On my visit to India for WSF in 2012, I went to a school in Kolkata where students had prepared display boards to greet me. One included images of Shakespeare and
Rabindranath Tagore, including extracts from their work and a heading: ‘Two bards, both ours’. The heading was symbolic, not just for the students’ pride in their national poet and ownership of mine, but also for the dialogic pedagogy we were drawing from both. Tagore is celebrated widely for his poetry and philosophy but his education work is now sadly less well known. He was passionate about dialogic pedagogy, setting up a school in his home town and later devoting the funds from his Noble Prize to founding a university on progressive principles. From her work in India, however, Nussbaum (2010) draws the conclusion that his influence has not taken hold, with rote learning dominating Indian schools. She observes: ‘Teachers all too rarely try to innovate, to inspire children. Their highest hope is to stuff them full of facts so that they perform well on national
examinations’ (2010, p.140). As part of the WSF project, students at the Kolkata school had created their own culturally distinct versions of scenes from Shakespeare plays and enthusiastically told me of the discussions they had had about the human condition, stimulated by the ideas they found in the text (Irish, 2012). They also told me about the stresses they experienced caused by societal and institutional pressures to conform and to achieve top grades on those national examinations. The Shakespeare project had proved a risky but enriching experience and they valued it highly, but they acknowledged it had been an exception in a schooling focused on competitive, technical skills.
There are many Indian teachers, however, who are keen to innovate and inspire and I have been privileged to meet some on several visits to India. Returning to Kolkata in February 2015, I led a workshop for ‘Goalz’, a local police initiative for boys living in the slums, who are described as ‘at risk’, mainly because their fathers are in prison (British Council, 2015). The programme was founded on using sport as a way to provide structure and develop social skills, but had recently expanded to include drama, and had staged an adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. In my workshop, I introduced the boys to the complex relationship between Prospero, Miranda and Caliban and found them to be enthusiastic, thoughtful and often surprisingly mature in their responses to the questions raised in the text. How much these boys learned about Shakespeare I don’t know but using this highly
194
respected artist as a vehicle for developing their own sense of self-respect seemed as tangibly effective here as with their more privileged peers at the high school; and with their peers in the UK, struggling with their own pressures of finding identity in the modern world.
In his examination of the role of beauty in education, Winston (2010) references a story told by Luiz Eduado Soares in 2006 about arts projects for street children in Brazil that succeeded from this same principle of allowing adolescents a structured space to explore their identities and receive affirmation. Soares described how a boy who feels that he is socially invisible can gain visibility, admiration and power by joining a gang and wielding a gun; or he can gain admiration and respect for skills of performance. Winston observes how the arts can ‘offer a different dynamic for self-assertion, with languages and forms of expression to help them provoke powerful emotions and hence become visible without the need for a gun’ (2010, p.137). McLuskie and Rumbold (2014) question the role of success stories as evidence for the value of arts in people’s lives, as discussed in chapter five, but each story of individual success becomes a metaphor for what is possible in other cases. Each case gives us hope.
As part of a national event run by the British Council in 2015, I worked with nearly a hundred teachers from contexts ranging from rural Primaries to international further education. Through these workshops, we explored the role dialogic pedagogy could play in their teaching, and used the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as our stimulus. Following exercises setting up democratic principles, we moved on to image work, with groups asked to create still images which contrasted concepts of hierarchy and
egalitarianism, and took these idea into the cultural effects of status within families. Their images of extended family units particularly began to bring out different cultural
references, such as children receiving blessings from their parents. Participants readily offered narrative interpretations of the relationships they observed in each other’s work, provoking reflection on what family means. In each case the influence of primary
metaphors was apparent. Our instinctive use of levels and eye contact in creating images of status, for example, can be linked to ‘control is up’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), which derives from our childhood learning that the adults who have the power to encourage or punish us are bigger than us. Alongside this, we learn from our own bodies that we feel more powerful when we stand tall, shoulders back, than when we sit hunched over; the first position reflecting a confidence in not being hurt while the second protects our vital
195
organs from harm. We learn from embodied experiences that eye focus reflects security because we know we can feel either safe or threatened under the gaze of another. From the primary metaphor ‘knowing is seeing’, we derive metaphorical language such as being ‘looked after’, ‘watched over’ or ‘spied on’.
Following a basis of reflection provoked by shared experience, I offered the Indian teachers a statement: ‘Children should always do what their parents tell them to do’, and asked participants to stand along a diagonal line from one corner of the space to the other according to how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement. In response, the teachers tended to cluster towards the middle with a few outliers. Responses were generally qualified: ‘It depends how old the child is’; ‘It depends what the parent is asking the child to do.’ But there were also strong statements such as: ‘Parents have more experience and know what’s best’; ‘Children are responsible for their own lives and need to work out what’s best for themselves.’
Groups were then given brief character descriptions for Theseus, Hippolyta, Egeus, Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius in the opening scene of the play and asked to create a still image, bringing out the attitudes of the characters to each other. The images created were detailed and thoughtful as the participants were ready by this stage to invest in them. Reflection on this experience elicited analysis of how proxemics, body language, facial expressions and eye contact were used and how it felt to inhabit this character’s circumstances. Each of these moments of reflection built up understanding of the visceral experience through what Bruner termed ‘going meta’ (1996, p.62) as they were
encouraged to step back and reflect metacognitively on their experience. Groups went on to create performances of an edited version of the scene by way of close examination of Egeus’ long speech and a series of exercises designed to explore the rhythms of the text and the intentions and objectives of the characters. For example, we emphasised the pronouns in Egeus’ speech by reading chorally and tapping our chest when we said ‘I, me, my’ and pointing across the circles when we referred to Hermia. This exercise proved particularly useful in illustrating the connection between language and thought and provoked a wide range of adjectives to describe how Egeus feels including: dominant, selfish, hurt, angry, humiliated, illustrating the possible nuances of sense behind the meaning of his words.
196
Finally, participants were given another statement and asked to stand along the diagonal line according to their level of agreement. This statement was ‘Hermia should marry Demetrius as her father wishes.’ This second provocation made the first generalised statement into a specific example. This time there was a much wider spectrum of opinion and many strong and forceful opinions expressed along the length of the line. In each of the four sessions this proved a rich discussion as participants could illustrate what were generalised ideas in the first provocation with discussion of how and when parents should tell their children what to do. Some teachers used specific language from the text to illustrate their points, for example Egeus’ use of the word ‘dispose’ and how this suggests an attitude of property towards his daughter, or how Lysander says ‘I am beloved of beauteous Hermia’ putting the emphasis on her feelings rather than his own. When we discussed how students would respond, they continued to use analogies deriving from the text. There were some strong voices that students should be told what to think by their teachers who had more life experience, just as Hermia should listen to her father who had her best interests at heart in selecting the better husband. There were many more voices who wanted to equip their students with skills to think and judge for themselves, just as Hermia should be allowed a say in her own future. Those in the first group (who were noticeably more likely to be male and older) tended to value the dialogic approaches for themselves but not for their students, whereas those in the second group were keen to adopt more dialogic principles in their own classrooms. If, as Bruner and others suggest, narrative is fundamental to our cognition, using a story that we have explored and embodied together allows us to share ideas that can then bring in further illustrations from our own experiences, whether personal or from other sources. In the case of this workshop, the embodied metaphor of Hermia and Egeus encouraged in vivo analogies from the teachers of relationships with their students and their own children, as well as thoughts on marriage and contemporary news stories about honour killings. Seeing Shakespeare as relevant to modern life rather than a dusty text to learn for examinations was a significant shift for the teachers, and a group of them embodied this very entertainingly in a presentation of what they had learned which linked situations from Shakespeare plays to popular Bollywood songs.
197