Can studying drama improve learning in other subjects?
In this film on the importance of drama, Pearson and Shakespeare's Globe spoke to professional
theatre-makers and journalists to hear their thoughts on how studying drama can improve
key skills in analysis, communication and evaluation.
What pupils are doing in drama is making meaning from the texts they read.
For that, they need high levels of inferential skills, so they are analysing text, they are
thinking about characterisation, they are thinking about how the structure of the text
creates the tension and the drama. When they are writing their own text, they
are drawing upon that experience and knowledge to write texts that also create tension, create
characters that are believable, and bring in moral dilemmas for the characters to solve;
that is based on their reading. Their reading feeds the writing.
I can't think of a more efficient way to encourage somebody to analyse text, to understand text,
fundamentally.
The joy of writing is that you get to live inside your imaginative world, but more than
that, you hand it over to a capable team of people and they build something from what
was originally a little kernel in your head, and it becomes something real and tangible
involving sometimes an extraordinary number of people, and an audience, and something
that doesn't belong to you anymore, but you know somehow started with a little tiny gem.
Drama, in particular, is known to improve reading ability and boost confidence, vital
for when are giving a presentation, or doing a bit of filming
I notice huge changes in students when you engage them in text, when they start getting
up on their feet and acting with each other. And you can find that it unlocks extraordinary
things in students that you would never expect, and not every student is the same. Some students
need that method of expressing themselves in order to do well in their other subjects.
You are going to learn much more about the characters in your play by reading and studying
the play both by their actions and their words. And you have to study those and think about
them in order to make decisions. I was lucky enough to work in a school with
a good drama department, where my students were getting a great deal of drama both in
the younger years and a very good theatre studies course in the sixth form. And many
of my students were doing both english and drama, and we were constantly cross referring,
because you are going to write about him or her in the exam, or maybe you are going to
put on a production and you are going to play that character, or play with that character.
In essence, journalism and drama use the same tools, the same raw materials.
The tools are the English language; the raw materials are human drama and human stories.
There is an understanding, a connection, between the two professions. And if you can understand
human motivation, and understand how people deal with crisis points, which is very much
what drama deals with in terms of stage plays, then you are in the same field as a journalist,
who is doing a similar thing, only it's reality rather than fiction.
I think the sort of skills you learn from studying GCSE Drama, and understanding how
something on the page is actually meant to be seen and heard, are invaluable because
if you are going to write about Shakespeare, Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read on the
page, and so, of course, if you understand the liveliness of it, and why the characters
are written in the way they are, as soon as you hear it out loud, it comes alive, in a
way that you can't expect or anticipate by just reading it on the page.
The engagement with drama, the interest with drama, is essentially a curiosity. And it's
a curiosity that requires you to probe, to investigate, with imagination. You have to
make choices when you are engaging with drama. And that's really interesting in terms of
the effects it has on academic work, or work that is about text work, or engaging with
dramatic text, because it's not a passive experience, it's an active experience.
The performer can't sit back; they must engage imaginatively with the text with the text
they have in front of them. It ceases to be text; it becomes alive.
My A level in Drama and Theatre really helped my A level in English because I was able to
peel back the different layers within a play, or within a text. It helped me to discuss
and evaluate what was happening within the text because of the different emotions I could
consider, because of the different characters, to help me think about and critically evaluate
my text within A level English.
When you are working on a play, at whatever level you are working on this play, you have
to work out how all the pieces come together. It's getting the nuts and bolts of a play
in your bloodstream, and then the play begins to come to life. And then it explains, it
starts to explain things about the text which otherwise you might just pass over, or you
might not notice. Because the exciting thing about these plays is that they are, for us,
always new.
Students who are studying say, the sciences, studying medicine, or mathematics, any kind
of subject, benefit from simultaneously studying creative subjects as well. That includes visual
art, to music, and certainly includes drama. And I think in many ways, in this context,
drama is the key. Because it is the one that encourages you actively have to analyse, to
actively have to work with other people, and actively challenge your own ideas.
And if you love English, if you love the words, and if you love history (which is part of
English), and you love storytelling, it gives you the sort of skills that you can take out
and use if you want to move into politics, if you want to move into writing, of which
there are hundreds of different areas of publishing, it's not just about being a writer. And I
say: good luck to you!
As we've heard, studying drama can help students understand how to analyse text and the written
word. Studying drama encourages active participation in group work.
Students can develop key skills, such as learning how to evaluate their work, and that of others:
this can be implemented in subjects such as English.