Meeting the Grande Dame of Drama:
Dorothy Heathcote Live!
Click here to read:
A Conversation about Dorothy Heathcote between Sophia Yannitsos and Sherron Burns as they reflect on their trip to Greece and the Hellenic Drama and Theatre Network, International Conference, April 2008.”
Dorothy Heathcote with Sophia Yannitsos (r) and me (l) in Athens, Greece in April 2008.
“Of These Seeds Becoming”
If I have any teaching wisdom, it is that I have learned to know
the struggle is the learning process;
and the skills of teaching lie
in making this time slow enough for enquiry;
interesting enough for loitering along the way;
rigorous enough for being buffeted in the matrix of the ideas;
but with sufficient signposts seen for respite, planning, and re-
gathering of energy
to fare forward on the way.
It is therefore, dear [researcher], my task as I see it
to arm myself well for this struggle,
so as to lead my class well into this forest of ideas,
where light, dark, soft, hard, shallow, deep elements wait so that we
can carry well-guarded
the questions to which we have as yet no answers.
The present time will provide the time to wander and press,
not the time that we must arrive.
Arrival are those moments of being able to demonstrate our knowing,
and the wandering is the time of learning.
by Dorothy Heathcote
From Educational Drama for Today’s Schools by Baird Shuman (1978)
I had the great pleasure of meeting Ms. Heathcote in Greece, April 2008. I was part of a full day workshop on Mantle of the Expert. Dorothy is 82 and an amazing lady of great strength, character and imagination. Sharp as a tack and hardy, she led us through a very active, 6 hour workshop, in which she had to juggle a lot of information, manage our process and deal patiently with translations for every word spoken. It was an incredible experience and one that I feel honored to have had. This poem captures much of her philosophy as an educator and has helped me better understand my practice. It is easy to say, but not always so easy to follow in practice … “to wander in the time of learning” and not to press for answers. The tension in accountability exists and must be faced.
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This video of Sir Ken Robinson approaches the notions of validity of arts education and addresses our notions of accountability. I had the pleasure of hearing Robinson speak in October, 2008 in Regina, and was struck by the simple and direct way he lays out his case. You would have to be mad to disagree. What is it about the British no nonsense approach (tough school marm) and the sardonic humour that captures underlying irony so well?
Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talks lecture:
“Creativity can be defined as the process of having original ideas that have value.” (Sir Ken Robinson)
“The power of imagination is to conceive of possibilities – this is what makes us human. Creativity is applied imagination” (Sir Ken Robinson)
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Ten Lessons the Arts Teach
By Elliot Eisner
The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.
The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.
