spoken’. Once voiceovers have been recorded and images and soundtracks sourced or created, all the threads are then woven together using movie making software to make digital stories, which are then screened at the end of the workshop. The workshop facilitators at ACMI continually stressed that the key to a good digital story is the story itself – not the special effects. The same


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message was coming from educators in K-12 classrooms, warning of the dangers of becoming intoxicated by the ‘bells and whistles’ of technology, and the need to focus on the narrative (Banaszewski 2002, 2005; Ohler 2007). In designing the project, the authors followed the basic format developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling, but thought that the process could be further enhanced by incorporating a variety of creative arts activities, in particular, process drama.

Process drama Process drama concerns the development of ‘dramatic worlds’ (O’Neill 1995), created by the teacher and students working together, in and out of role, and in the absence of a script or external audience. It has been used to explore the medium of drama itself, but also a wide range of curriculum areas, including second-language learning (Kao and O’Neill 1998; Liu 2002). Not only does process drama provide meaningful contexts for using language, but it is social and cooperative in nature and helps free students of their inhibitions so they can take risks (Hughes 1993; Liu 2002). While the drama worlds are usually fictional, process drama techniques have been used to develop narratives of self, (Hughes and Johnson 1998). In this case, the positive affective space created by the process drama activities helped the participants engage in narrative. This is important in terms of the quest to ‘get the good story’. As Roslyn Arnold notes: Students need to be encouraged to write about issues, ideas, memories or feelings which matter to them. They need to feel there is a genuine, trusting audience/reader for their expression. (1991, p. 31) In her study of digital storytelling with youth, Hlubinka found many people were timid about sharing their deepest feelings and stories (2003, p. 123). The authors thought that process drama work would offer a possible solution, not only for ‘getting the good story’ but for creating a supporting learning community where digital stories can be authored.

Drama in the culture connection project As the model of the CDS has already been described, the following section is limited to illustrating how drama activities and process drama were integrated within the greater project.

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After a series of getting-to-know-you activities and exercises developing confidence in using the space, the first process drama strategy, enactment of the expert, was employed. Enactment of the expert as developed by the second author, John Hughes (1992), is inspired by Dorothy Heathcote’s mantle of the expert (Heathcote and Bolton 1994), in which: [t]he group become characters endowed with specialist knowledge that is relevant to the situation . . . the situation is usually task-oriented . . . power and responsibility move from teacher to group; learners feel respected by having expert status. (Neelands 1990, p. 23) In contrast to Heathcote’s approach which requires the establishment of large and often long-term enterprise roles for the students (Heathcote and Bolton 1994), enactment of the expert can be a short-term project which is more useful in many pedagogic situations, particularly in ELICOS settings, where classes can change from week to week. In the first round of the Culture Connection project, the participants became expert anthropologists from the leading universities in the world. They were given several questions relating to their expertise and career highlights to help ease them into role. The first author has found giving prompts like this extremely helpful in ELICOS contexts. Some students got into role right away. Tobias from Austria changed his posture immediately to seem more important. Some expounded on the awards they had won for their research papers, some had lived in villages with local people, others had studied aboriginal cultures and married their research subjects. A spokesperson from each group introduced their fellow professors giving an overview of their expertise. This generated quite a lot of interest and laughter. Once in role, they were asked several favours by an ‘undergraduate anthropology student’ (teacher-in-role) for help with her assignments. The first request was to interpret a poem based on ‘Where I am From’, by George Ella Lyon (1999), in light of its cultural themes and then use this as a model for their own poetry and intercultural sharing out of role. It was thought that writing and sharing their poetry would serve to help them get to know each other better, to start exploring autobiographical material and to experiment with poetic language and style of digital story scripts, which have been likened to haiku. (Meadows 2007). Subsequent requests to the students-in-role as experts related to the role of stories and ethnography in anthropological study and how a new form of


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storytelling from the film world was being developed that might interest them. Had they heard of digital storytelling? What could it be? At this point, the first author showed her digital story to the class, and a lively discussion ensued. After viewing several digital stories the students (in-role) interpreted the elements of digital stories and a representative from each university presented their findings to the class. From these discussions, participants were introduced to the genre and could start to formulate ideas for their own digital stories and begin their first drafts. Activities such as enactment of the expert have been acknowledged as covert ways of allowing students to re-assess their ‘sense of agency, competency and mastery’ (Arnold 2005, p. 42) by engaging in tasks in which they are likely to be successful. This is particularly important in second-language contexts where learners often find their self-concepts as competent communicators dramatically challenged and can have high anxiety levels (Horwitz et al. 1986). The feedback on these activities was largely positive. Tobias noted in his journal that ‘after doing the activities/games in the first lecture all of us were able to get rid of most of our shyness and a nice climate to work was found’ (Tobias, Austria). When students were interviewed at the end of the project, the following comments were made in relation to the enactment of the expert activities: That was quite funny. I don’t know if the other students enjoyed it, but it was funny to me and it helped to become a little more creative. You don’t have to tell some serious stuff – you just think about a character you are in a different life . . . and that was quite fun. (Tobias, Austria) Yes, warming up to brainstorming because when I was doing this project I spent my brain very much to create, because if there is no creative it could be very boring. (Sujin, South Korea) That was very funny, yes. I liked it. (Clara, Mexico) I love this imagination world. (Risa, Japan) Others found it more difficult to get into role, but this seemed to be due to a lack of familiarity with the occupation and a perception that they didn’t have sufficient vocabulary to enact the role: It was a little bit hard because we have to be pretending archaeologists. If it were something like celebrity, it would have been easier. (Na Young, Korea)

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I think it is hard for us to pretend to be professionals because we have limit [sic] vocabularies. They speak with lots of professional vocabularies so it is very hard to pretend something like this. ( Jin, Hong Kong) Based on these last comments, the participants in the second round of the project were ‘enrolled’ as English Professors; something more within their realm of experience. The next step in the digital storytelling process was the story circle, after which the students reworked their drafts with the help of peer review. At this point, another process drama convention was introduced – tableaux. Tableaux involves students-in-role creating a still image or series of images with their bodies to ‘feel’ the drama of a scene from a text. The frozen sculptures are then presented to the class and become a stimulus for further questioning and discussion. Neelands (1990) notes the learning opportunities afforded by tableaux: [It is] a highly selective way of crystallizing meaning into concrete images, very economical and controlled form of expression as well as a sign to be interpreted or read by observers; groups are able to represent more than they would be able to communicate with words alone. (Neelands 1990, p. 19) These characteristics make tableaux very suitable for language learners, particularly as receptive understanding usually precedes the ability to articulate that understanding (Kao and O’Neill 1998). Following the lead of Hughes’ masterclass (Hughes and Johnson 1998) using drama to explore narratives of self, the students were put into groups to do a frozen picture of the beginning, middle and end of each other’s stories. In the second round of the project, they made frozen statues of their own stories. Some participants reported that this helped them express their feelings and generate ideas for their storyboards. Freeze frame activities made my draft’s image more elaborate and made me empathized. I could look myself and think more deeply. Moreover, it gave me another idea, so I could add it into my draft. (Hye Young, South Korea) It was good as i thought about the point i emphasis on in my story. also, it helped me think that what string of picture i choose to deliver my feelings. (Sung-Ho, South Korea)


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However, Hiro from Japan struggled to ‘discribe [sic]body language of our sentence’ and Clara from Mexico found this exercise difficult on account of shyness: I’m too shy – I like to be sitting and say ‘yes, no’ or answer something. I don’t like to interact with people – I feel afraid of that, so I don’t like that part, but anyway, I do it. (Clara, Mexico) Interestingly and notwithstanding her comments about being shy, it was Clara who made a mini movie using the photos taken of everyone’s tableaux, put it to music and emailed it to the class. Before the final voice recording, the participants were given the chance to record audio drafts and receive audio feedback. In the second round of the project with more time available, these drafts formed the basis of a follow-up pronunciation clinic, where the first author led the group through vocal warm-ups and pronunciation raps. They were then invited to assume their roles as English professors again – this time at an international English conference. They were each given a card with one or two sentences outlining the details of the paper they were to present, which also targeted their individual pronunciation needs. The professors then acted out conversations with their contemporaries in the field. Did these drama activities help develop the digital stories? From the comments of the participants in the project, it did help them relax, and enter into an affective space where digital stories could be authored. On the whole, the stories created were engaging and showed emotional depth. Clara, who swore that she didn’t have anything to tell, wrote a story of her decision to break off her engagement and come to Australia to study English. Tobias’s motivations for coming to Australia were to distance himself from Austria and his home – a place that hadn’t felt the same since the death of his mother. Sung Ho explored the changing relationship he had with his father. Nicola from Holland showed how practising law allowed her to help others in her community.

Empathic intelligence In developing and implementing this research project, the authors began to see how digital storytelling resonates with the theory of empathic intelligence in education (Arnold 2005). Empathic intelligence, as conceived

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by Roslyn Arnold, explains the underpinnings of effectiveness in learning and teaching and is manifest in four qualities of relatedness: enthusiasm, expertise, capacity to engage, and empathy itself (Arnold 2005). Within this model, learning is regarded as an ‘interactive experience, best achieved in a climate of relatedness, care and mutual respect’ (Arnold 2005, p. 18). Facilitating the digital storytelling process necessitates nurturing a climate of care and similarly requires a constant monitoring of oneself and the participants. A fine line must be stepped when trying to elicit the best story possible while respecting the creators’ intentions. This attunement to the thinking and feeling of others is critical, particularly during the story circle process, when it is crucial that the facilitator and the group listen with complete attention, and give feedback in a sensitive manner. This also resonates with the notion of ‘being there’ in empathic intelligence. Just being there can be constructive for the performer, whether at times of success or difficulty . . . The parent or teacher who watches and listens attentively honours the student in ways that seemingly stimulate tacit abilities. (Arnold 2005, p. 38) It is argued that by making digital stories, people can engage in learning experiences of deep impact and personal significance . . . Teaching and learning which goes beyond transmitting knowledge into the realms of creative experiences, and which mobilises deeply-felt shifts in consciousness, can transform our understanding of self, of others and the complexities of the life of the mind (Arnold 2005, p. 12). In a study of the impact of the BBC’s Capture Wales project, many participants reported on the transformative nature of digital storytelling, describing the process as therapeutic, having impacted on their sense of self and having had a lasting effect on their lives (Kidd 2006). Similarly, participants in the Culture Connection made the following comments: Before starting, I thought a lot to seek something that I want to share. The more I did, the clearer I saw myself. I realized what is important to me and what I treasure most, as well as what should I do in the following few years. (Nicole, China) It’s a kind of knowing more about myself. (Betty, Korea)


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I don’t know. It’s like go to therapy – but cheaper. Really, I never talk about this with anyone. I don’t like to talk about this. This time, I tried to tell – not all – but a little bit. I feel better with that. (Clara, Mexico) I love myself while making this story. (Jamie, Korea) To listen to others [sic]stories can learn different the way of thinking. (Lin, China) The sense of connection and kinship created by sharing personal stories (Booth and Barton 2001; Gere et al. 2002) may contribute to the development of quality relationships, which Arnold considers to be foundational to excellent pedagogy (2005). Several participants in the study commented on such a feeling of community and relatedness: I really feel like we are a family, to do the whole thing and show each other our own story – it make [sic]each other feel warm. I really think we have been close friends. So that’s why I loved these classes. (Nicole, China) Arnold (2005) also describes the empathic model of learning as one which is dynamic and democratic. Ultimately, digital storytelling is a democratic process as it is the storyteller who has control over how the story is told, represented and later shared. Joe Lambert, co-founder of the CDS acknowledges democratic expression as a key stone of the movement: [t]he emphasis, for us, was on a simple notion . . . The tools of digital technology should be used to democratize voice and therefore empower more people than the prior set of analog tools in contemporary communication. (Lambert 2000, n.p.) Not only is digital storytelling learner-centred, democratic and agency building, but the research participants found it highly engaging. It was really quite good because we were really self-motivated. All we really want to do, we did it hard. (Chan, Korea) I do not consider it just a project, as a course to gain some marks. I want to do it from the bottom of my heart. (Nicole, China) When examined through the lens of empathic intelligence, it becomes clearer that digital storytelling also shares many of the underlying

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assumptions of drama education. Both foster the creation of democratic, learner-centred, agency-building communities, where knowledge is coconstructed and methods are interactive and reflective. They are also instrumental in developing empathy, a sense of self and other, creative expression and artistic sensibility. At the heart of both digital storytelling and drama are engaging and transformative experiences. Could digital storytelling, then, be of service in the drama classroom?

Digital storytelling in the drama classroom Drama, dance, music, visual arts and multimedia forms all use space, contrast, focus, mood, time, symbol and tension, even though how creative artists apply these concepts may vary depending on the medium in which they work. (Poston-Anderson 2008, p. 239) Barbara Poston-Anderson adds that ‘being able to recognize and use drama elements enriches a person’s ability to participate in, appreciate and evaluate drama experiences’ (2008, p. 240). Similarly, it is proposed that the process of developing a digital story is an experience in applying several key elements of drama and as such, could be of interest to drama educators. Table 8.1 looks at the key elements of drama as identified by the NSW Department of Education and Training in its Curriculum Support for teaching in Creative Arts 7–12 document (Croft-Piggin 2000), and how they may correlate to digital storytelling.

Future possibilities for drama and digital storytelling In charting future possibilities for drama and digital storytelling, a number of questions and issues arise. • Could additional drama activities further enhance the process, particularly in terms of embodying the seven elements of digital storytelling as they relate to the elements of drama? For example, could drama games to experience the idea of ‘tension’, give students a somatic understanding of a ‘dramatic question’? • Further, the research presented here was undertaken with adult English language students in an ELICOS setting. How could it be adapted for the

Digital Storytelling and Drama TABLE 8.1

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The elements of drama and digital storytelling

Elements of drama

Corresponding elements of digital stories

Focus

Point of the story

The frame that directs attention to what is most significant and intensifies the dramatic meaning.

What is the point of the story? What do you want to communicate? Who is it for?

Tension or conflict

Dramatic question

The force that engages the performers and audience in the dramatic action.

What is the problem or conflict to be resolved?

Space The personal and general space used by the actors. It focuses on the meaning of the size and shape of distances between actor and actor, actor and objects (props and sets) and actor and audience.

The concept of space could be applied to the composition of images used in digital stories.

Mood

Power of soundtrack/emotional content

The atmosphere created. Mood concentrates the dramatic action and moves the audience in emotionally appropriate directions.

Mood in digital stories can be created by the soundtrack, the images, transitions between images, the narrator’s voice and the emotional content of the stories.

Contrast The use of difference to create dramatic meaning.

Contrast in digital storytelling can be conveyed by the images, voice, soundtracks and sound effects, and changes in the pace at which these elements are employed.

Symbol The use of objects, gestures or persons to represent meaning beyond the literal.

Rather than having literal images in every case, the use of metaphor in digital storytelling is strongly encouraged.

Role Taking on the physicality, attitudes and beliefs of a character. In drama students often shift in and out of role between imaginary worlds and the here-and-now in a process called metaxis (Boal 1995; Bolton 1984).

Source of elements of drama: Croft-Piggin (2000)

Digital storytelling is not concerned with fictional contexts; however, drama activities such as the enactment of the expert can be used in the process. It could also be argued that a kind of metaxis is present in the process of moving from the here-and-now to the past, and the reframing of these events in creating the narrative.

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primary or secondary drama and/or theatre studies classroom? Do the apparent synergies between the elements of drama and digital storytelling flagged in this chapter play out in practice? • Digital stories are usually based on significant events in a person’s life or can be based on a given theme. How would students respond to making a digital story based on a theme from a given unit of drama work? • What would be the effect of adapting the Center for Digital Storytelling model in order to explore the imaginary worlds of drama? For instance, could students create first-person narratives in role as fictional characters?

Conclusion This chapter has given a brief background to digital storytelling and discussed the ways in which process drama activities, such as enactment of the expert and tableaux, were used to develop digital stories in the Culture Connection research project. It has also touched on how digital storytelling aligns on many levels with the principles and practices of empathic intelligence. The project explored the notion that the best experiences in education involve a dynamic between thinking and feeling. Further, this multi-sensory approach to storytelling can activate both thinking and feeling by engaging participants through movement, visualization, imagination, creative problem-solving and shared oral and written activities. The aesthetic dimensions of digital storytelling require the development of a sensitivity to language, image and music, which can be used in both complex and evocative ways. Digital storytelling can connect with participants’ embodied experiences and enable them to articulate those experiences, thus elaborating and differentiating them further. In these ways, digital storytelling shares some of the elements of drama as well as its underlying assumptions in education. Likewise drama can be employed to develop and enhance students’ storytelling experiences and, as Bolton said, provide a new perspective so that what occurs is ‘ . . . some shift of appraisal, an act of cognition that has involved a change of feeling, so that some facet of living is given (however temporarily) a different value’ (Bolton 1979, p. 41). Further exploration of digital storytelling and drama may reveal even more exciting convergences and opportunities for transformative experiences in education, as the processes of both learning through and enjoying the creation of an art form resonate well in the development of minds, language, imagination and symbolization.


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References Arnold, R. (1991), Writing Development. Philadelphia: Open University Press. —(2005), Empathic Intelligence. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd. Atchley, D. (2000), www.nextexit.com, retrieved 22 June 2008 from http://www. nextexit.com/nextexit/nextframeset.html. Banaszewski, T. (2002), Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom. MultiMedia Schools, 1, pp. 32–38. —(2005), Digital storytelling: supporting digital literacy in grades 4-12. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Barrett, H. (2006), Researching and Evaluating Digital Storytelling as a Deep Learning Tool, retrieved 13 March 2007 from http://electronicportfolios.org/ portfolios/SITEStorytelling2006.pdf. BBC Wales, Capture Wales, retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/ sites/galleries/pages/capturewales.shtml. BBC (2007), Capture Wales, retrieved 17 May 2007 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ wales/capturewales/about/. Boal, A. (1995), The Rainbow of Desire. London: Routledge. Bolton, G. (1979), Towards a Theory of Drama in Education. Harlow, Essex: Longman. —(1984), Drama as Education: An Argument for Placing Drama at the Centre of the Curriculum. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Booth, D. and Barton, B. (2001), Story Works!. Markham: Pembroke Publishers. CDS (date unspecified), Center for Digital Storytelling, retrieved 22 June 2008 from http://www.storycenter.org/principles.html. Croft-Piggin, L. (2000), The Elements of Drama, retrieved 29 June 2008 from http:// www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/secondary/creativearts/assets/ drama/pdf/dramaelements.pdf. DSA. (2002), Digital storytelling: defining digital storytelling, retrieved 19 May 2007 from http://www.dsaweb.org/01associate/ds.html. Ellum, L. (2005), Digital Storytelling as a Teaching Tool [electronic version], Fine Print, 28, 3–6, retrieved 3 January 2007 from http://search.informit.com.au. ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/fullTextContent. Gere, J., Kozlovich, B.-A. and Kelin II, D. (2002), By Word of Mouth: A Storytelling Guide for the Classroom. Honolulu: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. Heathcote, D. and Bolton, G. (1994), Drama for Learning: Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert Approach to Education. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Hlubinka, M. (2003), Behind the Screens: Digital Storytelling as a Tool for Reflective Practice. Unpublished Masters Thesis, MIT, Massachusetts. Horwitz, E., Horwitz, M. and Cope, J. (1986), Foreign language classroom anxiety [electronic version], The Modern Language Journal, 70, 125–132, retrieved 7 March 2008 from http://www.jstor.org. Hughes, J. (1992). Enactment of the expert: drama and reading comprehension. The NADIE Journal, 16 Autumn (3), 13–18. —(1993), Linguistic and cultural barriers: the role of drama, in W. Michaels (ed.), Drama in Education: The State of the Art II. Sydney: Educational Drama Association, pp. 130–123.

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Hughes and Johnson, D. (1998), Drama from Intra-Subjective Monologues and Narratives of Self, in J. Saxton and C. Miller (eds), Drama and Theatre in Education, Victoria, BC: IDEA Publications, pp. 21–30. Hull, G. and Katz, M.-L. (2006), Crafting an agentive self: case studies of digital storytelling [electronic version], Research in the Teaching of English. Urbana, 41, 43–82, retrieved 8 March 2007 from http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy1.library. usyd.edu.au/pqdweb?did=1106284431&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=16331 &RQT=309&VName=PQD. Kao, S. M. and O’Neill, C. (1998), Words into Worlds: Learning a Second Language through Process Drama. Stamford: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Kidd, J. (2006), Digital Storytelling at the BBC: the reality of innovative audience participation. Paper presented at the RIPE@2006 Conference, retrieved 27 February 2008 from http://www.yle.fi/ripe/Papers/Kidd.pdf. Lambert. (2000), Has digital storytelling succeeded as a movement? Some thoughts [electronic version], dStoryNews, retrieved 30 June 2008 from http://www.dstory. com/dsf6/newsletter_02.html. —(2002), Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Berkeley: Digital Diner Press. Liu, J. (2002), Process drama in second and foreign-language classrooms, in G. Brauer (ed.), Body and Language: Intercultural Learning through Drama. London: Ablex Publishing, , pp. 51–70. Lyon, G. E. (1999), Where I’m from, retrieved 7 May 2007 from www.georgeellalyon. com. Meadows, D. (2007), http://www.photobus.co.uk/, retrieved 10 February 2007 from http://www.photobus.co.uk/. Neelands, J. (1990), Structuring Drama Work. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ohler, J. (2005), Telling Your Story – Putting the Story into Digital (and Traditional) Storytelling. Juneau, AK: Brinton Books. — (2007), JasonOhler.com, retrieved 19 May 2007 from http://www.jasonohler. com/storytelling/. Poston-Anderson, B. (2008), Drama: Learning Connections in Primary Schools. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Tendero, A. (2006), [electronic version], Facing Versions of the Self: The Effects of Digital Storytelling on English Education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education [online serial], 6, retrieved 13 March 2007 from http://www.citejournal. org/vol6/iss2/languagearts/article2.cfm. Woodson, S. (2004), The ‘Place: Vision and Voice’ program – power, authenticity and ethics, retrieved 5 April 2007 from http://www.communityarts.net/ readingroom/archivefiles/2004/05/place_vision_an.php.

Chapter 9

‘A blog says i am here!’: encouraging reflection on performance-making and drama practice through blogs Jo Raphael

This chapter considers the use of social software, in particular the blog, emerging from youth web-culture as a space for groups and individuals to reflect upon performance-making processes. It focuses on the Drama Australia VINE project, launched at the beginning of 2006 through to its conclusion at the end of 2007. The VINE project brought together groups of drama students within schools, universities and the broader community to make group performances based on a common theme. Using a multi-user blogging environment, vineblogs.net, groups or individuals maintained blogs of their performance-making processes. This allowed the work to be shared within the VINE project community and potentially with a worldwide audience. A case study was set up involving one class of students and their teachers who were involved in the VINE project and participants were asked to reflect and comment upon the performance-making and blogging experience. The chapter considers the challenge that we face as educators to find appropriate avenues to engage young people in reflection. It considers the ways in which students engage with technology that are often different from their teachers. The chapter goes on to discuss how blogs can contribute to the creation of a sense of individual or group identity and recognition. It asks, ‘how do blogs encourage reflection upon performance-making processes and facilitate the creating of connections and the building of community between drama students and teachers across a range of settings?’ Finally the chapter describes what we’ve learned about blogs in drama and considers where we go from here.

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The VINE project The project title, The VINE, is a metaphor for growing and linking varied and isolated performance groups to create a community of theatre makers. It is also an acronym for Very Interesting Networking Experience. The project was open to groups of drama and theatre students and teachers across all year levels and education settings from around Australia and internationally. Participants were offered a common starting point upon which to base their performance making. The VINE was designed to lead up to the 2007 IDEA Congress held in Hong Kong and the starting point, Planting IDEAS: ‘With our thoughts we make the world’ was inspired by the congress theme. As the project concept developed it was considered to be a way for drama students and educators to share performance-making processes as readers and writers of blogs. The process encompassed the creative development phase, the rehearsal and the resulting performance and post-performance reflection. Both participants and interested nonparticipants, were able to view all the blogs associated with the project through the purpose built multi-blog site, http://vineblogs.net. The VINE project took place from the beginning of 2006 until the end of 2007. By mid-2007 over 200 blogs had been created by individuals or groups of primary and secondary drama students, university students (in particular pre-service drama teachers), community theatre groups and practising drama teachers. Through the blogs, participants from the different groups involved were invited to discuss their ideas, thoughts and reflections on each other’s performance making and their own experience of the process.

The research project This research seeks to understand the role of blogs in encouraging reflection, in validating performance-making processes, in creating a sense of group identity and significance and in building a sense of connection and community among student performance makers. It considers the value of blogs in validating performance-making processes and sustaining the moment in the normally ephemeral and short-lived drama experience. The blogs created for the VINE project offer insights into the role of the blog for reflection in drama education. As Anderson (2006) suggests we need to move beyond advocacy to ask probing questions in order to

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understand the real value and potential there might be for the use of technology in drama. Research questions included the following: z z z z

What benefits do students derive from using the blogs in the drama classroom? How does the drama teaching and learning change when blogs are introduced? What roles do blogs play in creating connection and a community of learners in drama? Who is left behind when the technology is used?

During the project student and teacher blogs located in the public domain were visited and comments were posted to many. Participants were asked to reflect and comment upon the performance-making and blogging experience in order to monitor and evaluate the project. In addition, a case study was undertaken involving a class of year six students (11–12-year-olds) who were creating group-devised performances and maintaining group blogs documenting their processes as part of the VINE project. These students also participated in small semi-formal group interviews that provided them with an opportunity to talk about the process of blogging their drama experience. The drama teacher and the students’ regular classroom teacher were also interviewed for their perspectives on the use of blogs.

A space for reflective thinking in drama Students, as artists involved in creating an effective performance for a particular purpose and audience, are continuously making artistic choices from the dramatic and physical elements they have to work with, and the various possibilities that they imagine to creatively solve a problem. They make decisions about what they want to say and then go about finding an effective way to say it. They generate ideas and decide on content and narrative. They consider and explore dramatic styles and work with the dramatic elements such as tension, focus, space and design elements. A great deal of thinking and decision making takes place as they endeavour to shape their artistic expression in order to make meaning. When students are involved in the creative practical and physical work of performance making they are thinking on their feet and reflecting in action. However, in the busyness and excitement of the practical activity of

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performance making, there is often not the time for contemplation and ruminative reflective thinking, reflection on action, that is so important for students to really come to understand why they have made the decisions they have made, what they have learnt and how they have learned from the experience (Taylor 2000). It adds value to the art making experience to find some time, distance and a mechanism to take a look at what is happening in the artistic process. There are many questions they could ask of themselves and their performance making work. What worked? What didn’t work and why? What could we have done differently? Time for reflection, when built into the process, provides students with an opportunity to take stock, critique, evaluate and even theorize a little. It is this kind of consideration that will allow them to gain understanding, learn from their experience and apply what they have learnt to future creative work. Drama educators regularly build opportunities for reflection into their drama curriculum and often make this a part of assessment. Across all year levels educators are being asked to consider the ‘thinking curriculum’, and to be increasingly aware of developing meta-cognition in students. In drama this means students are engaged in thinking about their thinking in the artistic process of creating performance. Prensky (2001b) argues that time for reflection requires particular nurturing for young people of the current generation, the digital natives, who have grown up with high-speed digital technologies. In our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people. One of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in teaching Digital Natives is to figure out and invent ways to include reflection and critical thinking in the learning . . . but still do it in the Digital Native language. We can and must do more in this area. (p. 5) Drama educators have long appreciated the benefits and necessity of reflection but given the pressure to spend less time on reflection in these fast-paced times of the crowded curriculum, how might time be better provided for this activity? How might drama educators better encourage young people to pause and reflect on drama practice? Reflective thinking has conventionally occurred in drama classes often in class discussions and in reflective writing in the form of a journal, a log book or a folio. As an alternative, the VINE project proposed the blog as a space for drama students’ reflective thinking to be recorded, shared and encouraged.


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Why blogs? Choosing and using blogs in drama education The word blog is a contraction of web-log, a web-based log book. In drama the log book, or journal has traditionally been the place where reflective writing occurs. Blogs are especially useful in drama education because they are designed as online journals and provide the blank pages for a drama log book with each entry, or post, automatically archived in chronological order. Blogs are easy to set up, easy to use and easily accessible and for these reasons they were chosen over other internet-based options for the VINE project. Many blog hosting sites allow creation and maintenance of blogs for no charge, though sometimes in return for injecting advertising content into pages. Blogs serve as a website without requiring users to have an understanding of HTML syntax, page formatting or any of the complexities involved in creating and maintaining a website. It is this web-based presence that provides the most important advantage of blogs over the traditional journal. Because the blog is web-based it can be accessed from any internet-connected computer. This means blogs can be set up and maintained by individuals or by groups, as collaborative spaces, with members of the group able to log in and contribute to the one blog whenever they want and from wherever they may be. Drama is, after all, a social art form with students working in groups and ensembles to create drama. The blog is a social space in which the group sharing can be continued beyond the faceto-face class time. The web-based presence also allows the blog to be read by a wider audience, beyond the teacher and class members. Those who read the blogs are able to post comments thereby opening up possibilities for conversation and feedback. Web-based social networking has become increasingly popular among young people in recent years with growing numbers of young people engaging in MSN, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and other social networks. Similarly, the blog is a young person’s medium. The explosion in the number of blogs in recent years has largely been attributed to young people (Downes 2004; Eide and Eide 2005; Windham 2007; Witte 2007). Increasingly blogs have been explored by teachers and students for educational purposes. Students are attracted to blogs because they ‘have emerged out of youth web-culture. Blogs have the cachet of being progressive and perhaps even a bit countercultural’ (Dickey 2004, p. 288). While a blog that has been set up as part of a learning task for drama might not be as appealing as other social networking experiences for young people, the possibility of networking gives a blog a distinct advantage over the traditional journal.

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Digital natives are comfortable with internet-based writing and from an analysis of first blog entries they took up the technology with relative ease. In contrast some of the teachers, often the digital immigrants (Prensky 2001a), found the technology challenging and recognized, as these blog posts indicate, that their students had something to teach them: Hello world! Hi, well here it is my very first BLOG and how daunting it is. Its funny isn’t it we as adults get very nervous and protective with these things but the students just charge ahead at a million miles an hour without any fear. I now know how to blog. . . ha . . . I have written many times and never been able to create a blog that ‘works’. Hopefully I have now been taught successfully by my students!!! . . .I’m on a huge learning curve. In contrast, initial student blog posts often showed them hitting the ground running and as this student example indicates, approaching the technology with optimism and openness. Ok so I am a little new to this and it took me about 30 mins to work it out but hey I’ll give it a go . . . When students have a more intuitive and masterful approach to the new technologies that they are using, they may have much to teach the teacher. This can be a positive disruption to the traditional balance of knowledge and skills between teachers and students. Rather than being the experts, the teachers become co-learners within a community of learners. A significant outcome of the VINE project was the uptake of the technology by drama teachers when they could see that the blogs were simple to use and were a better way of engaging students in the kind of learning they intended for them. Several drama teachers commented that, much to their own surprise, they were now seen as leaders in the educational use of social networking technologies in their schools: It is pretty unique that the drama program was the first to trial this new ICT way of the world. It has changed people’s perceptions of the arts and of drama. That really makes me feel fantastic.


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The use of the technology is seen to not only impact upon the teaching and learning in drama but appears to be having a wider impact and role to play in advocacy. A blog draws attention to drama and reveals the significant learning that goes on in a drama class.

Too cool for school – the motivating potential of blogs WOW Wow, Using the net and writing blogs. Could you get any easier homework? I think this is fantastic. Mum doesn’t believe me when I say that I need to be on here for homework purposes. It’s just not right! Hehe. [sic] The above blog post typifies the positive attitude that many students had towards blogging particularly when compared to a traditional journal. Enthusiasm for homework, when blogging was involved, was a recurring theme. The drama teacher of the year six class interviewed for this study explained that prior to the introduction of the blog she asked her students to write in a drama book at the end of each drama class. She felt the students resented the loss of active drama time to reflection and writing, however, she faced a dilemma knowing that it was likely that students would not write anything if reflection was delayed and they were asked to do it at home. She explained how this changed with the introduction of the blogs when they provided an incentive and motivated students to write more and in their own time. When they come to drama they want to be active. They don’t want to sit and they don’t want to write and I have struggled with this ever since I’ve taught drama. Finally kids are doing written reflection in their own time, not in their 50 minute session, and they are keen to do it. Why is it that blogs have this kind of appeal? When asked to compare blogs with other methods of reflecting on their performance making, the year six students suggested that blogs have many advantages over a paper journal. For some it was the novelty factor that provided a sense of fun: I found it really cool because it’s a new way and it’s different. It’s a fun thing to do. It is easier because you can type.

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After the drama class the regular classroom teacher provided opportunities for these students to write their blog posts in class time but found that students still wanted to write posts at home. The teacher explained: You would never get kids saying, ‘Oh I took my learning journal home from drama and wrote a couple of paragraphs.’ The engagement is huge when you have got kids writing at home. I haven’t set it as homework at all but they are doing it anyway. The kids are engaged and motivated to write and to reflect – you can’t beat that! One of the students explained that blogs somehow made the writing seem more important: We have kept a diary like a little book, everyone rushed it because they didn’t think it was that important so this (blogs) really just changed everything. The year six students commented that they really enjoyed having the time to spend on reflection, in their own time and away from distraction as the following comments show: With the journals you were a bit rushed but with the blog you could do it at home and spend ages on it. You can do it when you’ve got a spare minute you don’t have to do it during drama time – because you are rushed during drama time. We can do it at home. You have more time. You can really think about it. It felt better to blog because you don’t have like all your friends around you so you don’t feel embarrassed to write up your true feelings and opinions. Just being by yourself when you are writing it feels a lot better. Such was the motivation to write that at the end of the VINE project, some found it difficult to stop blogging. The year six students asked their teacher if they could make a new group blog about their school concert and this senior drama student describes her sense of loss when winding up her blog and how she felt the urge to make one last post at the end of the ensemble making project.


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Just thought I would have one last blog /. . . it’s really sad, I’m trying to slowly wean myself off this blogging process and constant chatter about ensemble… For many students the internet-based blogs were more meaningful that the traditional paper approach and they felt compelled to write. The blog seems to go some way towards meeting Prensky’s challenge (2001b) in providing a means of reflection that is attractive and relevant to the digital native.

Blogging the performance making The blogging process provided students involved in the VINE project with time, space and a purpose to reflect. However, students found different purposes for blogging. At times blogs were a place for solitary reflection and at other times for social interaction. For some it was simply a matter of unloading their mind of ideas and perhaps revealing the tacit knowledge, the things that they know but don’t necessarily know they know. As one students described, blogging was like ‘freeing your mind and just getting all the ideas in your head out there’. Students’ blogs not only included progress reports, reflection and analysis of processes that you might find in a regular written journal but frequently uploaded images, iTunes song lists, embedded links to other relevant websites including video on YouTube, podcasts, uploaded documents that included production schedules, publicity material, scripts, costume and set design examples or sketches and research related to the performance themes or style. The grade six students claimed that writing the blogs facilitated their performance-making work because taking the time to record their thoughts and ideas helped them to remember what they had done. For group blogs this kept the whole group on track. I think because you are recording what you did, you can remember the things you did right and wrong and the stuff you can improve. You can remember it better. Blog postings varied in quality and detail and some tended to be short, simple statements of what was done. Sometimes blogs served as a message

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board for members of the ensemble to keep on track, for absent members to catch up on work missed and for suggestions to be posted to progress the group work. These two senior drama posts are examples: Hi forgot to write in my last 2 blogs that we are meeting at 8.30 in the drama room tomorrow if u read this b4 then!!!!! [sic] Hi guys, so i wasn’t at school today coz i was sick with a headache and stuff . . . so sorry . . . but i wanna know what you did in calsss, coz i was really thinking we need to get props and stuff done . . . like to know where to put placards and stuff especially, we also need to know all our dialogue by the end of this week i reckon . . . i really don’t even come close to this but i think it’d be a good idea coz then we can really start to rehearse properly! [sic] Some blogs showed students writing increasingly complex posts, reflecting not only on what was done but what was yet to be done. They considered the dramatic elements and the theme of the performance and the ways they were endeavouring to communicate their message to their audience. They reflected on their group work and processes and what was working and what was not and the factors that inhibited the progress of the performance making. For some students the process of writing contributed to the creative process even leading to sudden inspiration as this senior secondary student blog post revealed: Alright, so my solo isn’t really coming together as much as I would like it to at this stage. As my last post suggested I was planning on doing a metal head. This hasn’t changed in the slightest. And I can’t write much more about my solo except for the research. We had a research lesson, oh it was so long ago I barely remember it . . . It was actually really good because I was surprised at some of the information about them, because I didn’t know half of it all. Something that shocked me was the amount of paganism, but then the contrast with the christian metal heads. OMG just typing that gave me an idea for my solo!!! SEE BLOGS ARE AWESOME!!!!!! [sic] For some the notion of an audience was critical and impacted upon the quality of the reflection and writing: Blogging makes you put more depth in it because you know other people are going to read it.


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Although the students quoted above claimed greater quality in their reflection and recognized the useful functions in blogs, it was beyond the scope of this study to investigate the ways that reflection and recording that occurred in the blogs actually enhanced the performance making and learning in drama, however, this suggests an interesting area for future investigation.

I blog therefore I am The default title for the first blog post reads ‘Hello World!’ reminding the writer that blogs have a potential worldwide audience and the very act of posting your blog on the internet tells the world, if nothing else, that you exist. In the words of one year six student, ‘A blog says i am here and I’ve done this!’ Another explained that having ‘people actually wanting to read our blogs is amazing. It feels like you are actually recognized for something that you’ve done’. Beyond simple recognition, a blog can also be a means of expressing and claiming individual or group identity. There is plenty of anecdotal and research-based evidence to describe the ways that young people in particular, experiment with forging and changing identities in online environments (Penrod 2007; Carroll et al. 2006). Through blogs they are also exploring and presenting the multiple dimensions of their personalities. In this project the first opportunity for individual expression came in the naming of the blogs which had to occur for the blog to be set up. The VINE project blog site provided a long list of links to the most recently updated one hundred blogs created for the project and revealed some intriguing blog titles that invited further investigation. Given that the purpose of the blog is to be read, creating an interesting blog title was possibly perceived by bloggers as a way of potentially attracting more readers and comments to their blog. Here are some examples: -.- mOrb1dly *0* Be&$t$ -.The Life you could have led My mum thinks I’m talented Its all about... ME!!!!! In yer face theatre Complete Unadulterated Drama Blog! MUHAHAHEHOHIHU!! Philosophise the world to nothing If drama was a booger I’d pick it first Circus geek and drama freak

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Students also had other creative elements to play with. There was an option of choosing the look and layout of their blogs using the large range of colourful blog themes provided by the WordPress software. Many of these themes were able to be customized further and students found ways to make their blog original in appearance. It was evident in the VINE project blogs that writing posts was also a means of creative expression, not only because of what was written but because of the way in which it was written. While some students maintained a more formal style of writing, others wrote more casually, incorporating the codes and abbreviations of Net-Gen speak and with a playful disregard for formal spelling and punctuation. The writing took on aesthetic qualities wherein it looked interesting as well as sounded and read interestingly. Such writing very often captured the spirit of the spoken word in the way formal written language could not. The following example of a brief blog entry, by a student reflecting upon and expressing feelings of opening night nerves, captures the emotion vividly with a poetic quality charged with meaning. Peers would undoubtedly relate to the sentiment. OMG opening is tomorrow night i feel sick … not fully sick but sick sick like throw up vomit sick OMG WTF LOL argh i am crapping myself the end. Carroll et al. (2006) explain that when considering uses of technology in drama, ‘What is clear is that there is demand from students to explore ways for the liveness of the drama learning experience to be enhanced and supported by technology’ (p. 142). How does reflection in the blogs enhance live experience of learning in drama? The blogs provide an audience


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as well as a degree of interactivity with this audience which suggests that the blog shares some of the qualities of live performance. Drama students are often creative types and blog writing is a creative activity. A performance is created for an audience and so too is a blog. They both tell a story and involve the artistic manipulation of words and images. There are elements of design in the blog post that bloggers have to consider when communicating to their audience. When writing blog posts, in addition to the words and content, writers choose the font, colour, arrange the text and decide whether or not to include graphics, images and links. Arguably, students who choose to study drama are often those who enjoy and learn best by doing. Penrod (2007) recognizes the benefits that blogging offers in addressing the needs of these types of learners: Learning to blog and maintaining a blog are hands-on processes. There is a high level of tactile stimulation with keyboarding; and at the end of the blogging session, there is tangible evidence of the effort. For autodidacts and artistic types, blogging can be a way to learn and to create original material. (p. 73) Teachers involved in the project observed that the blog also provides a voice for another kind of learner, those students who are normally quiet or whose voices are drowned out by more vocal members of the drama class. These students may find that they are able to express their ideas more effectively through a blog. As one student responded when a comment was passed on the length and detail of her blog posts, ‘it is very true I do write heaps but I can’t help it . . . I express myself well in writing’. With traditional paper journals, such students may write just as prolifically but the voices within them will remain unheard and their ideas unheeded because it is unlikely that anyone other than perhaps the teacher will have an opportunity to read them.

Blogs for communities of learners and theatre makers The blogs offered readers something not usually available – windows into other drama classrooms and insights into drama and performance-making practices. For teachers including pre-service teachers, the blogs revealed other teachers’ practice and as one teacher explained provided ‘fantastic professional development. I’ve got new ideas from it.’ For teachers and students the blogs were affirming and helped to reduce feelings of isolation

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when they could see that others in different locations, and often very different educational settings, were doing drama and creating theatre just as they were. It was as though what they were doing mattered because others were doing it too. They were able to consider their work in the context of a wider community of theatre makers. The process of group devising performance is collaborative. In their examination of collaborative online learning, Palloff and Pratt (2005) explain the importance of collaborative learning activity in that it promotes: z z z z

development of critical thinking skills co-creation of knowledge and meaning reflection transformative learning (pp. 35–37)

While a sense of community needs to exist for successful collaboration to occur, collaborative activity can also serve to help create community (Palloff and Pratt 2005). Within the vineblogs community there was plenty of evidence of how blogs served to both enhance collaboration and build a community of theatre makers. Within the VINE project teachers’ blogs would typically provide an outline of the project for the students, information on assessment requirements and criteria and advice on blogging protocol. Some teachers also provided links to relevant websites, reflection on the progress of the class and, in one example, podcasts of the teacher providing important instruction. Teachers, as fellow bloggers, promoted a sense of community by providing a central blog for students with links to all class blogs as the following introduction blog post describes: Welcome to Blogland! This is your Theatre Studies Central! You can check in here to see what is coming up, what is going down, where we are at and where we are going to be! Once you have each set up your blog site, you will be able to link with this page, share information with me and each other, talk about all the craaaaazy stuff we do, and, most importantly, keep a log of your journal reflections and evaluations!! Isn’t that cool?! Just remember, no swearing, no putting each other down and no personal information either! Jokes are always welcome. Students also frequently made links from their own blogs to the blogs of other groups. The benefit of the multi-user blogging environment created


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at vineblogs.net was that it created an organized blog cluster – all blogs are connected by participation in the same project. This site provided information about the project, how to set up a blog, including video tutorials, web protocol and privacy considerations and a list that provided links to all blogs created as part of the project. One student explained that sharing the blogs was ‘like teaching each other’. In many ways the collective of bloggers formed a self-educating community (Burbules 2006) in which the participants are collaborators sharing a common goal, ideas, experiences and reflections and learning from each other. Teachers noted that the blogs extended and added value to the learning that was taking place in class: Some students have really got into it and are right into uploading pictures etc. A lot have also spoken about reading each other’s (blogs) and learning/getting ideas from them. It has made it a lot easier in class when there is so little time for discussion. A senior drama student described the value of the blog for keeping track of thoughts and processes as well as keeping their group on track between lessons. It was helpful. It meant we could track the evolution of the project, note down important stuff and generally follow our train of thought better! It also meant that we could communicate ideas overnight or over the weekend when we didn’t see each other without having to make a phone call – so it was simpler and more leisurely and in some ways more precise. Also it was nice to have people comment. However, when students viewed their peers as competitors, the blogs were considered too revealing: The problem was that we couldn’t write our feelings coz of wot ppl would see and we had to use code words to stop ppl steeling our ideas [sic]. For some students the blogs proved limiting when their public nature meant they had to censor comments that were not appropriate for a wider audience such as venting their frustrations with other group members. I felt like it was and wasn’t helpful. Like I felt like if I was a bit annoyed in our group because we didn’t get much done then we couldn’t really like

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let out our negative emotions because we knew that other people would be reading it. The opportunities for posting comments on blogs proved important in building connection within groups and between groups of bloggers as well as with the broader community. The teacher-student relationship was strengthened by the commenting process. The following comment posted by a student in one group to students in another group is an example of the kind of encouragement and potential for collaboration that comments provide: Comment: I’m glad you guys have got things up and running, I told you you’d be alright. -And remember, if you guys ever get stuck and need an outsider to give you some insight, I’m always there. Coz I know that sometimes we can get so caught up in our own ideas that all we need is someone to give us a different perspective and help us out. So use me!!! Xx Comments were proof of audience and students felt encouraged and motivated to write more when they got comments. When few comments came bloggers felt discouraged as these comments indicate: If you got comments it’s encouraging and you think wow, maybe I might get another one so you write more. Not a lot of people would comment and that got me down a bit. I wrote every week but no-one would comment but some blogs did get comments. Unfortunately, some teachers and students struggled to join the VINE community because individual schools’ ICT policies and sometimes whole state education systems block access to social networking sites for students. Some teachers argued to have access provided, some got around this by having students blog from home and others decided not to do it at all rather than locate the blogging experience totally outside of the school. In the case study for this research, the school and students had easy access to computers and the internet. However, for some schools and students who attempted to be involved in the VINE project access to the technology proved an issue and these students were left behind. For every blog that thrived in the VINE project there was an abandoned blog. Some students lost their motivation to write when they felt there was no audience. Although the multi-user blogging environment brought drama


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students and teachers into contact with other blogs, the most successful blogs were those within projects where the relevance of the blogs was reinforced. These included instances where teachers and fellow students posted comments on each other’s blogs and made reference to them in class time. The VINE project encouraged and facilitated partnerships between classes in different institutions that became some of the more successful learning communities in the project. In one example groups of senior students in neighbouring schools, one a government school and the other a private school, blogged their ensemble performance making on the project theme and read each other’s blogs during the process. They finally met for a combined evening of their performances. In another example students in a rural setting and students in a city setting were given the same performancemaking task that was devised through collaboration between their teachers. During the production process the city and rural students read and commented on each other’s blogs and culminated the project by swapping video recordings of their completed performances. At a tertiary level, pre-service drama teachers from universities in two different states, shared a common assessment task and created a blog into which they uploaded their group developed process drama lesson plans as resources for all to share. Such partnerships can and should be nurtured if we are to move forward in exploring the potential of collaborative learning and sharing of practice between drama groups through blogs. This is especially important in the absence of the multi-user blogging environment that the VINE project offered for drama.

Taking stock and moving forward This chapter began with the premise that reflection on drama practice and performance making is an important and valuable part of the learning process in drama. In considering the challenge that educators face to find ways to attract and encourage digital native students to take the time to reflect, the blog is examined as space for this reflective thinking to occur in drama. In this case study student participants reflected more positively about journaling their performance making through blogs and found them preferable to maintaining a traditional paper journal. When students are encouraged and motivated to reflect through blogs, this can be seen as a benefit to their learning in drama. The quality of the reflection and the ways that it impacted on students’ performance making was not examined as part of this study; however, this is an area worthy of future investigation.

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Blogs provide a way to reflect on the performance-making process that extends and reaches, in time and place, beyond the drama workshop or class. Their public nature encourages the students to think about the connection and impact of their performance making in the wider world and provides a mechanism for the world to respond. Blogging as part of the VINE project provided an opportunity for students and teachers of drama to share their performance-making experiences and to become a part of a wider community. The opportunity for feedback through comments that blogs provide serves to motivate students to write, provides the possibility for sharing of ideas and for conversation to take place between remote groups of students. The blogs opened windows to provide glimpses into other drama classrooms and to reveal the important thinking that takes place amidst the action and the enormous amount of work, often under-estimated and under-valued, that occurs before a performance is presented. Through an examination of the blogs created for the VINE project it is evident that blogs provide a means of individual and group expression that is attractive to young people. Individuality is shown when students choose a title, presentation and express themselves through language and images. This study reveals performance elements evident in the drama blogs and gives rise to another area deserving of further investigation – the notion of blogs as performance and the ways blogs enhance the live experience of learning in drama. Clearly the sense of audience that being a part of the VINE project provided is critical to this. In the absence of the multi-user blogging environment that the VINE offered, drama educators will need to take up the challenge of creating partnerships and promoting blogs so that drama blogs will have an audience and the social and sharing aspects of blogs can continue to be enjoyed. Blogs engage students with learning in a way that taps into their digital social networking interests. The VINE project introduced students to blogs at a time when they were still something of a novelty and this undoubtedly contributed to their appeal. We could equally explore the potential of wikis, drupals, moodles and other software for reflecting on performance making. Inevitably new social networking tools and software will develop, and it is more than likely that something even better suited to drama purposes will emerge for future exploration. The study revealed that in many ways the student participants were taking the leadership and showing initiative in the use of blogs, often teaching the teacher. If the students themselves are the leaders in adopting new technologies then this highlights the need for educators to be listening, taking notice and remaining open to possibilities that can be harnessed for learn-


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ing purposes. The challenge for educators to encourage digital native students to reflect is a continuing challenge. While blogs seem to have an appeal to the students involved in this particular study at this point in time, what is relevant now to the digital native student is a question that educators must continue asking and seeking to answer.

Acknowledgement The VINE project was initiated and coordinated by Drama Victoria under the direction of Jo Raphael and Justin Cash. The multi-user blogging environment, http://vineblogs.net, was generously supported by James Farmer, creator of edublogs.org who at the time of the project’s development collaborated with Jo Raphael at Deakin University where he worked in Deakin’s Institute of Teaching and Learning. A great deal of professional development on drama blogs was provided to drama teachers by Drama Victoria and not surprisingly the uptake by teachers was greater in Victoria than elsewhere. Thanks to the students and teachers for the use of their blog posts and for providing feedback on the project.

References Anderson, M. (2006), Some questions about methodology and pedagogy, in J. Carroll, M. Anderson, and D. Cameron, Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, pp. 143–145. Burbules, N. (2006), Self-educating communities: collaboration and learning through the internet, in Z. Beckman, N. Burbules and D. Silberman-Keller (eds), Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 273–284. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, C. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Dickey, M. (2004), The impact of web-logs (blogs) on student perceptions of isolation and alienation in a web-based distance learning environment. Open Learning, 19(3), 279–291. Downes, S. (2004), Educational Blogging, Educause Review, 24 August 2004, retrieved 20 September 2006 from net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0450.pdf. Eide, F. and Eide, B. (2005), Brain of the Blogger, retrieved 25 September 2006 from http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/brain-of-blogger.html. Palloff, R. and Pratt, K. (2005), Collaborating Online: Learning Together in Community. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Penrod, D. (2007), Using Blogs to Enhance Literacy. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Prensky, M. (2001a), Digital natives, digital immigrants, On the Horizon. NCB University Press, 9(5).

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Prensky, M. (2001b), Digital natives and digital immigrants: Part II: do they really think differently?, On the Horizon. NCB University Press, 9(6). Taylor, P. (2000), The Drama Classroom: Action, Reflection, Transformation. London: Routledge Falmer. Windham, C. (2007), Reflecting, Writing and Responding: Reasons Students Blog, Educause Review, retrieved 1 July 2008 from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/ pdf/ELI3010.pdf. Witte, S. (2007), ‘That’s online writing, not boring school writing’: Writing with blogs and the Talkback Project, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51(2), 82–95.

Chapter 10

Interactive drama using cyberspaces Sue Davis

Cyberspaces provide us with different spaces and opportunities to create roles, respond to situations and interact with others to tell stories. While the focus of using computers in education is often on access to and proficient use of technology, these in themselves do not lead to improvements in learning or quality drama experiences. Notions of interactivity are central to human/computer experiences but are also key to theories of learning, and dramatic process. Different notions of interactivity are explored in this chapter, with a particular focus on the ways in which collaborative interactions may occur through the creation of cyberdrama. Examples of how this can be done will be outlined in this chapter drawing on Cleo Missing – a drama that unfolded over time through uploading a range of material onto a website; and The Immortals, a drama staged utilizing digital pre-texts and a range of social networking and e-learning spaces. An interactive model for cyberdrama creation is outlined and the kinds of learning that might emerge from these kinds of processes are identified.

Introduction What can the use of digital technologies and online spaces offer to those who are concerned with creating drama with young people in educational contexts? What kinds of processes and interactions might contribute to meaningful learning in this field? These are the kinds of questions that have driven my work over the past few years as I have engaged in several projects working in various educational contexts. Currently within education systems there is a major focus on the integration of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in the classroom. The discourse around these initiatives is often almost ‘romantically’

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inclined with increased use of computer technology being championed as the key to increased student engagement, quality learning and positive outcomes. There have been claims to the contrary though, with a growing body of research indicating that increased access to computers alone is not leading to any significant increase in student learning outcomes if pedagogy doesn’t change (Cuban 2001; Cuban, et al. 2001; Goddard 2002; Cox et al. 2004). Other reviews of the use of technology from within the digital arts domain have also identified that we need to move beyond fetishizing ‘the technology without regard for artistic vision and content’ (Dixon 2007: 5). In his critique of ‘object-centred’ uses of technology, Pacey argues that technology use should be more people-centred and that this kind of outlook implies interactions which are participatory in style (Pacey 1999, p. 213). These critiques recognize that teaching with technology is not just about how to use the hardware and the software, but is also very much about people, processes and a range of different interactions. Notions of interactivity are also to be found in discussions about effective drama and learning processes. What kinds of interaction are possible, with whom or what and how might these be enacted through cyberdrama projects and processes? In this chapter some explanations of interactivity of relevance to drama will be explored before the notion of ‘collaborative interaction’ is analysed in relation to two cyberdrama projects I have worked on.

Interactivity in cyberdrama The term interactivity is one that is commonly used in discussions about the nature of human interaction with computer interfaces and about the kinds of user experiences that are most satisfying (Laurel 1993; Ryan 1999; Meadows 2003). In one of the first works written about the possibilities of combining drama/theatre sensibilities and computing design, Brenda Laurel explained that human-computer activity was based on the experience of interactivity: I posited that interactivity exists on a continuum that could be characterized by three variables: frequency (how often you could interact), range (how many choices were available) and significance (how much the choices really affected matters) . . . Now I believe that these variables provide only part of the picture. There is another more rudimentary measure of interactivity: You either feel yourself to be participating in the ongoing representation or you don’t. (Laurel 1993, pp. 20–21)

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At that time Laurel critiqued the view that designing such interfaces was only about technical and scientific knowledge. She proposed that those from artistic disciplines such as theatre and drama may in fact have a lot to offer in terms of designing effective experiences for people who are interacting with computers. If we look more specifically at the kinds of interactivity that might be possible for users through the cyberspaces of the internet then an exploration of the concept of ‘cyber’ also offers some insights into the nature of interactivity. The term ‘cyber’ is generally regarded as referring to computers and the human-computer interface – the digitized space ‘whereby physical barriers of appearance, geographical space and form disappear’ (LeNoir 1999, p. 175). The term ‘cyber’ itself does not however actually refer only to computers and human/computer interactions. It is from a Greek work which meant ‘to steer or navigate’ and came into common use in the 1940s in relation to the field of ‘cybernetics’ and Norbert Wiener’s concept of ‘goal-directed systems’. A significant feature of this kind of system is the notion of feedback loops. This means that there is a goal, there is an input and resulting action and there is a feedback loop that helps maintain the effective operation of the system. Effective cybernetic systems receive feedback and respond appropriately to ensure the goal is reached. So what kind of cybernetic system is a cyberdrama?

Cyberdrama and interactivity The term ‘cyberdrama’ was first coined by Janet Murray in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. She explored the various kinds of emerging narrative and storytelling experiences available in cyberspace and loosely defined cyberdrama as such: . . . a reinvention of storytelling itself for the new digital medium . . . As a new generation grows up, it will take participatory form for granted and will look for ways to participate in ever more subtle and expressive stories. (Murray 1997, p. 271) For Murray, story and interactivity are key features of cyberdrama with the important point being made that participants who engage with the digital medium (or system) have expectations regarding participation and active engagement. The notion of a cyberdrama is therefore that of a story or narrative which requires active engagement from participants, with

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opportunities for input and responses which show the impact of the user’s input – that is interaction. It’s perhaps useful to see some differences in the nature of the interactivity that may be available therefore in a cyberdrama process. There are interactions with the computers and the technology itself, but then there are also interactions between participants. These may also be extended through to interactions with another kind of participant or user, who may be an audience for the cyberdrama. The nature of the interactivity can vary enormously, from participants and users choosing between limited pathways to those whereby they can affect and change the plot. This basic distinction can be broken down further. In his extensive review of different kinds of digital performance Dixon (2007) identifies four different kinds of interactivity which feature in various kinds of interactive art and performance pieces: 1. Navigation – users make choices about where they go within the space. They might choose from multiple branches of a story, or which character to follow. All the options are pre-programmed. 2. Participation – users may participate, as in a game like form. 3. Conversation – two or more users are involved and interacting within the space or system. 4. Collaboration – users collaborate to actually alter the structure, architecture and activities of the game or drama world. (Dixon 2007, p. 563) What is interesting here is that the first two kinds tend to suggest interaction mainly with the computer or system, whereas the last two require interactions between people, between active human participants. The final category, which is concerned with collaboration, highlights the kinds of interactions between participants that are also common to many kinds of drama experience and communications in cyberspace. So while it is possible to analyse the kinds of interactions which may demonstrate all four kinds of interaction outlined by Dixon, the rest of this chapter will explore examples of work that may fit within the category of collaborative interactivity.

Interactivity in drama The form of drama that was used to inform my projects has been that of process drama. This form allows for a kind of collaborative interactivity providing opportunities for participants to work within a structured environment with a narrative throughline helping drive the action. Within


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process drama (Haseman 1991; O’Toole 1992), no script is created in advance but participants help build fictional worlds, taking on various roles within specific frames. The main action in a process drama is generally improvised with the role of teacher or ‘leader’ (Haseman 2002; Simons 2002) being a key one in this process. The leader works with other participants but also guides, directs and advises in helping create the fictional world, often introducing a stimulus or pre-text (O’Neill 1995). The leader works actively throughout the process, both in-role (as a character) and out-of role (Morgan and Saxton 1987) leading reflective processes to help deepen the learning that may arise from the process. Collaboration is required at each stage and relies on the active participation of the process leader as well as other participants to be realized. So what might cyberdrama become in relation to this concept of a goaldirected system operating within a learning frame? Is the goal the production of a well-designed digital space which uses technology effectively to create a user-friendly interface, or is the goal the creation of a coherent story, or dramatic and social learning experienced by the participants? Or is it a combination of these? What kinds of interactions might lead to the achievement of these goals and what are the components of an effective cyberdrama system? The next part of this chapter will explore the different factors at play in building cyberdramas utilizing collaborative interactions.

Project outlines The two projects discussed here both used process drama style structures or what Carroll and Cameron have previously called ‘interactive process drama’ (Carroll and Cameron 2003). Cleo Missing was created collaboratively with a small team of university students and aimed to explore the possibilities for creating a drama that would be enacted through cyberspaces. A website was created for the drama and over a period of three months various materials – including short video clips, text, photo stories and audio clips – were uploaded. A narrative developed about a girl who went missing from university. I participated as the drama leader, managing the development of the drama from within through the role of Cleo’s friend, Ivy. This was a role quite similar to that of the teacher-in-role in a process drama. The interactions were with two different kinds of participants, the project ‘participants’ who were involved in a collaborative devising process to create the drama, and the ‘users’, those who experienced the drama as an audience online. The drama attempted to incorporate some interactive elements for users through the use of forums on the site. Users

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could contribute information which was then woven into the unfolding drama where possible. The Immortals was created in collaboration with drama teacher Hayley Linthwaite, working with 15- to 16-year-old students enrolled in a Theatre Arts subject in a school context. Over the course of six weeks, students worked in groups to create roles in response to a digital pre-text. They created video clips which were uploaded to YouTube and to a Blackboard site within the Education Department’s e-learning platform. Participants built their character and the narrative through contributing to wikis and blogs also set up on Blackboard, as well as to a space within the social networking space, Ning. Both the teacher and I worked in-role, creating different roles that responded to the pre-text alongside students. We also provoked further dramatic action through the introduction of additional narrative twists and tensions. While other users could view the video material and the Ning space throughout the drama, external audience input was minimal. Students did share their work though in a live face-to-face presentation with an audience of parents and friends at the end of the process. In both cases data were collected from project participants, with a particular focus on the kinds of activities they engaged with. The following analysis draws on transcripts of interviews as well as written survey data with a focus on three different categories of interactions: interaction with the narrative and content, interaction with others and interactions with and through the technology. It should be noted that these three types of interaction are not mutually exclusive however and the drama is created through a coalescence of these different interactions.

Collaboration through interacting with the narrative and content Drama focus and pre-text The forms of process drama and interactive drama operate as open works (Eco 1989). This means that pre-texts may be selected and the drama leader may play a kind of playwright function (O’Neill); however, this function is generally shared with participants as the drama unfolds. The roles that participants take on and the way the drama unfolds relies on the active involvement of the participants and their interaction with narrative offers made. Another key function for the drama leader is finding a dramatic focus or question for the drama that resonates with participants. This needs to be something that participants can connect to, something that can draw on


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their experiences but also connect them to other people, places and times. To launch the drama the leader will often use a pre-text or stimulus. This pre-text provides some parameters and suggests possibilities for characters and calls for action from the participants. In Cleo Missing, the concept for the drama and the actual pre-text were created in collaboration with the four project participants. The dramatic idea that emerged revolved around identity, secrets and betrayal, which might be summed up by the question ‘do you ever really know someone?’ In searching for a reason why others might want to follow a cyberdrama, it was suggested by the participants that we would need to create tension which would engage users from the start. The idea of working within a mystery genre then followed. Mystery or inquiry focused dramas are often used by many drama practitioners because participants can be enrolled to investigate past events to arrive at an understanding of a present situation (O’Neill 1995, p. 143). The actual digital pre-text for the drama became the homepage for the website (Figure 10.1). It was written in-role from the perspective of the character Ivy – a friend of Cleo’s. She shared her belief that the police were

Figure 10.1

Homepage and pre-text for Cleo Missing

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not doing enough to investigate Cleo’s disappearance and invited others to share what they knew about Cleo and what might have happened to her. In The Immortals, some decisions were made by the teacher and myself before the drama was launched with the students. We decided that the focus of the drama should link to some concepts related to another subject students were studying focused on the ‘Future Body’. We also wanted to create a dramatic world that allowed for strong symbolic and metaphoric explorations and the possibility to move beyond a documentary style. We therefore decided to focus on the question, ‘what would you do if you were offered immortal life?’ We created a digital pre-text in the form of an email with a link to a video clip. This text was emailed to students and also shared in the live classroom context: You know you are special . . . You have always known haven’t you? But now this has been recognised and You have been chosen This is not a mistake . . . don’t delete this message Your life will change forever! If you accept the offer The offer of a lifetime! Find out more Email me your response! Create your own profile Contribute to the developing story I would have to say that for some students it took time for them to connect to the idea of this drama and that it raised issues for me about where the negotiating and sharing of the playwright function begins. Having a predecided focus and pre-text allowed us as drama facilitators time to create digital materials, resources and stimulus and feel prepared to begin the process. However, this pre-determined focus perhaps reduced the capacity for some students to feel committed to the drama early on.


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Building role and contributing to the narrative Another key factor in building participant commitment and interaction within the drama is through the development of role. A tool that is very helpful for doing this is already familiar to drama educators – the role profile, whereby participants respond to key questions in-role. The advantage of using online spaces for this kind of work is that many of the social networking spaces that young people use also utilize these kinds of formats. They are used to answering questions to create their online persona when they sign up for spaces such as Myspace, Facebook or Bebo. It is possible to set up a cyberspace (such as a Ning space) for the cyberdrama that operates in a similar way for their fictional role. The creation of character profiles (Figure 10.2) was one of the first steps taken in the Cleo Missing project and these profiles were then uploaded to the website as character pages which other material could later be uploaded to. Throughout the project, participants also had the opportunity to decide what went onto their page. Through participating in discussions

Figure 10.2

Character profile from Cleo Missing

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at meetings and prior to filming, the participants negotiated what might happen to their roles, to the relationships, and the storyline. These interactions then impacted on the drama through them deciding how they wanted to represent their character, play their role and contribute to the story. This was something that participants found satisfying and engaging: P4: In everything else you get given a character, you get given a script and you get given how your character would react in situations. Whereas here, we got to decide that. (Interview 22 July 2005, l: 267–269) If we are seeking to create opportunities for collaborative interactivity in an ongoing and engaging way, participants and any other users need to see that if they are expending effort that this will have some impact on the drama. In the Cleo Missing project we had tried to create an audience by sending out an electronic invitation to participate through the university student drama community. They were invited to contribute to the story through the forum option on the website. It was my intention therefore to try to incorporate audience/user input and weave these into the story wherever we could. This was possible on a couple of occasions. One photo story (Figure 10.3) in particular was created in direct response to user input. One user posted some information about seeing Cleo in the city on the night of her disappearance. The next time our participant group met we discussed this posting and responded to it by taking a series of photos that were meant to be taken from security camera footage in the city. It showed Cleo having some kind of altercation with one of the characters from the drama. This reflexive action was appreciated by at least one user, who communicated with me later and stated that this was one of her favourite sections of the cyberdrama. In the Immortals project participants were able to contribute to the developing narrative as well, first through their creation of roles and next by deciding how each role would respond to the offer of immortal life. Students were invited to respond to the pre-text through working in small groups of 3–4 creating one role per group. The developing narrative was shaped through a set of structured activities that required the groups to create digital material (including video clips) in response to four module tasks. We began with a fairly simple multi-media task – creating a video log – with the focus on one character. The multi-media and drama requirements become more complex as the modules progressed, module two was a news/current affairs report and module 3 was a metaphoric or symbolic piece. The requirement to work across a range of online spaces was


Figure 10.3

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Photo story posted in response to user input

introduced throughout the first week and within each group different people had responsibility for maintaining specific spaces (for example, Blackboard wiki, Blackboard blog, Ning site). Each week the teacher and I reviewed the content students had created and planned the next frame of the drama. In doing so we would try to build on the offers students had made in their work and extend on these. This structured but open collaborative process was something that in the end most students responded positively to, although some acknowledged that they had found it problematic earlier in the process. Steph: . . . the way we all developed our characters was such that not everyone knew everything about all the characters and so then we

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interacted with them and a lot of secrets came out at the end.(Interview transcript, 4 December 2008, lines 76–78) Lauren: I think it was good, because like everyone … I know I was really confused at the beginning about the whole immortality thing, but then leaving it open left us to decide what happened. (Interview transcript, 4 December 2008, lines 189–191). The features of the work that provided opportunities for collaborative interactivity with the narrative therefore included z z z z

creation of digital pre-texts which allowed for different participant responses; participants building their own roles and relationships; developing a narrative structure and tasks that allowed participants to create their own responses; reading different participant creative content and dramatic offers, interacting with these and building upon them in determining dramatic frames which followed.

All of these content interactions were enacted through collaboration with other people. The range of communications and interactions involved ranged from the live and face-to-face kind through to synchronous and asynchronous communications in cyberspace. Some of these interactions occurred out of role as participants discussed and planned what should happen next and reflected on developments, while other interactions occurred in-role, particularly those on the blogs and wikis. There is not enough room within this chapter to tease out the nature of all these kinds of communications and interactions, so several of these will be selected to focus on.

Collaboration through interaction with others – live and online The Cleo Missing project had only four core participants and we met weekly. Those face-to-face sessions were where the majority of interactions occurred – the online interactions between them outside of this time were fairly limited. It seemed that the participants were interested and keen about the project in face-to-face meetings but perhaps didn’t have the time or inclination to devote towards the project outside these times. The collaborative interactions between participants still occurred mostly in the live face-to-face mode or with individuals communicating directly with me.


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In this case the main online interactions were with other users, and this audience became very important. The website forum was our key focus for interactive engagement by users. This meant that throughout the project I eagerly followed the postings made on the forum, noted the trails users had responded to and sought to acknowledge these in a number of ways. Towards the end of the drama nobody was posting to the forums, it seemed that the project moved from being like a process drama to becoming more like an online theatre piece – users were not interacting through collaboration. When we weren’t sure if there was an audience out there later in the process we found it quite dispiriting. What was interesting for me was how much I missed the audience response that you would normally be able to sense in a live process drama or performance. The relationship with an ‘audience’ seems to be as important in the online context as in any other live drama process or performance. What also became very apparent throughout the Immortals project was that managing interactions between participants is an issue with any process involving people, whether these interactions occur online or in the faceto-face mode. Throughout the Immortals project interactions between participants were a major consideration. This was especially so as this class had been newly formed through combining members of two previous classes. The decision to go with creating one character per group partly arose from the desire to get students working together to build some group commitment. Students were required by the task to negotiate with each other and decide on the role the group would create and be able to embody. This was decided upon in the face-to-face mode before communications and creative work moved into the cyberspaces. This was not always easy for all groups, while two groups moved very quickly to a state of working productively, two others spent considerable time early on working through status and work role issues. Steph: Well everyone had to agree, and then to agree to disagree, and then try to find a solution we could all agree with. Alex: There was a lot of compromise, you have to talk it through with your fellow group members. Someone likes one thing, someone likes another, you have to find a happy medium and reach a compromise. (Interview transcript, 4 December 2008, lines 92–97) As in any drama process, failure to recognize and deal with the human dimensions of group interactions can lead to blockages in the creative process. While we had hoped that the creative engagement of the group tasks would help build coherence within the small groups, this was not always the

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case. In the final survey, it was apparent that approximately one-third of the class wasn’t so happy with the class combination and their group formation. Two of the groups these members were part of were slow to get going with their creative processes and some members felt left out at times. This highlighted for us as drama educators the importance of group formation and protocol processes in any drama process – live or virtual. Some of the online interactions which were quite productive and contributed significantly to the drama were those that were conducted ‘in-role’ within a range of cyberspaces. Each character had their own wiki page that they could build, adding photos, background information and reflections regarding their character’s life. There was also a team blog that they could post to regarding what was happening in the drama. On each of these there were comment options, and characters could post in-role to other’s postings. This kind of interaction helped build relationships and alliances between characters and flesh out the world of the drama. At the end of the project many of the participants identified these kinds of interactions as being some of the ones they found most enjoyable, especially the chats in-role such as this example: Agent 66> I think we need all the immortals to leave NOW Agent 101> ZAIPH IS OUT Agent 99> Zaiph has escaped! That’s one less soul to look after Agent 101> WHERES MARIXA Agent 99> Marixa, surely there must be something wrong with her if she isn’t here Agent 99> I hope not, though TOMBE> HAHAHAHAHA ALL PART OF OUR PLANS Agent 99> Not just something. Agent 99> MARIXA Agent 101> why - is she dead? TOMBE> I LAUGH IN THE FACE OF DEATH Agent 101> WHO R U Agent 66> WHat is this Agent 66> ?? What was significant for me in the Immortals project in terms of human interactions was the power of the face-to-face experience, for one frame of the drama in particular. This occurred about half way through the drama and the teacher and I decided to change the roles we had been taking, switching from equal status immortal respondents to high status ‘secret agents’. Through taking on these roles we also changed the roles and


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relationships for students. They were enrolled as student agents who were each invited to help find out more information about the immortal characters. This live interaction in a face-to-face context proved to be a powerful one, with many students commenting at the end of the process that this had in fact been their favourite part of the whole process. Siobhan: Yeah, the live interaction. The way we sat down in our room and all of a sudden our Principal came in and gave this serious speech about what was going on and how our teacher had been taken away. Siobhan: . . . and then the teachers burst through the door in character and then we all got thrown into this big improvisation process which really helped in the end . . . Steph: We worked really well as a team I think . . . and we kept it going when the agents left . . . and we were all whispering. (Interview transcript, 4 December 2008, lines 228–245). The impact of this particular interaction had me thinking carefully about the real purpose of the online interactions, when it appeared that the faceto-face, live form of process drama was perhaps the more powerful. However, some other students commented that the live chat conducted in-role as agents at the end of the process was also a powerful experience for them. This seemed to indicate that the technology in itself is not the key factor to powerful human interactions, but the quality of the co-present experience and the degree of engagement is still important. This would seem to support some statements by Auslander where he has identified that for both online or face-to-face drama the key features include ‘live interaction’, connections and feedback (Auslander 2006).

Collaborative interactivity with the technology The emergence of a range of cheaper recording technologies, web 2.0 spaces and tools have meant there are many more options now for creating cyberdrama. Interactions with these technologies can provide opportunities for engagement and feedback for participants. This was something that became apparent to me early on in the process of the Cleo Missing project. From the first time we photographed the participants in-role, I noticed the way participants seemed to become particularly connected and engaged when their experiences were framed by technology. This was something I also noted when we videoed scenes and created some audio recordings.

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It seemed that the use of various recording technologies framed the performance and in those moments the performers achieved a sense of connection with their roles and a kind of heightened awareness. It became obvious throughout the process that some participants were also highly engaged when they manipulated the technology to ‘frame’ performance, that is, when they were behind the camera. During this time they had a sense of agency and creative control through the framing of the shot, making decisions about angle, light, shot size, length of shot and so forth. Therefore, it seemed that having participants interact with technology to exercise creative control as well as having their experiences framed by technology lead to more significant engagement. During the Immortals project I found another significant way that framing through the use of technology may build engagement. Something that students seemed very interested in, was the potential audience they may attract on the internet and the opportunities that might be available through posting their work on YouTube. Alex: I think it’s making drama more accessible for more regular kinds of people, not just actors and actresses. So you can be at school and writing your script, and then make it, like your own movie, and put it on YouTube and everyone can watch it and respond. (Interview transcript, 4 December 2008, lines 49–52) One thing that should be noted however in respect to young people’s interactions with technology is that teachers and drama leaders should not make assumptions about the multi-media or communications literacies that ‘all’ students may possess. Yes some young people have very sophisticated skills in these areas but others may not. The Immortals participants were very experienced with using specific social networking spaces and some had created their own video clips. However, at the beginning of the project when I checked some basic skills that would be required for this project I discovered that their digital literacy skills were quite patchy. Most students did not know how to resize photographs, only one student knew what a wiki was and most students did not know how to edit video footage and save it in different formats. It demonstrated to me the importance of conducting a skills audit at the beginning of a project and utilizing teaching strategies such as peer tutoring to ensure participants have the necessary skills. This will help increase participant opportunities to participate in the collaborative process and to be able to make meaningful contributions to the creative process using digital technologies.


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Conclusion Through my cyberdrama projects to date what has become clear is that various technologies can provide opportunities for participants to develop multi-media skills and experiences of engagement. What the cyberspaces and online communications offer are opportunities to interact with others, build role and dramatic context, and access a wider audience for their work. I have found that there are a range of different kinds of interactions that need to be considered in order to create experiences that are meaningful for young people in educational or learning contexts. These kinds of interactions are collaborative in nature and involve teachers or drama leaders interacting with students or participants as the group builds a dramatic narrative interacting through and with technology. As a kind of cyberdrama system there are goals that drive the interactions and these may relate to student engagement and learning in a number of areas. The various interactions involved in this system are represented in Figure 10.4. What this work indicates is that drama, whether it occurs in a face-to-face mode or online has human interaction as its core. The system and processes

Interactions with ideas: experiences, genres and artefacts from the culture

Interactions with the narrative/content: to create the drama: Pre-text Role creation Making offers, accepting, extending & responding to feedback

Interactions with others: Interactions with and through technology: Teacher/drama leader Multi-media creation Other participants technology Other users/audience Internet and communications technologies

Goal orientation Learning about: Ourselves, humanity, drama, technology and cyberspaces

Figure 10.4

Different kinds of interactivity in a cyberdrama ‘system’

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for creating cyberdrama are about people and reinforce what Pacey has said ‘sensibilities regarding people and nature seem central to what technology ought to be about’ (Pacey 1999, p. 222).

References Auslander, P. (2006), Afterword: is there life after liveness?, in S. Broadhurst and J. Machon (eds), Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity. Houndsmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 194–198. Carroll, J. and Cameron, D. (2003), To the spice islands: interactive process drama, Fine Arts Forum, 17(8). Cox, M., Webb, M., Abbott, C., Blakeley, B., Beauchamp, T., and Rhodes, V. (2004), A Review of the Research Literature relating to ICT and attainment: Coventry: Department for Education and Skills and British Educational Communications and Technology Agency. Cuban, L. (2001), Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cuban, L., Kirkpatrick, H. and Peck, C. (2001), High access and low use of technologies in high school classrooms: explaining an apparent paradox, American Educational Research Journal, (38,4) Winter, 813–834. Dixon, S. (2007), Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Eco, U. (1989), The Open Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goddard, M. (2002), What do we do with these computers? Reflections on technology in the classroom, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, (35,1) Fall 19–26. Haseman, B. (1991), Improvisation, process drama and dramatic art, London Drama, 1991 (July), 19–21. —(2002), The ‘leaderly’ process drama and the artistry of ‘rip, mix and burn’ in B. Rasmussen and A. Ostern (eds.). Playing Betwixt and Between: The IDEA Dialogues 2001. Bergen: IDEA Publications. Laurel, B. (1993), Computers as Theatre. Boston: Addison Wesley. LeNoir, N. (1999), Acting in cyberspace: The player in the world of digital technology, in S. A. Schrum (ed.), Theatre in Cyberspace: Issues of Teaching, Acting and Directing. New York: Peter Lang. Meadows, M. S. (2003), Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Indianapolis: New Riders. Morgan, N. and Saxton, J. (1987), Teaching Drama: A World of Many Wonders. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Murray, J. H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama. Portsmouth: Heinemann. O’Toole, J. (1992), The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning. London & New York: Routledge.


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Pacey, A. (1999), Meaning in Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ryan, M.-L. (1999), Immersion vs interactivity: virtual reality and literary theory, SubStance 28(2), 110–137. Simons, J. (2002), Following the leader: an observation of the work of Brad Haseman on ‘leaderly’ process drama, in B. Rasmussen and A. Ostern (eds.) Playing Betwixt and Between: The IDEA Dialogues 2001. Bergen: IDEA Publications, pp. 234–296.

Chapter 11

Digital theatre and online narrative Rebecca Wotzko and John Carroll

‘Digital Theatre and Online Narrative’ explores the relationship between process drama and social media through exploration of the creation of an episodic online drama. Facebook is the digital stage on which this drama is performed using video, photographs, blogs, link sharing and textual engagement from characters. The audience become the participants in the drama by having the opportunity to interact one on one with characters through their social profiles and to respond to media shared by the characters. Process drama techniques such as pre-text and role play are used along with social media as methods to generate narrative material from the actors and external participants. New narrative structures for this medium are discussed and the challenge of maintaining dramatic tension while facilitating the artistic engagement of participants and audience are explored.

The development of digitally based social media platforms has provided dramatic artists with a new stage for performance. They provide the opportunity to develop alternative ways of telling stories and form new relationships with audiences. The participatory culture and collaborative nature of digitally based social media forms creates new opportunities to develop dramatic work that facilitates active participation. Victor Turner (1988, pp. 31–32) saw that ‘both drama and film are collaborative social performative systems’ requiring active involvement from all participants for a ritual/ drama to be completed. The current digital development of this is what French cybertheorist Pierre Lévy coined as ‘collective intelligence’ or ‘cosmopedia’ (Lévy 1997) of digital audiences and their involvement with visual media.

Digital Theatre and Online Narrative

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Lev Manovich (1999) sees modern storytelling returning to ancient rolebased forms of narrative, pointing out that the complexities of digital media and performance ‘extends far beyond the issue of narrative’ (Manovich 1999, p. 173) in evolving screen-based dramatic works. Role-based performance operating within the framework of specific social media platforms raises issues of interactivity, effective audience participation and the narrative structure of an online drama. To explore some of these issues, an online drama, Four, (http://www. facebook.com/group.php?gid=5664939205) was created as an experimental performance in social media. It was designed and produced as a piece of digital theatre in order to explore effective ways to apply role-based improvised drama in social media settings for students. Its aim was to develop authentic characters, engage audiences and hopefully, rethink the narrative structure of existing online dramatic works and their interaction with an online audience.

What is online drama? Brenda Laurel’s 1986 work on interactive narrative defined online drama as: A first person experience within a fantasy world in which the user may create, enact and observe a character whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might in a play. (Laurel 1986, in Aarseth 1997, p. 4) Although Laurel began to see the link between role playing in a theatrical setting and role playing within a digital setting, her definition is biased towards the mediums of digital gaming and simulations. In these forms, the text does not exist without input or interaction from the user (Carroll 2005). Considering online drama as an interactive and intertextual medium extending beyond the simulated world of gaming, researcher and interactive writer Andrew Stern offers an alternative definition of interactive drama: The general concept of an interactive drama is the following: a dramatic situation in which you are free to say things and take actions that affect how the drama unfolds. (Stern 2003) Janet Murray (1997) further defines interactive online drama as ‘cyberdrama’, where the audience, as participants must experience ‘dramatic

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agency’ (Murray 2004) and have some impact on the world in which they are participating. Espen Aarseth’s (1997) concept of Ergodic Literature, which draws on Eco’s concept of the ‘open text’ (1989), requires a similar engagement with the interactive dramatic world, which defines the framework of an online drama. These practitioners see online drama as a text that doesn’t completely exist without the participation of the audience.

Recent online drama Recent examples of online dramas include work by Sue Davis, Cleo Missing, the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Fat Cow Motel, Sensis Media’s Jupiter Green and Yahoo7’s PS Trixi. Each of these dramas is driven by mystery, with clues to be solved by the viewer/user in order to ‘access’ the narrative, often in a non-linear structure (Dena 2005). Narratives are accessed in each of these online dramas through the uncovering of objects and artefacts, the reading of diaries/blogs, and the examination of photographs and other visual media. The use of static digital artefacts such as diaries, photographs and objects such as an interactive wardrobe as seen in Jupiter Green (Cooke 2006) is due to ‘Designers tend[ing] to limit user interaction to visual cues however real life is multisensory and packed with an array of complex emotional cues’ (Metros 1999, p. 287). This restriction confines the work hypertextually as ‘readers’ activity’ which ‘for the most part is limited to making choices about how to operate the text’ (Tabbi 2002, in Dena 2005). Although each of these recent online dramas fulfil Murray’s requirement for digital artefacts to have ‘the motivation of a central dramatic action’ (Murray 1997, p. 255), their inclusion travels towards a predetermined ending with limited influence from the audience in determining how the narrative will unfold or end (Dena 2005). They therefore lack the facilitation of ‘dramatic agency’ (Murray 2004) or impact on the story world in which they are participating.

Forms of the narrative Hypertext The internet itself does not operate in a linear structure. In 1965, Theodor Nelson conceived the term ‘hypertext’, envisaging a way to organize information where each document or fragment of information connects to another (Kelly 2005). The internet is a collection of infinite web-linking


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media which consist of hypertext or hyperlinks. When designing an online drama it is important to keep the structure of the internet media in mind to separate it from simply being an imitation of other performance media. Media literacy among contemporary audiences means there is no longer a single reality or point of view (Murray 1997) in the online environment. Cross-media platforms used in a digital story provide multiple sets for the digital stage of the narrative making the narrative ‘mosaic rather than linear in structure’ (Murray 1997, p. 156). This kaleidoscopic structure of new media works allows the viewer to enhance their ability to imagine life from multiple points of view (Murray 1997) – something that is encapsulated in concepts of the cyberdrama and the hyperserial. One way to access this concept is through the concept of a kaleidoscopic narrative. This can be visualized as an analogous structure to artist David Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photographs. ‘Joiner’ photographs are a style of photographic montage that breaks the notion that the narrative of a still photograph must have four straight edges as seen in Figure 11.1. Each image in Hockney’s style of artwork tells a story of its own, and when brought together with other images, the story grows. The images are very much like fragments in a kaleidoscope. This is where we begin to see the connection with Murray’s story model. To construct an effective online narrative this idea of story structure needs to be kept in mind. As in the kaleidoscopic narrative, each photograph in the photomontage functions

Figure 11.1 Justin on the Net, Photomontage Wotzko, Rebecca (2008)

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as an independent image; however, when combined each facet reveals itself as a point of tension within the new dramatic arc.

Improvised drama and pre-text The teacher-facilitator of an improvised drama activity will often use a pre-text (O’Neill 1995) to frame the dramatic work. Drama educator Cecily O’Neill describes pre-text as below: Pre-text frames the participants in a firm relationship to the potential action and furnishes an excuse for an immediate action or task or carries an implication of further action, so that participants’ anticipation and search for fulfilment can begin. (O’Neill 1995, p. 23) Pre-text has a degree of ‘openness’ to it as it can be reused to generate a unique outcome each time as it facilitates a series of ‘unique encounters among the participants’ (O’Neill 1995, p. 23). Outcomes within improvised or process drama are also intended to have a degree of ‘unpredictability’. The role of the teacher-facilitator in this instance is similar to that of the director of a devised theatre work: to nourish the ‘infinitely deeper vision that comes from the rich, interweaving explorations of a whole group of imaginative and creative individuals’ (Brook 1993, p. 104). Pre-text can be the first scene or ‘episode’ of a text to facilitate further drama from the participants (O’Neill 1995). This is a version of the ‘script’ that Szilas (1999) is looking for in the organization of interactivity in a digital text. A ‘digital pre-text’ creates an ‘immersive’ experience for digital improvisation and role play, creating the link between process drama and digital media in order to effectively engage the audience as co-constructors of the narrative (Carroll et al. 2006).

Role play and digital media The interaction of improvised or process drama and online based texts was demonstrated in the 2003 work (Carroll and Cameron), To the Spice Islands: Interactive Process Drama. Within this online drama they found that: The use of web-based communication deliberately blurs traditional boundaries between participant and spectator, actor and character, interactor and viewer. (Carroll and Cameron 2003)


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When the audience engages with an online text by using ‘in-role’ techniques, it opens the possibility of becoming ‘immersed in an “alternate reality”’ (Dena 2005, p. 14). Carroll et al. (2006) term this as being immersed in a ‘situated role’ – positioned in the tension between process drama and digital technologies. Dena’s concept of ‘digital immersion’ is ‘also described as removing the fourth wall’ (Carroll et al. 2006, p. 30). The audience shifts from being passive to becoming a participant within the work. Applying process drama principles to the digital stage facilitates this audience transformation. It is clear that role play is inherent in online media and enables participants to work in the area of Boal’s ‘metaxis’; simultaneously participating in reality and the ‘image of reality’ (Boal 1995, p. 43). To maximize the authenticity available in a dramatic setting, Augusto Boal developed the concept of ‘Invisible Theatre’ (Boal 1992). Boal’s Invisible Theatre was based on: . . . acting out a scene that would happen in real life and improvising it in a place where the events could really happen, in front of an audience who, unaware that they are an audience, accordingly act as if the improvised scene was real. Fiction penetrates reality. (Boal 1995, p. 185) The actors in an invisible theatre work aim to construct belief rather than suspend it (Boal 1995; Murray 1997). Live performance is valued for ‘its putative ability to create community (if not communion) among its participants, including performers and spectators’ (Auslander 1999, p. 4). The encouragement of interpersonal networking and ‘community’ in social media means that users are likely to engage in ‘real’ forms of interaction and performance online through the assumed identity found within ‘email, passwords and internet persona’ (Shaughnessy 2005, p. 208). Paul Sutton of the theatre and technology company C&T argues that the ‘ . . . construction of new identities on the internet is an accepted convention and that this could be regarded as another form of being “in-role”’ (Shaughnessy 2005, p. 206). In the digital world you are ‘projecting a version of self that is inherently theatrical’ (Carroll et al. 2006, p. 33). As digital theatre removes the fourth wall, (ibid. 2006) an element of Invisible Theatre becomes evident. The audience may be aware they are participants in a work but may not be aware to what degree they are a ‘spectactor’ as they cannot be certain as to who is really behind a digital mask. The conventions of online role play offer a new framework for the development of characters for an online drama in order to effectively engage social media audiences and participants.

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A digital media case study: FOUR To engage with the online narrative and applied drama elements described above, an online drama, Four was developed. The digitally designed drama used a script based digital pre-text as stimulus for the performers and operated using the social networking site Facebook as centre stage for the action (see http://www.facebook.com/group. php?gid=5664939205). To summarize the Facebook interface, each member of this social networking site has a profile page, which allows them to add friends, share links, upload photographs and videos, post notes, and join and create groups. Users are able to link their Facebook page to other social media sites such as YouTube, Blogger, Digg and Wikipedia. The site provides status updates, which give users insights into what their friends have been doing/ thinking/feeling in real time. This site became the stage that contained the online drama episodes. The drama Four began with four video narratives sequentially uploaded on to Facebook over the period of a week. The characters interacted online with each other, in response to the video texts as they appeared and with audience members via their Facebook profiles and a discussion group. Both the characters and the audience were then able to draw on content in other forms of social media (Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, blogs, link sharing) to support their responses to the emerging story in the videos. The characters and the audience could use the Facebook group site to respond to the video dramatic texts in a number of ways, by z z z z

commenting on videos of the characters writing on the ‘wall’ for the group sharing hyperlinks they found relevant to the content or dramatic scenario and commenting on the shared hyperlinks initiating or engaging with a discussion board topic that allows group participants to discuss content related to the narrative in more detail

These were all active methods of not only responding to the texts but contributing to the dramatic action through direct interaction with the characters away from their individual profiles. To discuss things one to one with characters, the viewers of the drama have the opportunity to add the characters as Facebook friends, furthering their relationship and engagement in the drama.


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Integration with existing screen-based content: Love My Way After viewing the recently successful Australian drama Love My Way screened on subscription TV, it seemed possible to tap into an existing audience and community for the online drama rather than attempting to create an audience and fan base from scratch. The appeal of Love My Way came from its approach as a fresh, authentic piece of Australian drama based on awkward family relationships and the notion of still ‘growing up’ in your 30s. The complex web of relationships and subtext within the work offered several opportunities in which to integrate or link the online drama, Four such as z

z

making the characters of Four discuss the show and its characters in order to make sense of their own lives, allowing reality and fiction to penetrate one another; to create the drama as a parallel universe, implying relationships between the Love My Way characters and my characters – a spin off using younger characters that gives the Love My Way characters lives outside what is seen in each episode.

This puts a new spin on fan fiction and created the opportunity for other fans of the program to weave themselves into the drama. The work was promoted online by participating in existing Love My Way fan groups and forums. Using this model, it was important not to be too dependent on the existing screen drama to drive the online project as this requires it to be timed around the television season of Love My Way. Too much integration without the permission of the Love My Way producers also risked infringing on copyright. Considering these issues, Love My Way was used as a common thread between the characters, all being fans of the program. Four contrasting characters were developed and the reasons for each of them to watch Love My Way were considered. This resulted in the following dramatic role-based personae: Kate Harpur – a filmmaker who works at a bar, saving up money to pursue her dream of going to film school, fear within herself prevents her from doing it, desires to make a television program or film similar to Love My Way

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Drama Education with Digital Technology Kate Harpur

Live in the same apartment block, constant conflict

Best friends

Know each other through Kate

Fiona James

Know each other through Fiona

Michael Walters

Used to date, reunite online through a Love My Way forum

Toby West Meet later on through Kate and Fiona

Figure 11.2 Character links

Michael Walters – working as a junior executive in his father’s company, constantly living in his father’s shadow, watches Love My Way occasionally on his plasma television Toby West – an ex Arts student who has accepted his fate and a job in the public service, first watches Love My Way on DVD for escape Fiona James – a sales assistant, who denies that it is her ‘real job’ or ‘real life’, is an avid fan of Brendan Cowell, the lead actor in the series, which is her main motivation for watching Love My Way. Figure 11.2 depicts the links between the online characters, providing stimulus for their interactions both in the videos and online. The script, while organically developed, was devised to function as a pretext by providing vignettes of each character’s life. The tension present in the web of relationships between Kate and Michael, Fiona and Toby served both the actors and the audience in their online interactions. The script was written in such a way that alternative forms of media could be used to convey each of the ten short scenes. This gave the scenes the potential of being presented using photographs, blog postings or a pastiche of forum postings and link sharing. The balance between these scenes and the provided dialogue gave several angles of stimulus for the digital pre-text, both internally for the actors and externally for the audience.

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Because the performance worked as a piece of devised drama within a multimedia digital performance space, the dramatic arc for the work needed to be reconsidered. The traditional linear model of inciting incident, rising tension, climax and resolution was not appropriate for the online environment. The dramatic arc of the work needed to be reactive to multiple media platforms and the audience’s influence and role within the drama. A kaleidoscopic dramatic model was conceptualized for the performance to illustrate the external influences operating on the characters within the drama. Four scenes from the original script were made into video excerpts, the other scenes used as back-story with other media. This new narrative model that developed in the script was applied to the performance methods and media available within the digital stage that reflected the Hockney type images. The many facets of social media available within the Facebook group were then refracted in the kaleidoscopic narrative model pictured in Figure 11.3. The kaleidoscopic media model depicted in Figure 11.3 shows how the use of online media is linked together. Centre stage for interactions and media content is in the Four Facebook group. From here are links to Kate, Michael, Toby and Fiona’s profile pages where audience members can interact with them on a one-to-one basis. Dramatic agency and the opportunity Dramatic agency

Dramatic agency Video Michael's profile

Kate's profile

Text (Comments, Forums, Blogs)

Links

Facebook Group

Fiona's profile

Toby's profile Photographs Dramatic agency

Figure 11.3 Kaleidoscopic media model

Dramatic agency

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to collate and share multimedia content are enabled at both the level of the character profile pages and the discussion group.

Dramatic process In initial rehearsals, the three actors and the Fourth actor/facilitator workshopped character development prior to moving on to the script. The video rehearsals used on-camera performance skills to help the actors internalize dialogue and build subtext to give depth to their performances. Sample scripts where the subtext could be played multiple ways to bring new meaning to the dialogue were provided. The digital rehearsals and character development occurred by logging on and interacting in-role by using the Facebook accounts set up for each character. The details filled out on each character profile provided further pre-text for character and drama development. This included information on general interests, favourite music, television shows, films and books. The more detail supplied on each profile increased the depth of the character and their consequent authenticity. This is a technique that potentially can be used to aid the development of characters for a traditional theatre setting to help students engage in-role. The Facebook profile pages of the dramatic roles within the drama can be accessed online . For example, Kate Harpur’s profile (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=648507685) is Kate’s own personal space to express what she is thinking/feeling/doing as well as detailing other aspects of her identity such as interests, work details and other activities. Kate can also share links, photographs and video via her profile, collecting articles that reflect her personal response to the drama at different stages. The actors further explored character development by contributing to their personal character profiles through filling out more personal information details, joining groups or adding Facebook applications they thought were relevant to their character’s personas or aspirations, such as the ‘bookshelf’ application that was added to the profile of Toby, the ex-Arts student. The online groups that each character joined enabled the actors to maintain the identity of their character by associating themselves with communities that had similar interests or aspirations. The titles of the groups joined appeared on each character’s respective profile page. To further identify themselves with such groups, the actors contributed in-role to the group discussion. Hence they were interacting with real people who were unaware of the dramatic construct they were involved in.


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The group platforms that evolved from this had the potential to serve as small digital stages for vignettes of drama within the larger drama to be to played out. Characters interacted with each other via group wall posts and discussion boards, using these digital mediums as a stage to convey tension with one another in their relationships. Within the video drama on YouTube, the only way to gauge the audience’s response was when the tension was engaging and provocative enough for other ‘audience members’ on YouTube to respond strongly to the dramatic framing of the narrative. The aim of the drama was to create authenticity within the online world, whereby audience participants could influence the narrative as if the characters were real people. To justify the use of video, one of the characters, Kate, was portrayed as a filmmaker who decided to make a documentary about her three friends and herself. Her self-reflexive role as the protagonist was created with the intention of allowing a director/drama leader to be immersed in the action while filming the other actors. It was inherent on the Facebook group for Four that Kate was controlling the construction and publication of the videos. As Kate was creator and administrator of the Facebook group, she was immediately framed as having ownership over the material; she describes the group on Facebook: I am a voyeur. So are you. I am making a film about my group of Four. We like watching. We like drama. We love the way we watch. Watch us. The audience thus accepted this framing of the fictional characters as being ‘real’ personae when engaging with the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, (Coleridge 1907). By suspending disbelief, the audience was able to form emotional connections with fictional characters by entering and accepting the world in which they existed but nevertheless maintaining a clear ironic awareness of the dramatic nature of that interaction. By accepting the framing of Kate as a filmmaker and using the social media tools enabled by Facebook, the audience are able to interact with her and the other characters on a very ‘real’ dramatic basis.

Narrative development Online audiences responded strongly to the Fourth video, titled ‘The one with the morning after’; the audience debated whether Kate and Michael

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had become romantically involved. To further imply this, Fiona posted up a still from the third video in which it appears that Michael and Kate are about to kiss. The romantic tension between Kate and Michael was an engaging aspect of the drama, provoking many audience responses. A selection is reproduced from the website below: Andrew C wrote At 12:59pm on 18 November 2007 I was just waiting for the shot of you booting. Too bad you didn’t pash on . . . although that kind of video may have attracted the wrong kind of people to this group.Nice work. Thomas D wrote At 6:58pm on 18 November 2007 Michael man, sounds like you need to up your medication – first a chill pill to chillax out dude your way too highly strung. Then a cement pill man because that video has the effect of making you look like i (dare i say it and reinforce the societal cliché) a cadbury. Oh wait that’s a bit of surreptitious advertising isn’t it? mmmmmmmm chocolate. . . Mitchell O wrote At 7:34am on 20 November 2007 It is our concern if you sign a waiver. Accept the fact that your world is ours now. Though it’s good to see you haven’t toned anything down for the cameras. dare i say it, honesty from a lawyer. what a wonderful world. that’s what i think to myself. i also think that michael drinks to much, and seriously wants to kiss kate. or is he just a lonely ageing man. Stop using pissy mail as a pick-up line. The photograph and posted web links became a narrative building tool that kept the drama alive, weaving in another layer of subtext and implications rather than just being a ‘clue’ or ‘artefact’ in the story. Participation in the narrative by the audience was the key to the success of the project. Over the period of the drama the online audience became involved in the lives of the characters through viewing the developing video narrative and then interaction with the characters on the Facebook group and via their individual profiles with a depth not afforded by previous media. It did this by creating a complex web of relationships that relied heavily on subtext within the work. Textual ambiguity encouraged the audience to become more actively involved in narrative building as they unpacked information alongside the characters. It also integrated text-based blogs


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into the dramatic action to reveal depth in what was going on in each character’s life. Finally it created an online drama in parallel with the screen-based content by combining both forms on the same plot development line. In the drama classroom whether students are digitally exploring an existing dramatic text or creating an original online drama/digital theatre work, the main issues for teachers to consider when designing for both a live and digital performance process are as follows: z

z z

How can you reach an audience to view the student’s work? Is there the possibility of an existing audience that can be drawn to the social media site chosen? How will the dramatic roles interact in the online environment? What specific forms of social media can be used to use to advance the narrative? How will these help the participants/audience develop the dramatic roles and tell the story? Is there a space on social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace or Flickr that can contain the video narrative of the drama?

The online drama series Four offers a model for new dramatic work created in the nexus between improvised drama and social media. This process allows both drama educators and practitioners to create work within the digital stage or extend characters beyond the traditional stage and screen. The combination of maintaining dramatic tension while facilitating interactivity from an audience and applying an improvised drama approach to digital social media tools has the potential to create a new narrative model for online drama and digital theatre. Drama teachers can apply this new drama practice in a way which keeps pace with their young digital viewers and helps return drama to its origins of active and creative participation with the audience it serves.

References Aarseth, E. (1997), Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Adamson, J. (2007), ‘Outside the Box’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 2008. Alexander, B. K. (2005), Performance ethnography: the reenacting and inciting of culture, in N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd edn). London: Sage. Auslander, P. (1999), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatised Culture. London: Routledge. Boal, A. (1992), Games for Actors and Non-actors, trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge.

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—(1995), The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge. Bolton, G. (1984), Introduction, in L. Johnson and C. O’Neill (eds), Dorothy Heathcote: Collected Writings on Education and Drama. London: Hutchison, p. 104. Brook, P. (1993), There are no secrets, in There are no secrets. London: Methuen, Section 3, pp. 97–119. C&T (2007), ‘What is a dramatic property?’, retrieved 20 May 2007 from http:// www.candt.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=43. Carroll, J. (2005), YTLKIN2ME?: Drama in the Age of Digital Reproduction, NJ (Drama Australia Journal), 29(1), 15–23. Carroll, J. and Cameron, D. (2003), To the Spice Islands: Interactive Process Drama, proceedings of the DAC conference 2003, published by the Fine Art Forum, retrieved 1 October 2008 from http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Carroll.pdf. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Staffordshire: Trentham. Carver, G. and Beardon, C. (2004), New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies. Lisse (Nederlands): Swets & Zeitlinger. Coleridge, S. T. (1907), Biographia Literaria, vol. 2, J. Shawcross (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cooke, M. (2006), Digital storytelling. Same, same but different [podcast], retrieved 24 March 2007 from http://lamp.edu.au/2007/. Costello, M. J. (1996). ‘Don’t press that button’ [electronic version], Leonardo: Fourth Annual New York Digital Salon, 29(5). Cover, R. (2004), Interactivity: reconceiving the audience in the struggle for textual ‘control’ of narrative and distribution, Australian Journal of Communication, vol. 31, 107–120. Dena, C. (2005), ‘Elements of “interactive drama”: behind the virtual curtain of Jupiter Green’, Performance Paradigm: A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture, issue 1, retrieved 22 March 2007 from http://www.performanceparadigm.net/issue1/article-virtual-curtain.shtml. Eco, U. (1989), The Open Work/Opera aperta, trans. A. Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Facebook (2007), Facebook Factsheet, retrieved 24 October 2007 from http://www. facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet. ‘Fat Cow Motel’ (2003), Australian Broadcasting Corporation, retrieved 22 March 2007 from http://www.abc.net.au/tv/fatcowmotel/fatcowhome.htm. Hockney, D. (1984), Cameraworks. London: Thames & Hudson. Jennings, P. (1996), Narrative structures for new media: towards a new definition, Leonardo: Fourth Annual New York Digital Salon, 29(5). Johnson, L and O’Neill, C. (eds) (1984), Dorothy Heathcote: Collected Writings on Education and Drama. London: Hutchison. Kelly, K. (2005), We are the Web, Wired, 8 August, issue 13.08, retrieved 5 June 2007 from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html. Landow, G. (1999), Hyptertext as collage-writing, in P. Lunefeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectic. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 281–291. Lévy, P. (1997), Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Cambridge: Perseus Books.


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Lovejoy, M. (2004), Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. New York: Routledge, pp. 281–291. Manovich, L. (1999), What is Digital Cinema, in P. Lunefeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectic. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 172–192. Metros, S. E. (1999), Making connections: a model for on-line interaction’ [electronic version], Leonardo, 32(4), 281–291. Murray, J. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative. New York: The Free Press. —(2004), From game-story to cyberdrama, in N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. London: The MIT Press, pp. 1–11. O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama. Portsmouth: Heinemann. O’Reilly, T. (2005), What is Web 2.0?, 30 September, retrieved 5 May from http:// www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20. html. Prensky, M. (2001), Digital Game Based Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill. SBS (2007), Marx and Venus, retrieved 21 August from http://programs.sbs.com. au/marxandvenus/. Shaughnessy, N. (2005), Truths and lies: exploring the ethics of performance applications, Research in Drama Education, 10(2), pp. 202–211. Stern, A. (2003), That Darn Conundrum, 22 October, retrieved 16 April 2007 from http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2003/10/22/that-darn-conundrum. Szilas, N. (1999), Interactive drama on computer: beyond linear narrative, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, retrieved 23 March, 2007 from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/michaelm/www/nidocs/Szilas.pdf. Tabbi, J. (2002), ‘Elements of “interactive drama”: Behind the Virtual Curtain of Jupiter Green’, Performance Paradigm, in Dena, C. (2005), A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture, issue 1, retrieved 22 March 2007 from http://www.performanceparadigm.net/issue1/article-virtual-curtain.shtml. Tofts, D. (2005), Tsk tsk tsk and beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics, Fibreculture Journal, issue 7, retrieved 20 March 2007 from http://journal.fibreculture. org/issue7/issue7_tofts_print.html. Turner, V. (1988), The Anthropology of Performance. London: Johns Hopkins University Press. —(1990), Are there universals of performance in myth, ritual and drama?, in R. Schechner and W. Appel (eds), By Means of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Virilio, P. (1989), War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. P. Camille. London: Verso. Wenger, E .(1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 12

Enter the matrix: the relationship between drama and film Miranda Jefferson and Michael Anderson

This chapter explores a pedagogical model for film in the classroom. Film learning lives in a parallel universe (the matrix) to drama education. While there are similarities, the film learning universe has distinct and important individual features. We argue that this model is founded most effectively on arts education and particularly, arts education principles. We identify the importance of child-centred and constructivist approaches to learning and present a model which values aesthetic control and aesthetic understanding as the intertwined bases of film learning. Aspects of film learning and drama learning are compared as a means of informing how each is related yet distinctly unique, and examples of classroom practice are used to illustrate these aspects.

The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this. [He holds up a Duracell battery] The Matrix (1999)

In the movie The Matrix (1999), the matrix is a simulated reality constructed by cyber-intelligence that keeps humans docile while their life essence is sucked out of them to fuel the machines dominating the ‘real world’. The Matrix invites us to examine the relationship between liveness, technology and simulated reality. In this chapter we discuss how a drama and film pedagogy matrix share the same relationships. Rather than controlling humans to be docile in their imaginary world, drama as a pedagogy aims to transform students by learning about the world around them through the

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experience of simulated, fictitious role-based play. A pedagogy in film does the same, but in a dramatic art form shaped by technology. The matrix we present demonstrates how aspects of drama learning and film learning exist in a parallel universe but begin from similar foundations. We explore narrative film learning as a distinctive pedagogy founded on an arts-learning model of creativity and literacy, the aesthetics of screen theory and practice, and principles of drama education. In this chapter we share the framework of a film pedagogy model, and compare facets of film learning to drama learning in areas such as dramatic action, the ‘magic if’, collaborative creation of dramatic meaning and ‘performance’. Although process and performance are not bifurcated in the film pedagogy, aspects of both process drama and the performative elements of drama-as-theatre are used in the teaching of film. Dramatic role-playing and improvisation processes are used in the development of film-stories but once the stories become rehearsed scenes, screenplays and storyboards, they are fixed, like theatre, in the construction of their meaning. In the film process of production and post-production meaning is renegotiated and reconstructed in some way. Whether celluloid or digital tape, a cinema projection or computer screen, film is defined not by its medium, but by its semiotic or language to communicate. What we call film is moving, two-dimensional visual imagery with sound, speech, music and graphics that serve a dramatic purpose in order to communicate. We believe there is a strong case for drama teachers and not necessarily media or English teachers to lead students through a film pedagogy that has a matrix-like relationship with drama. A matrix is ‘a place or medium in which something is originated, produced, or developed; the environment in which a particular activity or process begins; a point of origin and growth’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2008). The learning areas of drama and film are not the same but they spring from the same essential pedagogical roots in collaboration, aesthetics, process, performance and child centredness. We begin our discussion with a common pedagogical basis for film and drama education and then stake out some of the ways the aesthetic and hence pedagogies differ.

Playing with an aesthetic The link between play and drama emerged from the work of educational pioneers such as Henry Caldwell Cook. In Play way an essay in educational method (1917), he discusses how teachers might guide students through

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learning by facilitating their use of play and through collaboration. Caldwell Cook describes his classroom: Some sit at the desks while others stand before them or lean over their shoulders. They [the students] are gathered in working groups, putting their brown heads together for the making of their play; and the room is full of an industrious chatter. A visitor entering suddenly might fancy that he had come by mistake into a classroom of the old school in the absence of the master; for the noise of allowed play sounds at first just like the noise of disorder. But if you listen you will find it is articulate. (Caldwell Cook 1917, p. 302) Playing as a form of learning endures as a research theme today. Roslyn Arnold (1994, p. 17) for instance argues that drama ‘reactivates the pleasurable (or difficult) experiences of exploration, mastery and social interaction found in early childhood play’. Caldwell Cook’s legacy to performing arts education and film education specifically, is the legitimization of imaginative and experimental play. While many educators recognize this is a mandatory precursor to creativity, Caldwell Cook through his employment of the ‘double meaning’ of play is inviting his students to engage with the aesthetic of drama in a playful way. For film learning this approach suggests a structure that recognizes the crucial interlinking of play and the aesthetic of film. In modern curriculum terms, this is signified by the terms making and appreciating. Just as Caldwell Cook introduced his students to the features of the aesthetic through the classics, so students of film require grounding in the aesthetics of film by recognizing the classics of the art form. However, where this is the end of learning in some classrooms, in our conceptualization of film learning it is the essential beginning. In a similar way to Caldwell Cook inviting his students to actively play with the work, effective film learning will engage students in the making of film informed by their aesthetic understanding. While in some arts learning, making and appreciating are bifurcated, in film learning classrooms they are inextricably linked.

A film learning model Figure 12.1 is a graphic representation of how the interplay between aesthetics and play creates film learning. In the same way as drama education values process and product as interlinked (Anderson 2004) film learning


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TEACHING FILM Making

Aesthetic control

Appreciating

Aesthetic understanding

CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT and CREATION

FIGURE 12.1 Teaching the screen

sees the twin learning goals of aesthetic control and aesthetic understanding as intertwined, one supporting and informing the other. The process and product of film learning actually sits behind the learning objectives of aesthetic control and aesthetic understanding as both process and product are integral to both. For instance if a student is developing a reverse narrative, where the end of the film is chronologically at the beginning, they might watch Memento (2000) to appreciate the way this kind of film narrative can be constructed. This experiential model values appreciation learning and makes explicit links between that and making learning. In Figure 12.1 the term aesthetic control refers to the ongoing command a student has over the aesthetics of film. In other words, how are they managing and manipulating the filming, directing and editing processes to make

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film? We have called this aesthetic control rather than making as this term recognizes the role of choice and the employment of resources to the aesthetic process to make a product (film) that engages an audience. At the end of this process we have identified critical engagement and creation as the outcomes. These twin aims recognize the impact of the work on different audiences and ask students to consider the socio-cultural and aesthetic forces that have brought the work of others and their work into being. The pedagogical model presented here can be viewed as the framework for teaching film, within which principles or assumptions of learning to, learning about and learning through film are embedded. In Teaching the Screen: Film Education for Generation Next (Anderson and Jefferson 2009) we explain how a constructivist approach in the film pedagogy is based on scaffolded and collaborative learning. Group exercises and small creative filmmaking tasks and film viewings are woven into incremental learning steps in using and appreciating the film aesthetic. The focus of this chapter, however, is to examine film and drama learning as a matrix of parallel worlds where commonalities intersect and differences diverge. The common ground in the drama and film matrix begins with an arts-based approach to learning that combines making and appreciating, but both also have a deep understanding of controlling dramatic meaning for an audience.

Dramatic action and audience Film in many ways is an amalgamation of all the art forms: it borrows narrative from the literary tradition, imagery from the visual arts, dramatic embodiment of story and dialogue from the theatre tradition, and the emotive and mood experience of music. Once all these art forms are combined to serve the moving, two-dimensional imagery of the film story, the codes and conventions distinctive to each art form change in the dynamic of working together. In a school arts-learning context, visual arts teachers bring a rich understanding of the composition and focus of two-dimensional visual imagery, music teachers have deep knowledge in the creation and effect of sound and music, and drama teachers understand how the elements of drama and narrative engage an audience. This highlights the aspects of film that drama teachers may not have a deep understanding of, but it also illustrates what they do ‘get’. In drama education, the actor-audience engagement is explored and embodied by students as a dynamic emotional and physical relationship. Students perform and students watch; they experience and are complicit in


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the act of dramatic communication. To communicate dramatically students have to understand, use and control the elements of dramatic form (O’Toole 1992). The elements involve the embodiment of role and action in a space, and the creation of tension, mood and symbol. To control the elements of dramatic form in a performance is to engage the audience through the creation of belief and expectation. These fundamental understandings of the dramatic form are also at the core of the film aesthetic. Engagement with dramatic film narrative is shaped by structuring plot over time and space and manipulating dramatic elements such as tension, character, action and space. It is these dramatic elements that determine filmic techniques such as shot size, composition of the images, sound and music. In other words dramatic narrative elements such as plot, tension, character and action determine why a close-up is chosen, how the image is composed and why a moment is punctuated by a certain sound and the mood enhanced by music. These choices are part of the control of the filmic aesthetic and a deep understanding of dramatic form that informs these choices. A drama teacher for instance has a dramaturgical, directorial and an acting understanding of dramatic action. This is important in film. If the dramatic action is to hide, dramaturgically, how does ‘hiding’ further the tension and the story? Acting-wise, why does the character need or want to hide? Directorially, how should the audience be engaged and affected by the hiding? For the audience, what is their relationship to the character hiding? Is the audience with them hiding? Or is the audience watching them hide? This relationship with the character is created by the chosen perspective of how the story is seen. This is in part determined by the proxemic (positioning) of the camera to the action. The camera is the audience but also can be viewed as another actor in the scene. It is the elements of dramatic action that drama teachers know how to explore, construct and shape when working with students in the classroom; however, they have to learn how those elements work in the form of the film aesthetic.

Three dimensions into two Where drama learning begins to differ from film learning is in how technology creates the art form of film and shapes the nature of the aesthetic. The codes and conventions of the aesthetic of three-dimensional live drama viewed from a fixed perspective change in the technological capture of twodimensional moving imagery which is viewed from a shifting perspective

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because of point-of-view shot selection and editing. This change in the aesthetic form cannot be likened to a simple key change of ‘performance style’; it is a ‘transformation’ of the form rather than ‘transposition’. The aesthetic transformation starts with the way the drama of the images is captured and compressed into a two-dimensional frame. The threedimensional proxemics and angles between bodies and objects appear differently in two-dimensions. To create the illusion of depth, principles of perspective created in two-dimensions have to be applied to framing the mise en scène. Simply, a table on an angle to the camera gives a greater illusion of three-dimensionality than the flatness of presenting it square on. Alternatively, what can look right or ‘real’ through the camera, does not feel right in three-dimensional reality. The conventions of staging and proxemics in a theatrical-like setting are very different to conventions of ‘staging’ or ‘placement’ in film.

Shots, editing and identification Moving the camera and editing shots together from various perspectives are also conventions that delineate the film aesthetic from the theatre. Film theorist, Béla Balázs (1949) explains that film’s capacity to do this has the psychological effect of ‘identification’. In the cinema the camera carries the spectator into the film picture itself. We are seeing everything from the inside as it were and are surrounded by the characters of the film. They need not tell us what they feel, for we see what they see and see it as they see it . . . We walk amid crowds, ride, fly or fall with the hero and if one character looks into the other’s eyes, he looks into our eyes from the screen, for, our eyes are in the camera and become identical with the gaze of the characters. They see with our eyes. (Balázs 1949, p. 48) The shot types and how they are presented in the editing affects how the audience identifies with the drama. The audience’s viewpoint is controlled by the chosen shot and the editing, and these aspects fundamentally affect the spectator’s perception and reception of the film story and the film world. The actor Gene Wilder described the eye of the camera as similar to the eye of God (Churcher 2003, p. 26). In film learning, a drama exercise such as ‘fly on the wall’ allows students the experience to move around a short


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rehearsed or improvised scene and watch from different perspectives. These viewing experiences are then compared to viewing from different fixed perspectives. The dramatic scene could be about two students sitting for an exam, and one cheating. Three perspectives are explored: each student’s and the ‘fly on the wall’. Character perspective and ‘identification’ for the audience are then considered as a precursor to deciding how to film the scene. The changing perspective and framing by the camera and the editing capability of film creates a transformational and profound shift in aesthetics for drama teachers that teach film. What drama teachers do have is an understanding of dramatic action and how audiences are engaged through the manipulation of dramatic tools. It is dramatic structures and dramatic elements that inform choices in the making of the film aesthetic. Drama and film learning require a core and deep understanding of dramatic form but in the matrix, the aesthetic of live drama and film differ fundamentally because of two-dimensional imagery and audience ‘identification’ through framing and editing in film. Drama and film also intersect and diverge in the process of metaxis and the ‘magic if’.

Learning through the ‘magic if’ The ‘magic if’ is belief in and commitment to the imaginary world. Cognition through fictional role playing is at the heart of drama pedagogy. Metaxis describes how the belief of participants in and percipients of role-playing is a state of knowing there is a real context and believing in a fictional dramatic context at the same time (Boal 1995; Bolton 1998; O’Toole 1992). Metaxis explains learning as interplay between real and fictitious worlds and the capacity to imagine and learn beyond actualities through enactment and embodiment. It is this imaginative space in the arts that Maxine Greene says, ‘enables us to make new connections among parts of our experience, that suggests the contingency of the reality we are envisaging’ (1995, p. 30). The awakening of the imagination and the opening of new doors of perception in Dorothy Heathcote’s teaching are to ‘create reflective elements within the existence of reality’ (1991, p. 104). Film at first glance is often associated with technology learning and media and visual literacy, and not examined as learning through role playing, acting, performing and perceiving in the state of metaxis and the ‘magic if’. On closer examination, filmmaking embodies metaxis and the ‘magic if’ in a number of ways.

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Acting Most obviously, narrative film requires embodiment of the aesthetic of film acting, or in animation using the aesthetic to endow objects to act. To act is to create and play a role or character with imagination and belief. In the filmmaking process of pre-production and production there is the opportunity to learn through metaxis by workshopping scenes and embodying the aesthetic of acting for film. The following description of how to act for the screen immediately conjures up what perception, reflection and understanding can be experienced and learnt through dramatic role-playing in filmmaking. We want to be involved – to believe in your screen life as firmly as we believe in our real life . . . In life, everything is specific. Nothing is generalised . . . Your scripted imaginative life must be just as vivid, just as precise, just as specific. No millisecond must pass you by, without you completely being in the moment of thinking and reacting as that character. (Churcher 2003, p. 57) Acting is often overlooked in film aesthetic learning in schools, yet is paramount to belief and audience engagement in film. Without recognizing the principles of acting such as intentions, physicality and truth, it is difficult to create and engage with characters, action and relationships in film storytelling. Drama teachers are cognizant of the principles of acting, but in the film form these principles manifest in a unique way. In theatre you play to a thousand eyes. In film you are seen by one – the camera. Imagine a triangle: for theatre, the apex of the triangle is pointing at the stage and the wide end is the audience – you radiate outwards towards them. For film, the triangle is reversed. All the interaction is happening at the wide end – between the actors . . . On screen you never play to an audience – you don’t even play to the camera. The camera observes you . . . It is like being under the microscope. (Churcher 2003, pp. 8–9) In the film learning classroom, drama focus exercises can be adapted to learning about film acting. Stanislavsky type exercises where students are inwardly focused and mindful at the same time such as the ‘creative state of mind’ and ‘circle of attention’ (Gordon 1987) lead students to an acting style more appropriate to film. The following exercises can be done alone,


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in pairs and then with other students watching: without looking, count the change in your pocket; pick up a bunch of keys without making a sound; read from a book as your partner does the same, then transfer your attention from your book to your partner and return to the book. These exercises can be discussed in the film learning classroom in terms of focus and belief. An extension activity is to repeat precisely the actions and thoughts from these exercises, and examine the consequences of repetition and continuity in filmmaking. Acting exercises such as these enhance the belief of film acting performances, but there are other aspects of the ‘magic if’ and ‘metaxis’ evident in film learning.

The ‘technical’ actor The ‘magic if’ and acting are foundational concepts in drama learning but they morph into a new aesthetic in film learning. What is less obvious is that the experience of students working with technology is to commit to the ‘magic if’ and ‘embody’ the film acting aesthetic. Carroll et al. (2006) explore how role and identity are possible within an imagined or virtual environment. . . . a central element of both process drama and multiplayer online video games is their ability to allow participants/players to ‘step into some-body else’s shoes’. Both forms contain role distance and role protection conventions that allow fluid toggling between close active engagement in the unstructured moments of the event, and more protected observation or reflection on the experience. (2006, pp. 138–139) In a similar way students working with film technology are not non-actors but role-players embracing the ‘magic if’. Students in filmmaking groups have to create the drama of the scene and make aesthetic choices to dramatically engage and affect the audience. They have to conceptualize their ideas and story for the drama and then creatively problem-solve how to visualize those ideas filmically. They have to consider how to frame the shot, how to follow or reveal the action and what dialogue and sounds may be needed to tell their story. Imagining the ‘magic if’ contributes to conceptualizing and visualizing the drama of the film story. In the classroom, this idea of imagining roles and telling stories through the language of film can be explored and developed in the form of a dramatic activity that we have called ‘kinaesthetic storyboarding’.

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‘Kinaesthetic storyboarding’ is a workshop activity that uses the ‘magic if’ to help students imagine and develop their film-story ideas and film language. It entails students improvising and playbuilding a scene or short story by acting out what happens and how it is shot. The ‘acted out storyboard’ is presented to the class for feedback before any filming is undertaken. By exploring their ideas through a kinaesthetic experience, students inhabit the ‘magic if’ which helps to inform them of the dramatic choices they are making in what is in the scene, as well as how it is shot, what sounds or dialogue is heard and how it is edited. The activity can be followed up with an illustrated visual storyboard to consolidate their ideas before filming. Student filmmakers have to understand the dramatic intent in their scenes (direction of the actors) and the dramatic purpose of their scene (identification for the audience) to make aesthetic choices in the art form. And like the actors in their scenes, the camera and sound operators imagine the ‘magic if’ of the drama and are ‘in the moment’ when filming. Through the monitor of the camera and the head-phones, students have to identify with the dramatic action to capture and control dramatically effective images and sound. The student camera and sound operators when filming are percipients (audience) of the dramatic action and participants (creators) of the dramatic action at the same time. They can be described as ‘technical performers’ of the dramatic film action. Students’ comments on a school film project illustrate this notion: Student actor: I anticipated to be slightly thrown by the presence of a crew crowded behind the camera, however the crew seemed invisible as if they served as a camouflaged audience for the world of the film. They almost felt like an additional actor in the scene. Student camera person: Behind the camera I discovered how we are just as much a part of the scene as the actors we are shooting – the same intentions are felt. (Anderson and Jefferson 2009) As Carroll et al. (2006) have argued with video games, the conventions of live drama performance can be applied to the mediated role of working with and through film technology and this applies to the editing process as well.

Editors as actors and directors Editing is often wrongly understood as a technicality of putting a film together, but it is an aspect of the film aesthetic that is central to creating


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dramatic meaning. In post-production, groups collaborating when editing their film again experience not only a sense of engagement with the drama they have created, but participate by controlling and changing the drama. Students identify with the characters and action of the scenes and negotiate and renegotiate its meaning through editing. Editing has been described as ‘directing the film for the second time’ because ‘to gauge the psychological moment – to know exactly when to cut – requires the same intuitive skill as a director’ (Brownlow 1968, p. 280). Editing choices are made by an empathy with and involvement in the ‘magic if’ of the drama both as percipient and participant. Performing and metaxis underpin drama pedagogy and so recognition of ‘metaxis’ in film acting and ‘technical performing’ in the process of filming and editing are concepts understood by drama educators. Once again in the film/drama learning matrix there are cognitive principles common to both, but within those principles there are distinctive differences. This is also applicable to the nature of the collaborative creative process in drama and filmmaking.

The collaborative creative process The aesthetic process of filmmaking, like drama making, has intrinsic value as a collaborative and creative learning process. An arts way of learning is founded in the idea that the experience of learning is combined with the experience of an aesthetic. The learning involves feelings and understandings of the world that are heightened, refined and rendered more subtle and complex through the aesthetic of the arts (Eisner 2002). The learning in arts education is defined not only by having an experience with art works, it is more significantly in the experience of working with and in the art. The experience of the aesthetic through working is central to the drama pedagogy with its focus on process as a means of learning. What is obvious to drama educators (Heathcote 1991; O’Neill 1995; Bowell and Heap 2001) is that valuable cognitive learning happens when students engage with the subtle and challenging process of working together to negotiate and make dramatic meaning. The same is apparent in the process of making a film. The process of drama learning involves students, through embodiment and enactment, focusing, imagining, creating, investigating, reflecting, problem-solving, collaborating and communicating (Bowell and Heap 2001). From an arts-based aesthetic approach to learning, it is these competencies in drama learning that are overlooked but fundamental to filmmaking. Collaborative practice in particular is integral to drama making and

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performing, and a fundamental underpinning of the drama pedagogy as a model of social learning theory (Dewey 1938; Vygotsky 1978; Bruner 1977). The process of making a film, unless you are a lone animator, is fundamentally collaborative as well. Film involves teams of people playing different roles working together in the aesthetic of writing, directing, designing, acting, shooting, recording and editing to achieve an artistic vision. In film theory, a pragmatic or practice-based view of cinematic authorship sees ‘creativity as constitutive at every level of cinematic activity’ (Watson 2003, p. 140). Filmmaking, like theatre making, involves collaborative creativity. Even if a film director is viewed as an auteur, meaning is still negotiated between all the participants in the process of making the film. Where would Alfred Hitchcock be without the creative collaboration of cinematographer Robert Burks and actor James Stewart? Their creativity not only realized Hitchcock’s vision it contributed to it. Director Bernardo Bertolucci describes the creative collaboration of filmmaking this way: A film is a sort of melting pot in which the talents of a crew must mingle. Film stock is much more sensitive than people think, and it records not only what is front of the camera but everything around it. (2002, p. 50) All the parts of filmmaking significantly contribute to the whole vision and impact of a film. For French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, the exchanging of ideas is an important requisite for making a film, and his views resonate with the ideals of collaborative learning processes in a constructivist educational approach. When Sartre wrote something, it was the result of endless conversations with forty and fifty people. He didn’t come up with all this just sitting alone in a room. I think making a film on your own is about as hard as playing tennis alone; if there isn’t anyone on the other side to hit the ball back, it just isn’t worth it. (2002, p. 210) A collaborative group approach is conducive to filmmaking in a film pedagogy but it does not have to follow an industrial model of filmmaking where students have to have a particular role such as screenwriter, director, cinematographer or editor. In a school context valuable learning in film can be inculcated in collaborative group work where students have joint responsibility for all aspects of a common filmmaking endeavour by sharing roles. This happens in the drama classroom. In most Western theatre


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practice the functions of playwright, performer, audience and director are performed by separate people with discrete tasks and responsibilities but in drama education these ‘functions are subsumed in other functions and roles and another network of relationships – the real roles and purposes of people in school’ (O’Toole 1992, p. 4). In the drama classroom for example, students creating drama through improvisation together, are all performers, playwrights, directors and audience at the same time. In the film classroom, students can be writers, directors, cinematographers, editors and audience at the same time when working together on their film tasks. A film pedagogy that embraces collaborative group work and the sharing of roles enhances the learning for all students. However, the filmmaking process of collaborative group work does differ in some ways to drama collaborative work. One way is in the nature and structure of what is ‘making’ and what is ‘performing’.

Making and performing in pre-production, production, post-production and screening Like drama making, filmmaking as a collaborative process involves learning to and learning through imagining, problem solving and communicating. Additional to these cognitive concerns is the elevated emphasis in filmmaking on group organizational skills and problem solving under the pressure and constraints of time and place. Peculiar to filmmaking are the problemsolving variables of technology, light, weather and the interruptions and protocol in dealing with real-world locations, conditions and social relationships outside a classroom. Filmmaking in the shooting production stage is authentic learning (Brown et al. 1989) and a community-of-practice model of learning (Lave and Wegner 1991) as students are actively participating with real-world concerns and experiences relevant to life. Screening their films to a class audience is also authentic learning practice. To support the real-world concerns of filming and screening to an audience, is the pre-production process in which ideas are conceptualized, developed and visualized hypothetically. It is a form of rehearsal and organizational framework that develops and supports the complexities of the production stage. Despite the hypothetical rehearsal and pre-planning stage of the pre-production process, the variables and opportunities in the ‘live’ filming environment create challenging conditions in the production process. Filming requires focus, cooperation, collaboration, organization and improvisational problem-solving and decision making under the pressure

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of time and situation. The challenges and environment of the filmmaking production process are complex and demanding, and peculiar to filmmaking. Filming is not a rehearsal; it is a ‘performance’ being captured by technology but not the ‘final performance’. The process of post-production (editing) continues to transform the ‘performance’, but becomes an unchanging ‘final performance’ when screened. Editing in the post-production process continues the evolution of the performative aspects of film creation because the participant creators are still negotiating meaning. But once the template of the art form (the film) is created, the template cannot change once screened for an audience, as the meaning cannot be renegotiated by the act of screening. However, screening for students is a valuable process for learning because they can learn from the audience’s evaluation. A live theatre creation is still in the process of creation, called a ‘type’ rather than ‘template’ (Carroll 1996) and it changes with every different interpretation by the creators, no matter how small. Nuances of meaning are still negotiated during a performance among the live participants (the performers) and negotiated as a result of the live relationship between the performers and the percipients (the audience). ‘Performing’ in filmmaking is a different aesthetic experience to that of drama performing. In the matrix, however, drama pedagogy understands the primacy and cognitive qualities of an art form like film that creates meaning through collaboration, negotiation and learning in the process of making and performing. The structure and nature of filmmaking is different to drama making because of the pre-production, production, post-production and screening process. Drama teachers have experience in and are equipped to manage the complexities of a collaborative and creative process that involves the dramatic embodiment of storytelling and performance. However, they have to learn how it works in the aesthetic of film and filmmaking.

Exit the drama and film matrix A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something. The Matrix (1999)

There is a sense of déjà vu when comparing drama and film education, but also transformative differences in the ‘change’ between the two.


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Filmmaking has been associated with technology integration and media and visual literacy in learning, but its strong pedagogical and aesthetic connection with drama is at best understated, at worse, neglected. Narratives are the way we construct meaning of our world and how we as individuals and communities communicate and construct our own identities. Polkinghorne argues that narrative is ‘the primary form by which human experience is made meaningful’ (1988, p. 1). He further argues that narrative organizes human experience into temporally meaningful experiences. Film’s capacity to organize, rearrange and manipulate time makes it an ideal form for the communication of human experience. What drama teachers teach on a daily basis is the structuring and restructuring of narrative in performance (Morgan and Saxton 1984), and therefore drama teachers have the foundations to understand and learn how to make the drama of a film story. Drama education has provided a way of learning through the experience of imagining and role-play, and uses an aesthetic form that is a tool and process for self-expression, collaboration and cooperation. The history of theatre practices and ideologies has given rise to a drama pedagogy that is a way to learn about the world, and a way to learn. Antonin Artaud’s claim, that ‘to break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre’ (1958, p. 13) sounds lofty and esoteric, but in practice this is what motivates drama teachers and happens in classrooms using drama pedagogy. Film, the twentieth-century child of the theatre, visual arts, music and technology is also a pedagogy that gives students a means to ‘touch life’. This is through the experience of critically creating and engaging with the film aesthetic. Echoing Artaud’s sentiments about theatre’s potential, is Ingmar Bergman’s thoughts that, ‘No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul’ (1988, p. 73). A film-learning approach in making and appreciating gives students the opportunities to ‘play’ and go ‘beyond ordinary consciousness’ by creating and communicating film-stories with aesthetic control. Our film pedagogy encourages students to engage with the film form in a critical and creative way. The matrix of film and drama learning highlights how film learning can be seen as the child of drama education, but it also illuminates the attributes of film as a discrete learning area and pedagogy in its own right. Understanding drama helps in teaching filmmaking and appreciating, but understanding film highlights how the role of technology in film fundamentally changes the form of the live drama aesthetic into something new.

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References Anderson, M. (2004), Devising unities: a recent history of drama education in NSW, in The State of Our Art: NSW Perspectives in Drama Education. Sydney: Currency, pp. 3–18. Anderson, M. and Jefferson, M. (2009), Teaching the Screen: Film Education for Generation Next. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Anderson, M., Hughes, J. and Manuel, J. (eds) (2008), Drama and English Teaching: Imagination, Action and Engagement. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, Arnold, R. 1994, Drama pschodynamics and English education, English in Australia, Journal of the Association for the Teaching of English 10, 17–27. Artaud, A. (1958), The Theater and its Double, trans. M. Richard. New York: Grove Press. Balazs, B. (1970), Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. E. Bone. New York: Dover Publications. Bergman, I. (1988), The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, trans. J. Tate. New York: Viking. Bertolucci, B. (2002), Revisionists, in L. Tirard, Moviemaker’s Masterclass: Private Lessons from the World’s Foremost Directors. New York and London: Faber and Faber, pp. 47–55. Boal, A. (1995), The Rainbow of Desire, trans. A. Jackson. London: Routledge. Bolton, G. (1998), Acting in Classroom Drama. Staffordshire: Trentham Books. Bowell, P. and Heap, B. (2001), Planning Process Drama. London: David Fulton. Brown, J. S., Collins, A. and Duguid, P. (1989), Situated cognition and the culture of learning, Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42. Brownlow, K. (1968), The Parades Gone By. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bruner, J. (1977), The Process of Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Caldwell Cook, H. (1917), Play Way an Essay in Educational Method. London: Heinemann. Carroll, N. (1996), Theorizing the Moving Image. New York: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Education and Technology. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Churcher, M. (2003), Acting for Film: Truth 24 Times a Second. London: Virgin Books. Dewey, J. (c.1938, 1998), Experience and Education. Indiana: Kappa Delta Pi. Eisner, E.W. (2002), The Arts and the Creation of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press. Godard, J. (2002), In a class by himself, in L. Tirard, Moviemaker’s Masterclass: Private Lessons from the World’s Foremost Directors. New York and London: Faber and Faber, pp. 203–215. Gordon, M. (1987), The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia. New York: Applause Theatre. Greene, M. (1995), Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco.


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Heathcote, D. (1991), Collected Writings on Education and Drama, Evanston, IL: North-western University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, N. and Saxton, J. (1984), Teaching Drama – a Mind of Many Wonders. London: Hutchinson. O’Neill, C. (1995), Drama Worlds: A Framework for Process Drama. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. O’Toole, J. (1992), The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning. London: Routledge. Oxford English Dictionary (2008). Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988), Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. New York: State University of New York Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978), Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watson, P. (2003), ‘Authorship, genre and stars in Hollywood’, in J. Nelmes (ed.), An Introduction to Film Studies. London and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 13

Second life/simulation: online sites for generative play Kim Flintoff

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed. (Winston Churchill)

This chapter focuses upon the praxis and philosophy of online drama with limited emphasis on theory because the work in this area is still largely exploratory. While the theory, as it relates to Drama/Theatre Education and Virtual Worlds is still to emerge, there is substantial new work being conducted under the more general umbrella of Education that will in the future inform the specific theories for Drama in virtual worlds. The discussion relates primarily to the category of virtual world that is currently being referred to as the 3-D MUVE, or three-dimensional Multi-User Virtual Environment. These worlds tend to be characterized by a three-dimensional spatial representation (that includes the visual and auditory representations), the mode of interaction is commonly via a 3-D humanoid avatar,1 the worlds are generally persistent, immediate and socially driven. The most technologically sophisticated of these worlds also operate highly evolved economies (that are increasingly connected to real-world economics, currency exchange rates and direct debit systems), user-created content in the form of built objects, customized avatars, scripted objects, original graphical and design elements, social activities and experiences, and perhaps most significantly the user-developed ‘mash-ups’ – software applications that connect interaction in the virtual world with the functionality of a wide range of other, often Web 2.0, applications in the real world and the internet. ⇒

Online Sites for Generative Play

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Most of these 3-D MUVEs are also bandwidth hungry and in some contexts, schools in Australia for example, the cost of this bandwidth consumption means these technologies are almost always locked away from general access. Despite these restrictions there are educational institutions the world over using these worlds in creative ways to support learning. What begins to define these worlds as something beyond a ‘game’ or ‘communication tool’ is the way that users decide to think about and engage with (and within) the worlds.

Introduction In 2005, when I first entered the world of Second Life®, I was one of a relatively small group of registered users and at any given moment. I would log in to find as many as 5,000 users simultaneously accessing and interacting within the world. By December 2005 Linden Labs, the company behind the development of Second Life, reported that they reached the landmark figure of 100,000 registered users. Within 10 months they saw the 1,000,000th registration and 8 months after that they announced they had reached 8,000,000 registrations. By July 2008, Second Life boasted in excess of 14,000,000 residents2 and it is common to have over 50,000 residents logged in concurrently. Currently, the growth in interest and development of Virtual Worlds seems enormous. New projects emerge that draw more users to the steadily increasing number of 3-D virtual spaces. While Second Life seems to be the market leader in virtual world, the figures given above about the exponential growth of their user base is reflected in figures emerging about other virtual world populations. Gartner (2007) predicts that by 2011 more than 80 per cent of active internet users (approximately 50 million) will be engaging and interacting within virtual worlds. Nearly all of these worlds are being explored by educators to find how and where they can be used to facilitate learning. In terms of theatre and drama, not all afford the same opportunities. However, they may contain elements that teachers will see as the key to creative possibilities. Table 13.1 identifies some of the current popular MUVEs and locates them within a fairly subjective taxonomy of usability for theatre and drama.3 The category decisions were largely determined by the degree of customization and control that was available to users when I first entered the

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Drama Education with Digital Technology TABLE 13.1

A list of popular virtual worlds and some basic features

Virtual World Second Life http://www.secondlife.com Teen Second Life http://teen.secondlife.com There http://www.there.com Entropia Universe http://www.entropiauniverse.com Cybertown http://www.cybertown.com HiPiHi http://www.hipihi.com Active Worlds http://www.activeworlds.com Kaneva http://www.kaneva.com Gaia Online http://gaiaonline.com Lively by Google http://www.lively.com Moove http://www.moove.com Twinity http://www.twinity.com Worlds.com http://www.worlds.com Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net Open Simulator/OpenSim http://opensimulator.org Just Leap In http://www.justleapin.com

Emphasis

Open source

Potential for drama

Open

No

High

Open

No

High

Social

No

High

Themed

No

Moderate

Themed

No

Low

Open

No

Moderate

Open

No

Moderate

Social

No

Moderate

Social

No

Low

Social

No

Moderate

Chat

No

Low

Open

No

Moderate

Chat

No

Low

Open

Yes

High

Open

Yes

High

Open

Yes

High

Open

No

Moderate

particular MUVE. Some of the features that strengthened the favourable judgement included the ability for users to create buildings, objects, clothing and accessories; the ability to modify avatar appearance quickly and easily; the various modes of interaction between avatars; the capacity to capture interactions (video, text logs, screen capture, etc); the availability of thirdparty builders and programmers; the overall population and culture of environment; and the capacity to control access and permissions to various spaces. The taxonomy is merely a starting point and several MUVEs are

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showing signs of adopting more open models for user participation, ownership, creation and control. A goal of virtual world developers is the portable presence; that is, an individual’s avatar will be able to travel between virtual worlds. July 2008 saw the first reports (Second Life, 2008b) of IBM and Linden Lab staff teleporting their avatars out of the Second Life environment and into another virtual world. This potentially signals the move towards a ubiquity of virtual world participation and, with less dependence upon a particular platform or flavour of world, the strengths of each of the virtual worlds can be leveraged.

Drama and theatre – performance As with the earlier technologies, the development of 3-D MUVE technologies has seen them inhabited by a range of artists and creative practitioners testing the boundaries of their art forms. This is particularly evident in drama as the following examples illustrate. As represented in Figure 13.1, once practitioners master the artistic process they have developed, they gain a greater understanding of the technology they’re using and begin to recognize how the technology affords them new opportunities to extend the scope or style of the work they initially created. Additionally as these 3-D spaces also seem to operate in conjunction with a range of Web 2.0 applications, a collaborative and participatory model of development occurs. Strong links can be made between this model and Bruns’ (2008) notion of produsage, whereby the traditional patterns of invention, creation, distribution and consumption are subverted by individuals and collaborative groups to blur the division between producer and consumer. The practitioners are at once utilizing available resources, creating new products and in turn, contributing to an evolutionary development of both the practices and technologies. From the Shadows, written by ‘Enjah Mysterio’ (SL avatar) and designed and directed by ‘Osprey Therian’ (SL avatar) was one of the earliest plays

Replication

Extension

Figure 13.1 Process of arts exploration in 3-D MUVEs

Evolution

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presented in Second Life, at the New Globe Theatre on the Millions of Us sim.4 The cast and crew of the play had never met in the physical world and all planning and rehearsal was conducted inside Second Life. At this time all communication in Second Life was presented in the form of text chat. The use of text chat was leveraged to allow action commands to be embedded in the dialogue so that actors could activate various animations and effects through their text input. Since then Second Life has developed and offers speech capabilities; however, the use of voice to activate the avatar and other effects is still at a fledgling experimental level. Various online critiques of the thriller From the Shadows suggest that as a first step into 3-D virtual theatre it was a memorable and enjoyable undertaking but suffered from a limited understanding of the limits and affordances of the technology. Many performance groups have begun to explore and capitalize upon the much richer body of knowledge and experience that has been developed by visual artists, musicians, performance artists, machinima5 producers, virtual dancers and virtual theatre practitioners as well as the more general developments that emerge from a growing population of residents in virtual worlds. A lively debate in a Guardian (Fisher 2007) blog suggests that there are mixed feelings about such developments and while no-one believes that the virtual production will replace the traditional there seems to be some growing measure of acceptance of virtual theatre as a divergent form of theatre. Three-dimensional virtual theatre has much in common with traditional forms. It is live, there is a definite sense of awareness of the presence of actors and audience and the responses can be as immediate and spontaneous as in traditional theatre. It is distinctly different from the recorded performance. As the technology has developed we have seen the use of ‘holodeck’ (Murray 1997) capabilities in performances, whereby the scenery and theatre space itself can be programmed to transform around the actors and audience. These new technologies have the potential to radically shift our preconceptions about the nature and form of live theatrical performance. The SL Shakespeare Company (http://slshakespeare.com/) formed with the intention to perform the works of Shakespeare in Second Life. Operating out of a virtual SL Globe Theatre (http://slurl.com/secondlife/ sLiterary/27/32/22), claimed to be most accurate 3-D version on the net; the company has developed strategies for managing and presenting virtual performances of the Bard’s works. Their productions include highly


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detailed costumes and avatars, custom animations, complex scripting and effects with all the immediacy and challenges of traditional theatrical production mediated through the technological frame of SL. There have been several projects aimed at recreating famous theatre buildings in Second Life and several incarnations of such theatres as The Globe, The New Fortune, and various ancient and modern theatres. Additionally, these projects have led to the design of purpose built theatrical spaces to accommodate new modes of live theatrical performance in the virtual worlds. THEATRON is a project emerging from a collaboration of British universities with partial funding from the European Commission to develop 3-D reconstructions of famous theatres. Theatron 3 enters Second Life with a view to importing the existing collection of 3-D theatre models into the Second Life environment. The website for the Theatron project (Theatron, 2008) lists 19 representations as current 3-D constructions. This is a major project and in many ways addresses the scope of Theatre, Drama and Education; Drama as literary genre, Drama as performance, Drama as pedagogy and Theatre as social and historical phenomena. What is noticeable is that There seems to be a strong drive to present theatre in Second Life. This is especially interesting when we step back and realize that we are ALWAYS performing in Second Life. Phorkyad Acropolis is very much like the human puppeteer behind this avatar, but the very nature of this form of communication suggests constant role-playing and performance. (Schrum 2007) Schrum, a long time digital theatre researcher and practitioner, as Phorkyad Akropolis, directed and performed a production of Euripides’ The Bacchae in Second Life during 2008. His blog (Schrum, 2008) is an engaging account of the technical and artistic considerations that he faced in the process of creating, rehearsing and performing the work. Not surprisingly many of the considerations will be familiar to theatre practitioners – vocal training, costume, set and make-up designs, blocking, staging, and timing. What becomes evident though is the significant impact of the technology on these considerations; for instance, all special movements need to be scripted avatar animations, synchronization concerns in regard to server lag and how this will impact upon audience experience as well as actors cues, graphic design, creation and uploading of costumes to the Second Life environment, and many more. Given that audience members can view

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a performance from any angle and any level of zoom Schrum had to consider how the overall staging of the work could leverage these capabilities.

Improvisation in Second Life While role-play in Second Life (and most other MUVEs) is more generally associated with recreational game play there are small pockets of exploration into process drama, improvised drama and role-play/simulation. Some of the simulations tend to be more training oriented activities about learning prescribed responses to given events, but dramatic role-play seems to be developing a greater following for its educational potential. Dan Zellner (SL: Dan Undertone) from Northwestern University is another theatre and drama practitioner who has found his way into Second Life. Dan’s work spans more than a decade and includes a variety of investigations into Drama and technology. Inside Second Life, Dan has conducted a range of workshops and activities exploring the potential of improvisation. I joined one of Dan’s Second Life Theatre Workshops in May 2007 and met weekly over five weeks at the New Media Consortium Arts Theatre (http:// slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Arts/80/60/33) in Second Life, for a couple of hours of exploration. This was a specially convened workshop to accommodate Australasian participants. While Second Life operates on its own SLT time zone it coincides with Pacific Time, probably to best suit its creators at Linden Lab in San Francisco. Many of the offerings in Second Life still tend to be targeted at North American users, but this is slowly changing as the overall numbers of users across the world increases. The group was seldom more than six avatars, but the activities offered some interesting insights into the way the environment operates in a theatrical sense. The activities often began as parallels of real-life drama classes – ice-breakers, name games, walking, discovering the space, experimenting with different speeds of movement, and generally, engaging and focusing the group. We played simple pass the ball type games; of course the ball needed to be a specially scripted object that would respond appropriately. One notable activity involved exploring the ability to ‘push’ other avatars. Pushing is generally considered to be an anti-social practice in Second Life, but in our excitement to discover new possibilities and explore new metaphors we agreed to allow each other to be pushed. It was an interesting experience to have an avatar propelled by another, but one participant found she was feeling especially intimidated by the experience. The virtualworld experience became real-world discomfort. Of course we stopped as


209

soon as it was apparent, just as we would in a real-world class where a participant felt ill at ease about an activity. What it began to highlight was the very pervasive sense of presence and engagement that develops when one commits to a focused activity in the MUVE. This richness of experience is what I believe brings many artistic practitioners to engage in their praxis with this seemingly, at least initially, artificial and remote world. The experience of being ‘inworld’ with others, who bring their own real stories, experience and engagement to the virtual space, is far from that of a distanced and isolated reality; it is brought to life because of the very recognizable presence and participation of others in a shared experience.

Process drama in Second Life As much as educators might like to, it’s often difficult to really put students into positions where they can get some hands-on learning. Imagine trying to get a room full of students to understand gender issues . . . In SL, though, not only is taking on a new role easy, but it’s fun! (Robbins and Bell 2008, p. 284) The use of process drama was first showcased in Second Life at the New Media Consortium Symposium on Creativity in Second Life in August 2007. Angela Thomas and I offered a session called ‘Teaching on the Second Life Stage; Playful Educational Strategies for Serious Purposes’. Drawing on our shared interest in theatre, drama and play as vehicles for learning we offered participants an opportunity to actively engage with these practices during this presentation. The pre-text was predicated on some of the social conditions in Second Life® at the time, namely that there were pressures to introduce a variety of forms of control and censorship over participation as a resident in the world. We located our fictional scenario in a not too distant fictional future looking back at a decision that had already been made. This dramatic pre-text was the basis of the following drama. In a major persistent world, Our Virtual World, the Administrators had acquiesced to community pressures and no material outside an ‘M’ rating was accessible inworld. This distancing in time provides the requisite shift to allow for metaxis, where participants can reflect upon their own condition while engaging with a fictional reality. (Interestingly, the scenario was to foreshadow moves by the Australian government to introduce mandatory internet filtering.)

210


We provided an open letter to the Administrators of Our Virtual World (set two years into the future) for participants to read. Here’s an excerpt from our letter: Open Letter to Administrators of Our Virtual World We, the undersigned, are concerned about the way Our Virtual World has moved away from its grassroots principles of freedom of expression and participatory culture into a sanitized Disneyland state. We recall in 2004 when President Phillip proudly, enthusiastically and energetically espoused his philosophical stance about Our Virtual World . . . But by far we, the undersigned, believe that the most debilitating move on the Administrators’ part is the new TOS policy issued in January of this year, to remove all M-rated sims and M-rated content, even in citizen’s private homes. With 30 million users, all over 18 and adult, we cannot understand this move to reduce Our Virtual World to Disneyland, which serves only to stifle the creativity and personal freedom of expression out of each and very one of us. Our Virtual World is no longer a deeply compelling place for us to live, to work, and to do our business. We therefore call for an immediate return to the terms of service as set out at the beginning of 2007. The activity was conducted within the Muriel Cooper Coliseum at the NMC conference centre in Second Life where we constructed a TV studio and the probing talk show, Eox News. My avatar, Kim Pasternak, adopted the role of the host and Angela’s avatar, Anya Ixchel, was our roving reporter. The participants were enrolled into the drama through the random distribution of badges (see Figure 13.2) that identified them as Parent, Student, Teacher or Administrator. Participants were invited to discuss the issues and elect a representative to appear on Eox News. The main focus of discussion was to relate to the relative impact of the policy changes upon the various groups in 2009. They were asked to individually consider whether or not they would sign the letter to the Administrators. We utilized the talk show format to mimic such strategies as hot seating, teacher-in-role, mantle of the expert, meetings, interviews and interrogations, reportage, and conscience alley to develop a hybrid form of virtual process drama and forum theatre (see Figure 13.3). Participants were ultimately asked to enter into a referendum and cast a vote as to their position on the letter to the Administrators. Interestingly, what emerged was that the majority of participants chose not to sign the letter.


211

Figure 13.2 Badges used to identify role (Image by jokay (http://jokay.com.au). Used with permission.)

Later out-of-role discussion revealed that the vote did not represent the feelings and attitudes of the participants but rather that of the roles they had adopted. So engaged were they that they felt the need to follow through with the intentions of the character they had played in the drama. This led to some engaging discussions about how this had occurred and what events and considerations within the role-play had convinced them to act contrary to their real-world views. While the time frame for the presentation was necessarily short, the personal experience and feedback from participants suggested that this was an important insight into the effectiveness of such approaches. This provides an example of what I’ve been calling generative play, the approach to learning that does not pursue predetermined outcomes but rather recognizes that serendipity in a focused, yet playful, exploration of

212


Figure 13.3 Caught up in the action during the NMC Symposium presentation (Image by Kim Flintoff (in Second Life as Kim Pasternak))

ideas is likely to lead to unexpected discoveries and insights that are of great significance to individuals and groups involved in the learning. The play is purposeful yet the specific learning is not prescribed at the outset. This generative play seems to best emerge when there is a strong ludic engagement with a limited regard to formulating an ideal narrative. The narrative emphasis is limited to the degree to which participants are comfortable with sustaining the fiction; in some ways this seems to have been anticipated by Janet Murray when she speculated that If participatory environments merge with authored environments . . . tensions between the author and the participants may increase . . . The area of immersive enchantment lies in the overlap between these two domains. (Murray 1997, pp. 266–267) There needn’t be a narrative that is cohesive or satisfying to an external reader, simply one that removes the need to constantly re-evaluate the parameters of the fiction. The role-players, as in traditional process drama, can be trusted to extend and deepen the engagement without resorting to conflict over the general narrative development. In many ways these functions seem to provide a type of public sphere6 where social issues can be considered in a place free from fear of threat. Steinkuehler and Williams consider massively multiplayer online games


213

(MMOs) as a type of ‘third place’ where they serve to support cultural awareness: Participation in such virtual ‘third places’ appears particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital–social relationships that, while not usually providing deep emotional support, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews. (Steinkuehler and Williams 2006) Their discussion of the features of a third place identifies Oldenburg’s eight characteristics and considers how MMOs satisfy the criteria. I believe that the types of drama/role-playing spaces we have created in virtual worlds like Second Life also provide examples of the same criteria and I have adapted their table with these examples (see Table 13.2).

TABLE 13.2 Identifying how Second Life reflects Oldenburg’s (1999) eight characteristics of ‘third places’ Characteristic

Definition

Neutral Ground

Second Life users can enter and leave Second Life without regard to others.

Leveler

The real world status of a Second Life user is negated by the reputation of their avatar and presentation inworld.

Conversation is Main Activity

In Second Life this is the case, despite the pretence of virtual activity there is strong evidence to suggest that users come to the world to socialize and communicate.

Accessibility and Accommodation

Second Life is freely accessible and relatively accepting and accommodating for residents. (Notwithstanding some concerns about digital access in a broader consideration of socio-economics.)

The Regulars

Second Life has its own personalities and celebrities in all its various locations, the places that people choose to frequent will very likely host a group of regulars.

A Low Profile

This isn’t always the case – there are some very ostentatious and bizarre locations within the virtual world, however there is a measure of complacency that diminishes the impact of the constructed space.

The Mood is Playful

Second Life has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to support playful engagement. The planning and execution of virtual process drama and virtual performances is predicated on a purposeful but playful approach.

A Home Away from Home

Second Life and other virtual worlds take on a very familiar homely quality for regular users. The familiarity, ownership (real and perceived) of place and objects, and social connections create an atmosphere of comfort and ease.

Source :‘Characteristic’, cited in Steinkuehler and Williams (2006)

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Godot Island – Lost City process drama During 2007 I invested real cash to purchase a virtual island in Second Life. My research project focused on the design and facilitation principles of a process drama in a 3-D virtual world. I’d previously been granted a small parcel of land on the mainland under the Campus: Second Life project that the Lindens had been operating to support educational experimentation. The land initially seemed quite huge, but as I learned some of the basics of building and scripting in Second Life I began to discover that this was a fairly small piece of real estate for the project I imagined. I had constructed a representation of a dingy main street of a rundown town and filled it with stimulus for the drama I wanted to run. Unfortunately, my neighbours in the region began developing dungeons for BDSM (bondage/discipline/sado-masochism) activities and opening clubs where gambling and ongoing parties were held; generally speaking, the neighbourhood was in decline. I could do little to limit the impact upon my parcel of land and there were additional detrimental effects on the functionality of the space because of all the activity.7 I bit the bullet and invested in a private island that I called Godot. The island sits within a 64,000 square metre space over which I have full administrative control and can limit access and functionality to avatars I choose. This is especially important when facilitating a process drama where I am gathering research data, even more so if I am running a class with students on the island.

The Lost City pre-text I began developing the Drama that drew upon debates around internet governance issues. I invented a back story for the island and set up pre-text materials. The stimulus materials for the process drama were embedded within the construction of the Lost City (see Figure 13.4) community on the island of Godot. The island was developed into a small community, not dissimilar to Queensland’s Bribie Island that I’d visited a year earlier. This is the background material that was presented to each participant: A resident in Lost City is closely related to one of the organizers of an inworld funeral in the World of Warcraft (Wow). The details of the service were advertised through the forum for the WoW server they used. However, other people also read the notices and


215

Figure 13.4 The island community on Godot (Image by Kim Flintoff (in Second Life as Kim Pasternak))

formulated a different plan for the day. The funeral was attacked by members of two Horde guilds. The Lost City resident has since established a lobby group called PLATO ( People’s Lobby Advocating Technological Ordinance) as a response to her feelings about what transpired. PLATO has grown and is lobbying for a new council by-law to restrict and monitor internet access. PLATO has invested a lot of time and resources into identifying examples of internet usage that they see as a threat to community standards. However, a grassroots opposition to the proposal has begun to emerge. RASCL (Regional Association for Social and Civil Liberties) has established a small office in the shopping precinct of the Lost City community and has begun promoting a No vote in the forthcoming referendum. RASCL’s arguments include the assertion that such a law will adversely impact upon the democratic nature of the internet and will have dire consequences in relation to education, social action, and privacy. The island was equipped with a range of buildings including shops, cinema, arts centre, TV station, police station, council chambers, school, homes, bar and nightclub, and others. The buildings were decorated somewhat sparsely but functionally; each building offering some contribution to the overall story of the island. In some cases the building itself and its furnishings provided very obvious clues about how to read the site; for instance, the headquarters of one of the major organizations (PLATO) presented in the drama had a large stone structure atop a hill, with iron gates, luxury vehicles and

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Figure 13.5 PLATO HQ on Godot (Image by Kim Flintoff (in Second Life as Kim Pasternak))

guard dogs outside and bottles of expensive champagne, leather sofas, etc. suggesting a place of privilege, exclusiveness and power(see Figure 13.5). This in stark contrast to the office of RASCL which was furnished with cheap furniture, posters supporting Aung San Suu Kyi, thus invoking the Burmese government’s political use of internet blocking and Suu Kyi’s famous Freedom From Fear speech: It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. (Aung San Suu Kyi) Elements like this were included throughout the build of the Lost City community on Godot and were intended to provide two extremes of opinion on the subject. It was hoped that engagement in the drama would allow the participants to consider the issues from a variety of perspectives. Participants initially met on the island of Godot (see Figure 13.6) and then teleported to a ‘skybox’ located 300 metres above Godot (see Figure 13.7). This was our ‘out-of-role’ area, in this space the participants were introduced to the back story of the drama and enrolled in the drama. Additionally, participants were supplied with some instructions about modifying the appearance and profile description of their avatar to better match the roles they would play. Roles were assigned representing members of these categories (sometimes within the same character): z z

Computer game players Internet business owners


217

Figure 13.6 Participants gathering for the Lost City drama (Image by Kim Flintoff (in Second Life as Kim Pasternak))

Figure 13.7 Participants in a debrief session in the skybox above Godot (Image by Kim Flintoff (in Second Life as Kim Pasternak))

218 z z z z z z z z z z


Local politicians Journalists Parents Students Educators Administrators Artists Social Activists Law enforcement Musicians

The drama was fictional but predicated on an infamous event in internet history; the events surrounding of the raid on the WoW memorial service really happened early in 2006. The rest of the scenario is fiction and was intended to invoke a wide ranging debate that reflected real-world concerns about internet governance at the time. The drama had some real and timely issues at its core. Coincidentally, PLATO and RASCL are also the acronyms of two educational lobby groups in Western Australia, adding further layers of significance to the pre-text materials. The drama demonstrated qualities similar to both an open process drama and forum theatre. Significantly though, there were real challenges to facilitating the drama. I entered in-role at some points, and at times used the chat and messaging capabilities of Second Life to coach and prompt individual players. Players explored the space, engaged in their own discussions and interactions with each other and with the pre-text materials. We broke the drama at times and moved to the skybox for reflective sessions. Ultimately participants met at the voting station and cast their votes. We subsequently retired to the skybox to consider the drama. The entire process was partial and fragmented for every participant. And while a range of monitoring devices were in place it was not possible to experience the full scope of the drama. The participants in the situated roles (Carroll et al. 2006) of Lost City residents were essentially embedded in the drama and became elements of pre-text in their own right. The drama was supported and moved forward by the complex interactions and the frequent need for players to evaluate each other character they encountered. This was not an easy undertaking, nor was it always comfortable. As facilitator, I recognized I was simultaneously more engaged in the drama and less aware of the scope of the drama than if I was managing this exercise in the traditional setting of a drama classroom.


219

It remains to be seen if Drama teachers and students, or learners more generally, will be willing to regularly engage with this level of immersion. Perhaps a new form is set to emerge, DramatARGy, where the principles of Alternate Reality Gaming are brought to bear on process drama. As educational sectors work towards a greater engagement with technology, online learning begins to integrate with face-to-face learning. Universities (and some K–12 schools) are offering more access to regional, remote and off-campus students, and as such, the modes of teaching and learning are shifting. Through this approach Drama students are being asked to explore different ways of knowing, learning and understanding the world. Unless traditional drama can find ways to engage with these new models of education (and performance) there is every likelihood that it will become less and and less relevant to contemporary learners. The models described in this chapter offer some starting points for this type of modified approach to Drama. The key imperatives will be to determine how we can move towards online models of interaction that allow remote learners to be involved in drama and performance with similar degrees of richness that face-to-face learners experience. Can a rich immersion in a fictional scenario be supported through engagement in virtual worlds and sustained by the strategies of extended alternate reality game play? Could we live our dramatic scenarios for extended periods; could metaxis be leveraged beyond a few minutes in a drama to a 24-hour-a-day waking state? It may be the stuff of science fiction; it may be that this will vanish as a fleeting curiosity; it may, however, emerge as something as potentially significant as some of the dramatic structures and forms we now use that were first seen as radical departures from established practice.

Notes 1

2

While the most common forms of 3-D avatar are highly idealized human representations it is becoming far more common that users are opting for non-human avatars such as animals and robots, and increasingly there is more experimentation with abstract and inorganic representation such as sculptural and amorphic avatars. A resident is defined on the Second Life website as ‘a uniquely named avatar with the right to log into the Second Life world, trade Linden™ dollars and visit the Community pages’ (Second Life 2008). At best it is an approximation of the number of users, but in this instance I have used the figures primarily to highlight the growth of use within the virtual world.

220 3

4 5

6

7


Newcomers to Second Life should also be aware that the term ‘drama’ is used somewhat pejoratively in the mainstream; generally referring to the overly emotional reactions to events inside the world. A ‘sim’ is a parcel of virtual land comprising the equivalent of 64,000 sq.m. Machinima is more or less the process/product of film-making using real-time techniques in 3-D environments (computer games, 3-D MUVEs, etc.). This is despite Habermas’s own assertions that the internet will not facilitate the development of new public sphere as documented by Axel Bruns (2007). Second Life sims have a finite capacity for the number of avatars in a region and the amount of scripting demands and server calls that can be placed on the hardware, as my region had become densely populated it was less able to respond effectively.

References Bruns, A. (2007), Habermas and/against the Internet, an entry from Surblog, retrieved 12 August 2008 from http://snurb.info/node/621. —(2008), Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang. Carroll, J., Anderson, M. and Cameron, D. (2006), Real Players? Drama, Technology and Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, p. 8. Fisher, M. (2007), Will virtual plays kill real theatre? on the Theatre and Performing Arts Blog, retrieved 12 April 2008 from, http://blogs.guardian.co. uk/theatre/2007/08/will_virtual_plays_kill_real_t.html. Gartner (2007), Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A ‘Second Life’ in the Virtual World by the End of 2011, retrieved 23 June 2008 from http://www. gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861. Murray, J. H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oldenburg, R. (1999), The Great Good Place: Café’s, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. New York: Marlowe & Company. Robbins, S. and Bell, M. (2008), Second Life for Dummies. Hoboken: Wiley Publishing Inc. Schrum, S. (2007), Poetry and Theatre Performance in Second Life, presented at the New Media Consortium Symposium on Creativity 14 August 2007, transcript retrieved 13 June 2008 from http://www.musofyr.com/Phorkyad/SLPerformance/ SymposiumScript.pdf. —(2008), Theatre Technology (Blog), retrieved 15 June 2008 from http://community. livejournal.com/theatechnology/. Second Life (2008a), Economic Statistics (Updated 4 July 2008), retrieved 7 July 2008 from http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php. —(2008b), IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement, retrieved 9 July 2008 from http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/08/ibm-linden-lab-interoperabilityannouncement.


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Steinkuehler, C. and Williams, D. (2006), Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as ‘third places’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), article 1, retrieved 12 August 2008 from http://jcmc.indiana. edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler.html. Theatron (2008), List of Theatres currently available in THEATRON, retrieved 27 May 2008 from http://www.theatron.org/info.html.

Second Life locations Godot Island: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Godot Greek Theatre: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cookie/59/28/33 Maceday: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Maceday NMC Arts Theatre: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Arts/80/60/33 NMC Conference Centre: http://slurl.com/secondlife/NMC%20Conference% 20Center/64/193/22 SL Globe Theatre: http://slurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/27/32/22 Theatron Island: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Theatron/176/124/23 SL Live Performance: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Live_Performance_Home

All the above SLURLs were last accessed on 19 March 2009.

Afterword David Booth

As I read through this intriguing and insightful collaboration by contributors involved in drama and theatre education, I was confronted once again with the realization of the number of forces for change challenging today’s schools. Technologies not even dreamt of when I began teaching drama are central to the everyday lives of most of the students we find in our classrooms. When one young man had his cell phone taken away by the principal of his secondary school, he told him, ‘You might as well cut off my arm.’ Such is the power of so many modes of technology to our young people. My son studied computer technology at college, and I should be more attuned to its relevance to today’s youth, and yet so swift has been the cultural flood that educators are struggling to accommodate digital connections inside (and outside) school walls (Tapscott 2008). Perhaps drama education appears distanced from these technological factors in our traditional visions of schooling, and yet those of us who spend much of our lives inside the drama framework have always realized the effects of the changes in the culture, and especially in the subcultures of our students; we have adapted our teaching strategies, our conventions, the themes and issues we explore, and the connections we make with participants and observers. We are welcoming the new technologies into our pedagogies, just as professional theatre is making use of them in their offerings. Fortunately, the authors of the chapters in this book see technology as a much more significant force – not just a new strategy integrated into our drama work, but one that can be socially constructed and shaped for our own educational purposes. These educators from classrooms, colleges and theatre communities understand that technology can offer us dynamic tools for our explorations in drama, but in addition, they pull us into the contemporary cultural frames inside which students live. They offer us possibilities for engaging them in situations and experiences where we can build together the meaning-making structures that we believe in. We as educators need to be in charge of the technologically supported and enhanced drama learning.

Afterword

223

The disparities between the electronic world outside the school and the traditional school curriculum can contribute to the alienation that many students feel about what happens in their classrooms. How can we build on their digital worlds as we reconceptualize drama experiences? This book offers us authentic examples of teachers and theatre groups who have done this, along with potential suggestions for future explorations. These essays help us realize that we need not feel shut out from the huge societal changes; indeed, we are given models and demonstrations of the relationship of the new technologies and the world of drama, just as music, dance and visual arts have embraced the digitized media. Of course, we need to move our students beyond the rudimentary use of the technology, towards collaborating and creating opportunities that technology makes possible, more tools for creating relevant and authentic drama events. We need to help them to be active and critical in their use of digital tools, and vigilant that they do not get lost in cyberspace or substitute electric flashes for emotional connections. The contributors to this book have explored so many significant aspects of drama education that are surrounded by the new world of technology, and they have offered us ways of seeing these changes as integral to drama education in its different venues. Their words will help us to stay true to our mandate of drama education as a living art form, while adapting to the everchanging surround of digital technology. The chapters have taken us into drama classrooms and inside theatre for young people as the writers work through and demonstrate the inter-relationships of drama education and technology. We are helped to make connections between the virtual realities of computer games and drama; we are comforted with the recognition of familiar drama conventions that have been updated by incorporating the tools of the digital generation; we have observed students exploring online participatory drama opportunities; we have witnessed the application of drama conventions and the storytelling opportunities supported by digital audio production tools where participants tell their own personal stories through images, film and sound; we have discovered examples of virtual forums for students that allow them to discuss issues that matter, along with blogging platforms for reflecting on the intricacies of creating performances, and ‘open forms’ for working inside the drama experience and on the web; we have noted online applications as resources for developing material for participants – all of these digital conventions for promoting drama literacy, technologies for deepening the experience for drama makers and drama viewers (Booth 2008). We have to consider the effect and the influence of these technologies on the processes and proficiencies we hope to develop in our students within

224

Afterword

our drama events. The technology of the future will bring an ever-increasing flow of content and modes of transforming experience, which students will need to learn to understand, construct and apply to new situations. The critical and creative competencies that we hope to develop in them as they explore drama will be affected by technologies yet unknown and undeveloped. (The New York Times recently reported on attempts to create a brand new internet to rectify the problems of the one we have now.) Today’s students are more aware of a much broader range of modes than we ever were. Their texts have video, animation, podcasts, hot spots, blogs, YouTube, and, in their world, the written word has been extended by the visual and the tactile. In a digital environment, our students are developing and expanding new modalities that involve thinking, exploring, constructing, connecting, and making meaning, often collaboratively. Students have the potential of taking advantage of vast global networks, huge databases, immense archives and interactions with millions of users (Booth et al. 2004). Our task as drama educators is to help young people become capable and involved navigators of what is often a complex landscape, making up their own maps and minds, within the art form called drama. Interpersonal connections and personal reflections are fostered by exchanges on email and in chat-rooms and discussions forums. However, the literacy we seek to develop is the socially constructed one in the technological world our learners inhabit, one that offers a different sensibility, diverse opportunities to engage in the building of ‘felt/knowledge’. Maxine Greene (1995) says that aesthetic knowledge lets us see further and sense the ‘as if’, the hallmark of thoughtful, mindful citizens. Students today think of themselves as programmers, as interface designers when they read and generate texts on the computer. They interweave such modes as written text, sounds, animation, and video to enhance their assignments. But as well, they need to see the role of these digital movements in shaping the world they live in through the arts – exploring, creating and interpreting as they engage in drama experiences. We need to create our drama events in terms of the multimodal digital nature of what students now accept as necessities. The real potential of technology lies in the power of learning with it – using the technology as a tool for exploring concepts and issues in drama in new ways. We need to be strategic and systematic in creating conditions and providing the means for technology to be used within our dreams and goals for drama education. Communication technologies used as tools for drama events can assist students in creating new insights and ideas for bringing to life their ideas and constructs.

Afterword

225

Schools are joining the technology-rich world of today’s learners, and students are responding to technology-enhanced learning opportunities. The learning events described in this book involve technology as tools for exploring classroom drama and theatre experiences embedded in networks of mutual interests. In an environment filled with opportunities for exploring, observing and reflecting, students can create their own rich web of experiences that help them organize and structure their learning and develop their understanding of ‘drama literacy’. In our work, technology needs to involve knowledge construction, along with the aesthetic and artistic representations and design of ideas – in words, in movement, and in sound and image. The contributors to this book have demonstrated that there is a role for technology in supporting and extending, and even in changing, our drama work inside and outside schools. They have shown us the potential for creating drama events where students become creators, viewers and interpreters within these dynamic and interactive expressive forms. There is no doubt that technology can enhance our drama teaching. Teachers can enrich their practice and students can have deepened and expanded learning opportunities with new tools for constructing our thoughts and feelings. Drama can be a powerful means of expressing and interpreting the world as we explore and communicate ideas and information, social behaviours, values, feelings and attitudes (Gallagher and Booth 2004). The potential for involving technology inside our work as drama educators is the heart of this book, and the contributors have strengthened our resolve to meet the future as wired (or as wireless) as our students deserve. David Booth is Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto; and Chair of Literacy, Nipissing University.

References Booth, D. (2008), Children as drama makers, Canadian Theatre Review V. (133 Winter). Booth, D., Green, J. and Booth, J. (2004), I Want to Read. Toronto: Rubicon Publishing. Gallagher, K. and Booth, D. (2003), How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars and Advocates. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Greene, M. (1995), Releasing the Imagination. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc. Tapscott, D. (2008), Grown Up Digital. Toronto: McGraw-Hill.

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Index

3-D avatars 219 3-D Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) 202 3-D spatial representation 202 Abolition of the Slave Trade, British Empire Bicentenary 98, 99 absorption 26 academic ‘moral panic’ 9 ‘active creation of belief’ 22 actors’ voices, dubbing of 41 actual, dramatic and virtual worlds 20–36 aesthetic control 187 aesthetic of film acting 192 aesthetic understanding 187 aesthetics and play 186 ‘affinity space’ (James Gee) 14, 15 ‘agreement to pretend’ 24 alter-ego 62 Alternate Reality Gaming 219 anonymity of cyber-bullying 69 Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd (ATCo) 69, 70 ‘arrangement of incidents’ 25 art, music and drama 188–9 Artaud, Antonin, on creating theatre 199 Atchley, Dana 114 attitudinal role 88 audience for blogs 140–41 dramatic action and 188 as participant 173 response to online work 161 audio drama 97–110 instrumentalist 108

in learning 105 in museums 109–10 Aung San Suu Kyi, quotation on power 216 Australasian Collaborative Research Centre for Interaction Design (ACID) 29 Australian Centre for Moving Image (ACMI) 116 Australian TV drama and Facebook 179, 180 Love My Way 175–7 authenticity level 53 in online world 179 of tasks 88 autoethnographic theatre 47 avatar animations 207 avatars 62 on-screen 28 back projections 45 ‘back story’, virtual world game 25 badges for role identification 211 Bergman, Ingmar, on power of film 199 Bertolucci, Bernardo, on filmmaking 196 black minority ethnic backgrounds 101 Blast Theory, artist team 16 ‘blended learning’ approaches 15 Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) 57 blogging platforms 4 blogs, online journals 17, 58, 59, 133 roles played in drama 131 students’ creativity with 139–40 websites 133 writing at home 135–6,141

228 blue screen techniques 46 boundary objects 7 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Capture Wales project 122 British Empire and Commonwealth Museum 98, 102 Buckingham, David, critique of technology 9 bullying issues 67, 70 Burmese Government 216 C&T applied theatre company, England 38–50 Caldwell Cook, Henry, Play way 185–6 camera as eye of God 190 camera crews, presence of 194 car crash images 45 Carbon Copy (CC) function 57 causality and player performance 25 cell phone conventions 3 cell phone technology 71, 74 bans in schools 15 expertise 72 process drama conventions 72 use in schools 79; see also mobile phone Center for Digital Storytelling 114–17 character profiles 157 chats in-role 162 chatterbot programme 74 class division in website use 10 Cleo Missing pre-text as homepage for website 155, 157–8 university student project 153–6, 160, 161 codes as reflection 78 collaboration 152, 153 group work 196, 197 interactivity opportunities 142, 160 nature of digital media 56 ‘collective character’ improvisation 62 ‘collective intelligence’ 56

Index colour chroming 46 commission-based drama 90–91 Commission Model 81, 83, 89 of drama 92 for real clients 91 communities creating 142 feeling 122 of practice 7, 14, 91–2 Community & Theatre-in-Education 38 Community Media for Development Productions 108 compliant learners, in decline 8 computers access and student learning 150 games 20 interactivity 26 value in learning 12–13 Computers & Theatre 38 conflict in drama 27 contemporary classroom-based drama 64 contemporary drama groups 53 conventions 26 conversation 152 costumed interpreters 99 creation of film 188 creative learning spaces 14 Creativity and Technology 38 cultural borrowing 43 cultural references, updating 53 Culture and Theory 38 Culture Connection project 118, 122 ‘cyber’, human-computer interface 151 cyber-bullying 3, 67, 68 cyberdrama creation 149–66 interactivity in 150 cybernetics, ‘goal-directed systems’ 151 de-briefing after process drama 322 design in blog posting 141 designers’ role 31 digital cameras 101

Index digital environment, value of, in education 93–4 digital games 81–95 digital literacy skills, variable 164 digital media 56 case study, Four 174, 175 use within drama 53, 54 digital natives 11, 146 (Net Gen) 12 and reflection 132, 134 digital pre-text 54 digital storytelling case study 116 drama 113–26 main elements 115 therapeutic 122 uses 115, 119 digital theatre and online narrative 168–81 digital video-based teaching 17 Digital Youth project 15 Dormitory Boys 40 drama applied 81–95 improvised, and pre-text 172 traditional and new models 219 drama and film differences 191 education 198 relationship 184–99 drama and popular music 39 Drama Australia VINE project 129 drama conventions information, text-based by facilitator 60, 61 overheard ‘private’ conversations 61 participatory media forms 62 text-based media forms 61 drama education 2, 3, 17, 199 context with songs 45 facilitators in schools 53 focus and pre-text 154, 155 museum learning 99

229

drama-in-education pedagogy 84 drama learning and film learning, comparison 184–99 drama practice through blogs 129–47 Dramatic Property 39 ‘dramatic worlds’, creation of 117 dramaturg, creating four Ws 20 drama unit, History’s Purchased Page 30–31 drink-driving melodrama 45 Dungeons and Dragons, board game 28 editors as actors and directors 194 educational technology, user-centred 8 e-mail for drama 53 emergent narrative 21 emotional drivers 26 emotional understanding of events 31 empathic intelligence 26–7, 121–2 in education 113 ‘enactment of the expert’ 72 English study in Australia 116 environmental storytelling 26 environments authored 212 participatory 212 Epiphany Virus website 39, 40, 4–50 Epistemic Games and Simulation 7, 81–6 Ergodic Literature 170 escaping the time loop 71 Euripides, The Bacchae 207 Everest, climbing of 31, 34 expanded universe 54 Experience Room for virtual experience 35 ‘expert anthropologist’ roles 118 Facebook social networking site 10, 168, 174 face-to-face experience, power 162–3 feedback loop 151 fidelity 53 filming as performance 198

230

Index

filmmaking process aesthetic 195 collaborative creativity 196 films art forms 188 education 4 learning model 186, 192–3 on mobile phones 15 visual imagery 185 foley (sound effects from object manipulation) 104 framing dramatic action 27 From the Shadows, play in Second Life 206 frozen images 76, 120 game-based learning 85, 94 game-playing about slave trade 101–2 game technology 86 garden design, professionals’ model 89, 93 geospatial data 63 geotagging 59 globalization 43 Globe theatre, incarnation of 207 glocalization 43 Godard, Jean-Luc, French New Wave 196 Godot island 214–17 Gorillaz, cartoon musicians (apes) 49 GPS technology 60, 63, 109 graphic detail of a criminal 35 graphic wallpapers 59 group devising performance 142 group interactions 161 Hamlet on the Holodeck: . . . narrative in cyberspace 26, 151 health education in South Africa 108 Heathcote, Dorothy, case study 89, 92 Commission Model 7 garden design 93 Real Players 18

Rolling Role drama model 43 Hepburn, Audrey, dubbing by Marni Nixon, My Fair Lady 41 heritage interpretation 98, 100, 105 historian roles 30–31 history of slavery 105 history, presentation of 32 Hockney, David, artist 171 Justin on the Net 171 holocaust memorials 108 ‘holodeck’ capabilities 206 homophobic slurs 68 hospital garden commission, real 90 Howe, Jeremy, BBC Radio 4 108 human interactivity 12 humanoid avatar 292 hypertext 179 ‘identification’ with films 190, 191 identity concealing in audio drama 106 ‘illusion of realness’ 24 image theatre 76 imagination, fragile world of 36 immersion in the game 26 immortal life, Future Body 156 Immortals, student project 154, 156, 158, 161 improvisation in Second Life 208 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 2, 8, 30 in classroom 149, 150 interaction designers 21 with computer interfaces 150–51 interactive drama 152, 153, 169, 170 using cyberspace 149–66 Internet blocking, Burmese government 216 iPod and MP3 players 40 Jackson, Anthony 99 ‘Joiner’ photographs, Hockney 171

Index kaleidoscopic media model 177 ‘kinaesthetic storyboarding’ 193–4 ‘learned helplessness’ 2 learning in museums 98 re-evaluation 16 through drama and ICT 42 Lee, Laurie, Cider with Rosie 108 Linden Labs 203 lip dubbing 39 lip sync group performance 44, 45 individual performance 45 and networked theatre 42 practice 43, 44 Lip Sync, drama project 39, 47 literacy difficulties 101 live interaction popularity of 163, 164 live theatre performance, Next Exit 114 ‘live’ versus ‘virtual’ 12 live video feeds 45 Lost City 214–17 ‘ludology’ 26 Macarthur Foundation 15 ‘magic if’ 191–5 Mantle of the Expert, Heathcote 81–90, 118 map and diagram-making 63 ‘mashup’ examples of 60 user-developed 202 massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) 213 Massive Multiplayer Environments 29 Matrix 184–202 Meadows, Daniel, BBC, Capture Wales 114 Me Deya! audio-viewing area, BECM 108–9 media forms, synchronous and asynchronous 57

231

media literacy 171, 199 Media Station, The 29 memorial garden design project 90–3 meta-information 53 metaxis 27, 191, 195, 219 and the virtual 32, 33 Meteorological Office, UK, website on sunlight 92 miming to songs 39 Minghella, Anthony 108 mini-disc recorders 101 mobile media forms 59, 63 mobile phones 59 blogging (moblogging) 59 communications 55 ownership 13 personal media hub 55 mobile phones for drama 53; see also cell phones MP3 player 41 Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) 59 multimedia projection 45, 114 multiplayer world design 23, 35 multi-purpose digital tool 59 multi-user communication 33 Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) 4 multi-world designers 25 museums 97–110 drama education in 15, 41 music musical lip syncing 3 music industry 49 music’s role in daily lives 41 Myspace 10 mystery genre 155 mystery-driven drama 170 mythologies on slave trade 99 narrative and meaning 199 narrative development 179–80 narrative forms 179

232 National Secondary School Computer Fund, Australia 1 Nesta Futurelab 109 Networked Theatre 42 new generation (N-Gen) students 11 One Laptop Per Child project 1 online and face-to-face learning 219 online audiences 46 online chats with historic figures 34 online communications 54, 55 online drama 169–70, 181, 202 online persona creating 157 online social network sites 15 Open the Loop, New Zealand 67, 68 success of 78–9 oral and aural skills, neglect of 107 orientation and complication 25 Our Virtual World 209, 210 parental scrutiny of website use 10 participatory media forms blogs, podcasts, wikis 58 bookmarks, games, mashups, micro-blogs, media sharing 58 virtual worlds, simulations, tags, 58 pedagogic hierarchy, shift in 68 peer relationships 3, 67 pen-and-paper games 28 performance 195 cell phone bullying by students 70 performance-making blogs 137 performance teaching 17 performing arts 100 persona, in virtual world 28 Phorkyard Acropolis 207 photo story 159 photography, still and video 13, 67 physiological change in brains 10, 11 placebo computer virus 39 plant growth website information 93 PLATO 215, 216, 218 playing as learning 186 playing duplicitous roles 103

Index playwrights and gamewrights 24 points of view (POV) 27 popular culture, celebrity-dominated 46 portable music 40 postmodern knowledge 47, 49 post-production process of filmmaking 198 Potter, Dennis, British TV writer 41 Pennies From Heaven realism 46 power of unseen voice 106 power relationships shift 72 Prensky, Marc, on changing schooling 8, 11 pre-production process of filmmaking 197 pre-text 4, 24 description of 172 improvised drama 53 privacy issues 65 problem-solving 89 process drama 21–30, 74, 102–6, 117, 152–3 constraints 26 Second Life 209 social media 168 world design 23 professional mentors 90 professional roles, taking on 86–8 professionalization through lip sync 46 protocols on privacy 65 ‘pushing’ avatars 208 racial slurs 68 racism and slave trade in British history 4 ‘radio conversations’ 64 radio drama experiment 102 Radiowaves, UK 107 ranking or rating content 58 rapid entry into drama action 53 reality, social enactment of 84

Index real-life functional roles 24 manifestations 28 real professional learning 92 real world into classroom 82 real-world knowledge of experts 93 reflection, process drama 25 reflective thinking in drama 131, 132, 145 Regional Association for Social and Civil Liberties (RASCL) 215, 218 research project on role of blogs 130 resolution of drama 25 ringtones 59, 67, 75, 76 Rockstar Games – Grand Theft Auto 35 role attributes 28 role-based performance 169 role development 157 role-play 3, 4, 20, 218 and digital media 172 in filmmaking 192 games 28–9 models, limitations of 100 naturalistic 31 roles in bullying situations 70 Rolling Role 43 romanticization of students 9 ‘roundscape’ 63 ‘roundtracking’ 63 Royal Opera House project 16 safety protocol 35 Sartre, Jean-Paul 196 Schrum, digital theatre researcher 207 screensavers 59, 76 Second Life Theatre Workshops 203–7 improvisation 208–9 process drama 209 sense of self 122 sensory immersion 36 sexual harassment 69 sexual slurs 68 Shakespeare, virtual 206 Short Message System (SMS) 56, 57

233

shot types for film 190 significant events in life, digital stories 126 simulation 28 game-based 92 versus play 35 SL avatar (‘Osprey Therian’) 205 slavery absence from history education 99 history of 98–100 slaves and masters on plantations 103 slave trade, Transatlantic 109 social exclusion and difference 68 social media and narrative 181 social networking blocking of sites144 space, Ning 154 web-based 133 sound as learning support 106–7 on mobile phones 15 sound-creating, from slave trade era 104 soundscapes 75, 76 story with active engagement 151–2 problematic 25 student filmmakers, choices 194 students ‘as-if’ professionals 94 mastery of technology 72 teaching cell phone technology 72 suicides from cyber-bullying 69 suspension of disbelief 86 tableaux, still images 120 teacher-actors 70 Teaching the Screen: Film Education for Generation Next 188 ‘technical performing’ 195 ‘technical’ actor 193 technological revolution 17, 18 technology and cultural identity 8

234

Index

technology (Cont’d) harnessing for creative education 11 shaped for education 1 technology-use, people-centred 150 ‘telephone conversations’ 64 television work of Dennis Potter 49 tension and atmospheric music 27 of metaxis 32 and shocking graphics 27 of surprise 31 of the task 31 tension balance, critical 27 text-based media forms 56, 57 text chat 206 text messages 77 text on mobile phones 15 Theatre, Drama and Education 207 Theatre-in-Education 42 theatre in education programme 67 Theatron, 3-D reconstruction of famous theatres 207 ‘third place’ 213 thought button 76 Time Travellers Incorporated (TTI) 72–9 time-travelling 71–3 To the Spice Islands, online drama 172 traditional boundaries, blurring of 172 traditional drama teaching 17 traditional music and drama 83 Turner, Jane ‘Truna’ 21, 22, 23, 26 two-dimensional frame 190 Understanding Slavery Initiative (USI) 98, 99 ‘unfinished materials’ 62 Vice City 25 video clips 67, 76–7, 101 video sharing site 62 Vimeo 40

VINE project 130, 144–5 virtual environment, experience 33 virtual island in Second Life 214 virtual teacher-in-role, cell phone as 72, 74 virtual theatre, divergent form of theatre 206 virtual worlds (VW) 20–2, 29, 203 communication 33 game 27 integration with real 16 list of 204, 205 young people 8 Virtually Impossible Computer Company 31, 35 virus downloading 48, 49 visual and auditory representation 202 visual literacy in learning 199 voice telephony 59 Waikato Primary Health Organisation, New Zealand 67, 69 wallpapers 67 web-based communication 172 website visits 10 Wiener, Norbert 151 Wiki tools 62 Wilder, Gene, on eye of camera 190 world design 26 world, represented by computer 24 ‘Worlds Collude’ project 21 worldwide audience for blogs 139 young people’s lives, perception of, through modern song 44 Young, James E., on memory work 108 youth web-culture 133 YouTube 40, 62 Zellner, Dan, theatre and drama practitioner 208

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