Oldal 11 [11]
FOREWORD
texts. Peter Slade revolutionised the use of drama with his book Child Drama.?
He placed the child’s personal development above learning to act and studying
plays and this changed the whole dynamic of drama teaching in UK schools.
Rather than having to rely on reading skills and reading texts, children could
bring themselves to the drama in a sort of living through approach. As Ádám
Bethlenfalvy explains it in this research: "When used without capital letters
living through drama refers to simple experiential improvisations that can
be part of many different genres of drama with a variety of aims"? and when
used with capital letters the drama “focuses on creating improvisation where
participants are in role and experiencing and dealing with some sort of crisis
within the fictional situation”.
Starting her teaching career at Newcastle University, at the same time as
Peter Slade’s work was becoming known, was a person who was to become
a world leader in the field of drama in education, Dorothy Heathcote. Heathcote
started running courses for experienced teachers who wanted to learn about
teaching drama to young people. From the start she was concerned that
young people should be involved with Living Through Drama as the main
form of their engagement with and experience of drama. Heathcote developed
her sophisticated thinking and theory primarily through her own practice.
Her work developed over the years into what could in time be seen to be two
distinct phases. One came to be called ‘A man in a mess’ drama and the other,
which I think she would regard as her major contribution, the development
of ‘Mantle of the Expert’ drama. This switch of focus to Mantle of the Expert
was explained by Heathcote as her coming to see that education should be
the focus of the work of drama teachers not drama itself. Adam Bethlenfalvy
usefully traces the development of her theorising and pinpoints clearly
the major differences that mark out these two major forms of her drama
teaching.
By one of those interplays between necessity and chance the second
most important teacher in this field, Gavin Bolton, was appointed to teach
drama in education courses at Durham University. This university is only
some 20 kilometres distant from Newcastle University where Heathcote was
teaching. This began a life-long sharing of experience and influence between
these two fine teachers of teachers and children. This proximity, developing
into a personal and professional sharing, had a particular influence on Bolton’s
theory and practice. The ‘necessity’ part of the dialectic was the extraordinary
progressive period of education that was taking place in the UK in the 1960s,
2 Peter Slade: Child drama, London, University of London Press, 1954.
Adam Bethlenfalvy: Living through extremes in process drama, Budapest, Karoli Konyvek,
2020, 22.
Bethlenfalvy: Living through extremes, 22.
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