Before I start: the 34 Conventions of Dramatic Action are a set of invaluable tools for teaching through Mantle of the Expert. Tim Taylor has produced a useful guide to the conventions and how to use them, as well as this overview that I use on a regular basis to choose the convention I will use (and to remind myself of them; I tend to stick to a very few of the familiar ones).
Anyway, today's blog concerns convention one: naturalistic, in present time, with roles interacting with each other.
As a rule, I shy away from convention one. I have never been comfortable with 'drama' and find it hard to act/be in role/roleplay/partake in imaginary play. I've become much better at it over time; firstly when I started teaching small children, and secondly when I began my Mantle training.
However, the other day I used convention one in a very simple sense. The children are currently a team of travel agents. So far they had:
* come up with a name for our travel agency
*created some logos
* created some posters for the wall, showing some travel desinations
However, they were not yet ready to meet the client and take on the commission I have planned for them; I wanted to invest them further into their role by enacting some time in their office. I often find that if children are not yet invested in an idea or a role or a commission, introducing some sort of enactive something helps.*
With that in mind, I invited the children to help set the classroom up as their office, with a table for each team (a team for each continent). We discussed what might happen in the office, and then they began.
To start with, they were filling out holiday booking forms and coming up to me to say 'finished'. They were not in the story; they were carrying out a task 'for me'.
On page 7 of his guide (see link above) Tim has this to say about convention one, and the highlighted sentence sums up what I think happened.
It is important to say that while convention 1 can be exciting and involving for those taking part, it does carry with it certain risks. Mainly, that once things get going the teacher has to rely very much on what the students can create in the moment. Occasionally this will mean they run out of ideas or the work begins to lose focus. If this happens, the teacher can bring things to a halt, either to negotiate a rerun or to stop the drama altogether for reflection.
The children had no ideas of how to proceed, they weren't used to imaginary play in this way in the classroom (again - it's a new school for me and I haven't done a lot convention one with my new class). It was all falling flat.
Then one little thing changed it, and the children were 'there'.
I was sitting at one of the desks in role as a client wanting to book a holiday. Nothing was very convincing and the children were far from invested. I had to do something, so I said:
'B, the phone's ringing, I can wait, you go ahead.'
B was a bit unsure to start with but picked up the phone and started having a conversation with the person on the other end. It went something like this.
B: Hello. Yes. Yes. No this is Europe I can't help. You need someone else.
Me, whispering: B, where do they want to go?
B: Antarctica
Me: you better put them through. Antarctica desk, you've got a call coming through!'
And that was all it took for the children to take that one step deeper into the drama, and I could stand back and watch the busy travel agents' office at work, with children taking calls, visiting each others' desks to book holidays and stop coming up to me to say 'I've done.'.
What I think I'm saying is that convention one doesn't just happen: I need to help the children along more, get involved and be creative and spontaneous.
* Mantle of the Expert makes use of Bruner's forms of representation: enactive, iconic and symbolic
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