– VOLUME 1 | NUMBER 2 | 2007 –
VOLUME 1 | NUMBER 2 | 2007
VOLUME | NUMBER | 20xx The Journal of Artistic and Creative Education (JACE) is an on-line journal that can be accessed at jaceonline.com.au JACE is a peer-reviewed journal published twice each year that explores issues of artistry and creativity in contemporary research and teaching, and the interface between them. The journal seeks to promote praxis, to provide an evidence-based bridge between arts and artistic practice, creative practices in educational contexts, and learning research and theory in all these areas. Editor
Dr Wesley Imms, University of Melbourne
Editorial Assistant
Chris Sommervelle, University of Melbourne
eEditor (Graphics)
Dion Tuckwell, University of Melbourne
eEditor (Web)
Michael Dunbar, miek.com.au
Editorial Board Professor Susan Wright, University of Melbourne Dr Neryl Jeanneret, University of Melbourne Dr Christine Sinclair,
University of Melbourne Dr Barbara Kameniar, University of Melbourne Mr Robert Brown, 
University of Melbourne For details concerning our journal focus, information for contributors, and contact details, please access our website on www.jaceonline.com.au ISSN: 1832 - 0465 Published in Australia Publisher: Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3010. JACE is peer reviewed as per section 4.3.4 of the HERDC Specifications.
CONTENTS EDITORIAL: ON MASCULINITY, CREATIVITY AND LEARNING “ON THE FRINGES”
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Wesley Imms “MUSCULAR CHRISTIANS” AND “DRAMA FAGGOTS”: OBSERVING A ‘QUEERING’ PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE BINARY IN AN ALL-BOYS’ SCHOOL
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Janet McDonald SPORT PEDAGOGY, MASCULINITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR EXPRESSION AND CREATIVITY IN SCHOOL RUGBY
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Richard Light and Steve Georgakis FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE SPORT FIELD: MASCULINITIES, SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION AND CREATIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES
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Richard Pringle PLACE MAKING IN BOYS’ SCHOOLS: RESEARCHING WITH AND THROUGH ARTS PRACTICE
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Dónal O Donoghue
Please Note: This issue has been reformatted from its orignal. As of March 2012 pagination has altered.
Editorial:
ON MASCULINITY, CREATIVITY AND LEARNING “ON THE FRINGES”
Wesley Imms Melbourne Graduate School of Education
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Within the supposed hierarchy of subjects in schools, those that appear to be relegated to the fringes are coincidentally often the ones that take a more holistic approach to learning. Subjects such as (but not limited to) Dance, Drama, Music, Visual Art, Health, Sport and Physical Education often engage the student in creative and embodied learning, inculcating as they do experiences of expression, play, movement, feelings, emotions and the body’s senses in the learning process. These qualities marginalise certain subjects because they address the affective as opposed to the effective domains of learning. Interestingly, those who teach in these classrooms frequently cite significant social, emotional and academic advantages for their students because of the very qualities that place their subjects on “the fringe”. This is particularly so for boys. An encouraging trend in recent research concerning the development of masculinity in schools has moved from ”recuperative” strategies – often centred on the supposed core subjects and improving literacy and behavioural defects - to strategies focused on engaging boys and addressing their social and emotional well-being. This trend I boys’ schooling issues, from the effective to affective domains, opens the door for fringe subjects with artistic and creative epistemologies to advocate their ability to affect significant change in boys’ lives. This edition of JACE presents papers from educational practitioners and researchers that explore this important development from a variety of perspectives. Janet McDonald takes us into the world of the sometimes playful, sometimes serious interchanges between teenage boys, drama teachers and the drama curriculum in a single-sex school. It moves beyond the now well-articulated concept of using drama to challenge the gendering that occurs in such institutions, to explore how dramatic and gendered performances can create ‘self-referential and critical pedagogical spaces’. Through racy and fast moving dialogue, McDonald has the reader considering whether the participants’ actions she describes are camp or just ‘playing in the margins’? We are encouraged to think about not so much the motives behind the boys’ use of drama curriculum, rather the effect of these actions – the way a third space is created through drama performance and play, in which we can critique the polarising effect of traditional volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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gender politics in such schools. The paper tempts us with a view of unorthodox pedagogies that differentiates between “queer pedagogy” and “queering pedagogy”. Within this subtle difference, explains McDonald, lies the transformative nature of curriculum many of us seek; in the instance of these boys and teachers, it is (arguably) the pedagogic space where masculinities are explored and disrupted. Richard Light and Steve Georgakis’ paper inhabits a specific and precise domain often visited by arts educators, the arena of style of team action, but unlike the subtleties of collaborative art making and artistic performance, theirs is the practise of sport. Linking team sport with creativity and expression seems, on the surface, a tall order; Light and Georgakis help us extend our conceptualisation of artistry to include ways in which it is used to give boys’ free agency in play. Their analysis of one such instance explores the issues that hinder or facilitate transformation from non-creative to highly creative action. Like the painter intentionally looking at an emerging work from a quite different viewpoint, this paper helps us to better understand not only the processes of facilitating creativeness and expressiveness, but also how creativity is not only the domain of artists – it is a human function that must be explored from all possible perspectives. In keeping with this theme, Richard Pringle provides a new and artistic viewpoint to a well-documented concept. The theory that power and aggression on the sports field legitimises off-field stereotypes of masculinity has been discussed in some depth. That such masculinities often serve to marginalise and oppress ‘te other’ is now well accepted, as is the call for strategies (both in schools and in society) to counter this hegemony. To be effective, however, Pringle notes that an issue arises in terms of such pedagogical strategies – how can critical pedagogy for examining masculinities be implemented without alienating those participating in its actions? In an interesting study, Pringle utilises the arts to demonstrate one such approach; pre-service teachers engage in text analysis and expressive arts exercises to raise awareness of the gendering influence of sport and to discuss and legitimise the voice of ‘the other’. The paper helps us focus on the role of the creative arts to promote discussion and problematise taken-for-granted knowledge.
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Artists have often been captivated by the ways in which our built environment is inhabited, and how the aesthetic environment impacts our state of mind and actions. Dónal O Donoghue explores the way inhabitation can turn a place into a space and the impact this has on legitimising and policing certain types of masculinity. Photographs from single-sex boys’ schools in Ireland provide a sense of situation; the starkness and graphic reality of these empty spaces are counterpoised by boys’ commentary about the cultural relevance doorways, hallways and public venues have on their daily existence. The photographs are somewhat haunting in that they will take many viewers back to their own schooldays, when particular corners or areas of the school were dangerous territory, or perhaps for the lucky ones, spaces that generated play and imagination. O Donoghue uses these artistic data to unpack and investigate the role of the school’s built environment on the ephemeral nature of boys’ complex masculine cultures – how they are built, maintained and regulated. These papers, spanning as they do boys’ experiences in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia, provide intriguing interpretations of masculinity, the role that arts-rich pedagogies play on boys’ development, and the way that arts based research methods help us understand the culture within which boys live and operate. While we might accept that subjects like the arts and sport exist on ‘the fringe’ in many schools, these are certainly not the actions of inconsequential disciplines. Indeed, the four papers in this exciting edition of JACE demonstrate the advantages that being on the outer can have. These creative and artistic perspectives on issues that appear otherwise somewhat tired and unresolved enlighten and inspire a new direction that should be followed with enthusiasm. I must express my appreciation to the authors presented in this edition. They responded with generosity and professionalism to my solicitations for articles and worked hard to meet the extremely tight deadline that was imposed. I must also thank the reviewers for their promptness and guidance, and to Ms Hang Tran who proof edited this edition with skill and efficiency. 17th December 2007.
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“MUSCULAR CHRISTIANS” AND “DRAMA FAGGOTS”:
Janet McDonald University of Southern Queensland Dr. Janet McDonald received her Ph.D. majoring in Theatre for Youth from Arizona State University in 1999, where she was also awarded the 1998/99 Distinguished Graduate Teacher Assistant Award. She has been a high school Drama teacher since 1987 and is currently lecturing in Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba. Her current research interests include: developing strategies for sustaining theatre arts practice in regional towns, as well as her ongoing research into masculinities and actor-training, and queering pedagogies. She is a member of the Public Memory Research Centre at USQ.
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OBSERVING A ‘QUEERING’ PEDAGOGY BEYOND THE BINARY IN ALL-BOYS’ SCHOOLS
Abstract In elite boys’ schools there is a level of anxiety about the perceived place of (the subject) Drama and how it might interact/interfere with the homogenous masculinity promoted by notions of the Arnoldian ‘muscular Christian’. This paper offers some observations on males who do Drama in these schools where dramatic and gender performances are used to create a self-referential and critical pedagogic space where masculinities are explored, disrupted, and commonly ‘queered’. Male Drama teachers provided a space in which to also interrogate not only the myths of their expected muscular Christian performance, but also that of the deviant, yet desirably playful ‘Drama Faggot’.
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Several years ago I taught Drama in an elite all-boys’ school in Brisbane. I had a Year 10 group of very vocally tough boys; most of them played rugby and bullied the kids who did not. They always seemed to be busting out of their uniforms as they were physically growing faster than they could understand; hairless faces one week would be covered in spots or stubble the next, they were like a morphing group of mini•Incredible Hulks whose hormones literally bounced around the room. I had a 70-minute lesson with them on Fridays between morning tea and lunch, and I dreaded it every week as they saw Drama as a “bludge”; they appeared neither interested nor engaged. One Friday I threw all caution to the wind, and asked “What do you want to create a drama about?” I promised also to take on board any topic they threw out; I had obviously lost my mind. “Porno!” one boy yelled out, and the class roared with laughter. “Okay”, I said, “let’s interrogate that topic using drama.” I was on a dangerous roll – I could hear the school intercom going off in my head: “Miss McDonald, please report to the Deputy Principal’s office”. Yet I persevered because I wanted to honour my promise and to use the dramatic form to critique their choice of topic. They assembled into small groups and we used some Augusto Boal techniques for creating three frozen images: the perfect, the worst and one showing the transformation between the two (Boal, 1992). I can tell you that my definition of “porn” was far darker and more dangerous than anything these boys produced, which tended to mostly be images of them pretending to be “page 3 girls” with puffed out chests and pouting lips. Yet, something more profound was taking place; what began as titillation and mockery began to become more inquisitive, not so much about their images, but about themselves. After we argued and critiqued which images were the most revealing and why, we sat on the floor in the circle to “debrief” the experience. I began by asking them to describe what they now felt about “porn” as a topic and, after some chatty responses; one boy said that he felt weird because since his Dad left he was expected to be the “man” of the house, although this was never stated by his Mum. He then told us that he had been upset that his mother did not cuddle him anymore; somehow in a lesson that was about “porn” he had understood that his mother’s lack of cuddles was connected
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to his increased bodily changes in becoming a man. He assumed it was because he looked like his father, rather than his mother’s own sense of what was appropriate touch between herself and her son who was no longer a boy. It was an astonishing revelation with no giggles from the class, the only noise being a knock on the door to tell me that it was now period six (we had not heard the bell and worked through lunch without noticing), and I was in trouble from the boarding house because the boarders in my class had not picked up their lunches. What these boys felt was a desire to rattle their teacher by choosing “porn” masked a far more complex messiness about their bodies, their gender, and their awkward self-awareness. The term “porn” was transmuted for them through the use of dramatic play; their attempts at female imagery only served to place the focus more on their own bodies, which questioned their notions of “man” (that is, the school’s homogenous and expected expression of the muscular Christian) as a stable category. Without me ever using the term “critical pedagogy” or “gender interrogation”, they experienced the location of themselves in the realm of gender performance, transcending their own belief systems for a moment, opening an aperture to what may lie beyond conventional thinking, not unlike the first time one realises the affect of whiteness upon the body. It is a process of gradual revelation rather than an epiphany of immediacy. It was this experience among many more in all-boys’ schools, which hastened my enrolment into a PhD program to further research “leftfield” praxis and unorthodox pedagogies embedded in dramatic play and performance. The interface of masculine gender performance and colonialism within elite boys’ school tradition and expectation was interrogated during this research, which revealed two distinct boy-performance modes by boys and staff who undertook the subject Drama; the Muscular Christian and the Drama Faggot. Subsequent research using critical pedagogies and queer theory to explore the myth of these modes as dichotomous suggests the transgressive potential of what I will call a “queering” pedagogy which uses selfreflective, self-referential gender performance and dramatic play to disrupt the Muscular Christian ideal in an all-boys’ school. This paper reflects upon my own experiences as a Drama teacher as well as those volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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of three male colleagues (referred to here by their pseudonyms: Paul, Fraser, and Jaye) who also taught in all-male school environments in order to open an aperture on how many young men in our care transgressed the apparent abyss between the expected performance of the Muscular Christian and the more clandestine, yet playful, Drama Faggot.
Contesting the Muscular Christian with the Drama Faggot I use the term ‘muscular Christian’ to evoke the middle-class, Arnoldian essentialist masculinity euphemistically represented in the character of Tom Brown created by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Brown was a “poster-boy” for muscular Christianity, a “manly” Christian whose image was to be “projected by scores of headmasters acting as their own publicist” (Mangan & Walvin 1987; p.138). This performance of essentialist masculinity is part of the cultural literacy at work upon the bodies of contemporary boys in a Greater Public School (GPS). The school uniform, class rolls, assemblies, systematic punishments, as well as the institutionalized ranking and grading of students encourages student ‘normalization.’ Foucault would describe this as “panopticism” which monitors and regulates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ system inside a school; observations of the subject become an “efficient means of control by authorities” (Schmelzer, 1993; p. 127). Sporting events become performative texts that externalize the competitive muscular Christian and hierarchy in an all-male environment. The GPS maintain a powerfully coercive function on young privileged men because they not only combine the institutions of religion and education, but also that of sport, to maintain a dominant ideology that normalizes essentialist masculine ‘privilege’ through the master-condoned processes of selection or exclusion of particular types of boy behaviours in these schools. Tradition, in this case, is what R.W. Connell refers to as the “patriarchal dividend” (1995; p. 79-80), and a school’s historical and cultural traditions are externalized by all boys wearing uniforms as they publicly display the school colours, school values (neatness, privilege, stoicism), and the students’ personal history of achievement, participation, and status in school activities (usually embossed onto the pockets of the school blazer). The spectre of the
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muscular Christian in Brisbane’s GPS is for public performance, public consumption and private compliance. Mangan and Walvin’s (1987) research on public school life in Victorian and Edwardian England suggests that “public image seldom mirrored the private morality. Too frequently there was an ideology for public consumption and an ideology for personal practice; in a phrase, muscular Christianity for the consumer, Social Darwinism for the constrained” (p. 139). Morrell (2001) also alludes to this contradiction inside hegemonic, colonial, and elite boys’ schools in Natal, South Africa. “…[A] school prefect might be (in his public self) a perfect exemplar of hegemonic masculinity, play rugby for the first team…. But he might also sneak off and have a smoke… (p. 11). In Staging Masculinities Michael Mangan (2003) describes the “unspoken but clear shared belief” that those students who might perform a masculinity that was contrary to the essentialist one adopted by the school “would probably gravitate towards places like the Drama Society” (2003; p.3-4). Doing Drama in all-boys’ schools is not without risk, “since one was aligning oneself publicly with the ambiguous cultural signifiers of a questionable sexual identity” (p. 4). Drama activity, and more importantly conscious gender performance, could well be said to be a “queering” agent – not just because of the mythical tradition of “drama faggotry” – but rather, as a pedagogical practice of inviting and critiquing actual behaviours through fictional representation. It evokes a language and practice of passion in the classroom that can confound (because in some cases it is seen as “feminized” and a “soft” academic option) and also be seen to be “in opposition to” mainstream academia by nondrama teachers and students. It is no surprise to discover that the essentialist colonial patriarchs and pedagogues, like Thomas Arnold and Robert Baden-Powell, made manifest the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century by separating masculinity from ‘the other’ (women, homosexuals, and ‘native’ peoples). This was done in order to stave off fears of degeneracy in boys (Beynon, 2002; pp. 27, pp. 38). Morrell states that no system can ever be totally inclusive; a system requires an ‘other’ for its success (2001; p. 11). Academic ‘others’ such as the creative arts are often feminized. The methods of instruction in Drama tend to include dialogic discourse, collaborative groupvolume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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work, active participation, and the sharing and critiquing of creative work, while the teacher usually takes on the role of facilitator, rather than an all-knowing and dogmatic instructor (McDonald, 1999; p. 54). This pedagogy creates suspicion about Drama, because it promotes rapport-building, subjectivity, and intimate interrelations between teacher and student that is not for public (i.e., fictionalized performance) consumption. The suspicion of observers about of the ‘contract’ (Neelands, 1984; O’Toole, 1992) between boys and their Drama teachers is stirred because Drama embraces pedagogy that involves “the renegotiation of the contractual expectations of the [mainstream] classroom” where the boundaries of ‘acceptable behaviour’ may be redefined (O’Toole, 1992; p. 194). This also aids in the feminized perception of Drama; it is a complex ‘other’ world that, when it does reveal a public face, the “acting” promotes degenerative practices of fiction and masking (unlike the visceral realism of sport). All the boys I interviewed in the original study consistently spoke of how the Drama classroom could often be a place of revelation and change, especially as their Drama teacher offered a very different way of teaching and looking at the world than other teachers at the school. It is as if the Drama teacher had a privileged position as a librarian of the students’ risk-stories – stories that other teachers may have felt obliged to reveal to the Headmaster or counselors. The Drama teachers had access to enormous insight about the complexities of their boys’ emerging masculinities, and they put great faith in the abilities of boys to understand and humour the gendered anomalies in their school: F: . . . oh yeah, they were the leaders—they were Prefects and stuff. Two of them—the two biggest gay guys— hardly any of the school knows that they were gay—the two biggest gay guys used to babysit the Headmaster’s kids—two girls—but this was the calibre of kid they were, and I’ve always enjoyed knowing that. That is completely true — that in the biggest rugby school in Australia, the two biggest poofters in Year 12 used to look after the Principal’s kids! They were elected prefects by the students. (‘Fraser,’ interview, 21 July 1998) In most cases, these male teachers created Drama ‘spaces’ that gave students license to play with many of the authoritarian, essentialist
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masculinities in the institution, but more plainly, a place to play at “queering” and get away with it. I: I notice you use Spice Girls names with the boys—why is that? P: Because they love them — because they’re forbidden, I think. Because they’re popular, and they’re sexy, and they’re women — but they’re also “poofy,” and you wouldn’t really like the Spice Girls, you wouldn’t really know the music — but, you’d shag Ginger! . . . when they found out I went to the Kylie concert, they couldn’t get enough of it. Y’know — that sort of freaked me out a bit — I thought, “you boys run this parallel, you jump from one to another”…every time they do that sort of thing they take a risk. (‘Paul,”’Interview, 4 August 1998.) Paul deliberately wanted to make his students aware of the constructed adult-male constraints that were imposed upon them and survived in the school. He opted to hit right at the core of ‘camp’ and ‘queer’ behaviour and show them that the perceived taboo was irreverential fun. There was great pleasure – visceral and social – in contesting the essentialism at these schools, and this pleasure came from the building of trust and rapport with the boys over time. In some cases, they built their own language that defined their culture within the school. This creativity is driven by “intrinsic rewards, that encourages a style of thinking that promotes diversity and the transformation of given circumstances” (Florida 2005; pp. 68-69). The male Drama teachers who participated in this research were very much agents of provocation about the gender-play used to disrupt the traditions in favour of a less universal/compulsory masculinity. What I observed was an overwhelming urge to ‘play’ from all three Drama teachers, most often by self-referentially contradicting their own performances of masculinity in the school’s public eye. One teacher playfully performed the role of the essentialist ‘muscular Christian’; the meticulous ‘straight man’ who wore what he called the GPS uniform: ironed blue-chambray shirt, R.M. Williams boots, woven kangaroo leather belts, khaki pants and rugby club tie. He enjoyed playing with building mythical narratives about himself at every opportunity:
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I was the only new person for a long while, and I was different to everyone else. I was younger by far, I had a different attitude, I was the first trained Drama person here, and I did things differently to how they had been done in the past — and I’ve never apologized for that. So they [the boys] created this persona that they wanted me to be, which I thought was very flattering, so you know, I [said I’d] been on Neighbours — I’d had my starring TV role on Neighbours — and, looking back, I probably should have said “No, I didn’t,” but I was happy to go with that. . . . I’ve also gone with the Real Estate Agent — had a sign in the classroom that says “Paul Riley’s Real Estate” which another staff member gave me as a joke. And as a joke, I said to the boys that the Headmaster had bought his holiday property off me, and that when he met me he wanted me teaching Drama. . . . And in saying all that — exactly how I have just recited to you now — the boys have taken bit of that on board and gone with it. (‘Paul,’ Interview, 4 August 1998.) In creating this mythological persona, Paul deliberately deconstructed and satirized his school’s desire to have ‘outstanding professionals’ on staff. Jay and Fraser were both heterosexual men who played at over-performing their heteronormativity in order to poke fun at non-Drama staff suspicions of their ambiguous Drama-teacher sexuality. Their overt ‘muscular Christian’ performances were again self-referential and satirical as they attempted to demystify the authoritarian singularity of a sports-masculinity at their school: It’s a joke between Richo and myself which I think came out of us bonding together . . . we had to because we are part of a minority, in a sense — we’re both passionate about the subject [Drama] — but realize that the profile of it is difficult to raise in the school. So that the constant joke — as any minority does, is joke about itself. . . . I think it’s a very Australian thing — it’s a very satirical, very dry thing, it’s to say “Yeah, I teach Drama, yep, I’m not a faggot, well, I could be, but (cough) um, but I couldn’t be with a voice like this” [said in a comically deep, authoritative voice]. So, yeah, it’s a joke on a joke on a joke — and what’s funny to us is when we’re in a public situation and we start carrying on … our joke isn’t understood by anybody else — and that’s a very comforting thought. We can walk
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into the dining room and say “G’day mate, how are ya? See the rugby game on the weekend, oh maaaate, I was there” [said using the same overtly male voice] (‘Jay,’ Interview, 21 July 1998). Jay, Fraser, and Paul all routinely gave heterosexually gendered ‘performances’, which were often ‘queered’ and designed to promote ambiguity and complexity about what it meant to be a man and be a Drama teacher in an all-boys’ school.
‘Queering’ as a Deliberate Pedagogical Practice Paulo Freire (1996) reminds us that all pedagogy is a political act as there is a process of inclusion and exclusion at work in terms of content and methods. A “queering” pedagogy seeks to actively participate in and develop a discourse that can transform thinking and revise the “habitual ways of reading texts and reading the world” (Spurlin, 2002; p. 12). But there has to be a spark that arouses this interest, a desire in a teacher to contagiously affect the desire in students. Connell tells us that exploration of desire is commonly excluded from social theory (especially pedagogical theories) but the practices that shape and realise desire are an aspect of gender order and ordering (1995; p. 25). Perhaps this is because notions of desire are often worn on the body; bodies of students are texts and are laden with messages either intended or imposed, and a body in denial of knowledge of itself risks becoming what Foucault would call a “docile” body that is without self-critique or awareness of how normalising processes act upon it. Yet desire is another term that has been hijacked to only read as “dangerous” in school contexts. Desire is relegated to a sexualised body and therefore students may not be put at risk of such things. And so, the discussion of sex and gendered topics remain unspoken in schools (unless students undertake creative arts courses), which does not mean that it is never communicated. Homi Bhabha might refer to this kind of non-language discourse as interdiction, which is at the “crossroads of what is known and permissible and that which… must be kept concealed; a discourse uttered between the lines and as such both against the rules and within them….” (1994, p. 86 and p. 89) Bhabha suggests that this kind of “in-between” play such as dabbling in self-referential performance of the muscular Christian volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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whilst also embracing the camp-ness of the Drama Faggot, is both menacing and liberational because it reveals how dominant ideology works upon gender and the body to surveil and curtail. According to Spurlin, critical pedagogy and queer theory both “enable critique of the reproduction of knowledge and cultural narratives that serve the interests of dominant social groups” (2002; p. 10), to ultimately expose and contest normalising processes in society (Kopelson, 2002; p. 20). What intrigues me most about queer theory is that it subsumes critical pedagogy and actively aims to dismantle the myth of binary oppositions such as the Muscular Christian and the Drama Faggot; to “disorganise, rather than merely organise around our terms” (Kopelson, 2002; p. 19; Sedgwick in Spurlin, 2002; p. 9). Much of the recent published scholarship about queer pedagogy articulates moving beyond “queer” as a simple identity category in opposition to straight, toward “queering” as a process of “disrupting dominant cultural understanding of the ‘naturalness’ of heterosexuality and conventional gender relations” (Anderson 2007; p. 3). To me this is all about making visible the mechanisms that hide complexity and depth of understanding in order to encourage inclusivity. Zoe Anderson (2007) tells us that “queering” becomes “a mode of teasing out the strange regulatory manner” that allows normalising processes to persist. In order to truly go beyond tolerance we need to transgress the boundaries of absolutes and dogma that still hound the concept of education and proffer the term “queering” as a verb (Britzman, cited in Kopelson, 2002, p. 25) that has playful and irreverent intent. For me, then, the term ‘queer’ also can be added to the lexicon of things that are not easily divided into a binary space; indeed, the process of “queering” (as an active present participle, rather than a forgone conclusive noun) is one that is similar to a “materialist” or Marxist intent (just as with Materialist Feminism) that promotes critical thinking, gender playfulness, and pedagogical practices that transgress and transmute, even triangulate the ‘other’ in full concert with the binary so as to eradicate marginality. This is a different mode of action to ‘queer pedagogy’, which aims to recover queer voices in theory and queer lenses in critical analysis. A queering pedagogy may
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also do this, of course, but the emphasis is on the verb; it is an active strategy that works upon gender performance. Like queer theory, it moves beyond seeking a discourse of contradictions (that is, of simply taking sides of either muscular Christian or Drama Faggot), rather, it is a subtle process that mimics the dominant homogeny of the muscular Christian in order to mirror and “menace” the assumed stability of it as a fixed or stable gender performance. To illustrate the difference between performing ‘queer’ and ‘queering’, I will compare two instances of cross-dressing I observed at two different boys’ schools. The first was a kind of contrived performance of a long standing tradition called ‘Party Day’ where mothers and wives of old boys are invited to watch the boarders play at dressing-up in full make-up, skirts, stockings and heels to ‘perform’ musical numbers for their largely female audience. Boys dressing up and laughing at females was deemed ‘safe’ in this school, perhaps because the performers were not Drama students. This was not necessarily a contestation of the essentialist masculinity of the school, but titillation and a tantalizing romp in the foray of the Drama Faggot, not unlike the masculinised hijinks on display on television programs such as The Footy Show. The risk was altogether different when one male Drama teacher asked his Year 11 students to perform an all-male version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Jay desired to play with gender and take it out of the ‘private’ safety of the Drama classroom and into the public domain. On opening night, the cast performed the play to an audience of 600 boarders who were made to attend (in order to show school spirit), yet, their reception of the play was without incident as the audience seemed to connect with the idea that the cast were taking a great risk in genuinely trying to perform their female roles, not just blokes pretending to be women for laughs. Both the Drama teacher and student cast desired to contest the marginality and feminisation of their subject and offer a different approach to the overall masculinized curriculum in the school. Jay’s enthusiasm about raising the profile of their ‘Drama - masculinity’ seemed to have a contagious effect on his students, one of whom articulated similarities between theirs and other marginalized/feminised activities within his school: volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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. . . soccer’s a game of skill—soccer is a drama form because you’ve got to move your feet — whereas rugby’s just put your head down, and if you get tackled, well you lose a few teeth. But soccer’s a real art-form …. Well, soccer is like drama in sport. Like if you watch a soccer game — it really is dramatic in terms of the way people move and act towards each other. . . It’s weird, because since they’ve [the soccer teams] started winning premierships, they’ve gotten the respect — like they actually have to do something well for people to start liking them. It’s like drama, so if this “Ernest” thing goes well — maybe it will elevate our status in drama. (‘Carl, Drama student’ Interview, 29 July 1998.) It would seem that the cross-dressing in the production of the play transgressed from a ‘blokes in frocks’ expose into serious contemplation of the art form and the skill it takes to portray a female character. Ironically, the use of cross-dressing in dramatic performance (as a pedagogical tool) in all-male schools dates back to the 1500s in England where it was widely used in teaching Latin and Greek. These grammar schools educated and supplied the boy actors (who played female roles) for the Boy Companies whose popularity rivalled Shakespeare’s own acting company (Goodman, 1968; Watson, 1908). Notions of the Drama Faggot also undergo a queering process here, where their potential moral danger is transmuted into a serious gender interrogation that again exposes and questions the dominant muscular Christian performance, but not at the expense of its erasure or demonisation. A ‘queering’ pedagogic mode therefore must be experiential; it must be encouraged over time so that the queering stance is not some one-off, reactionary disruption and derailment that is anomalous or maligned as deviant.
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Conclusion While being camp or playing in the margins of the ‘Drama Faggot’ was tantalizing for many boys, being outed as ‘gay’ was still something considered to be “inconceivable” (Frosh, Phoenix & Pattman, 2002; p. 64). Genuinely homosexual students (such as those discussed earlier by Fraser) hid their ‘queerness’ from the greater public eye and chose to perform the normative masculinity of an outstanding muscular Christian. The point is they were aware of making a choice about their performance; they were aware they had one or several choices. As a gay man in an all-boys’ school, Paul’s homosexuality was probably also invisible to most of his students, yet his “queering” was laid bare for all to see. It was never deliberately hidden, but rather made visible in acts of transgressive, self-referential and humorous gender-play. We can never know how many students read this as “queer” or as potentially liberating over a period of time, as it is beyond the realm of this research; however, the impact of galvinising a community of boys/men through self-reflective and critiquing humour has enormous pedagogical and social benefits for all school aged students who continue to be fearful of “difference” and “queerness”. What I experienced in my own classroom was that students became aware of their own complicitness in their performances of the muscular Christian or the Drama Faggot; they quite easily and willingly and simultaneously did both so that any binary opposition between the two dissolved into what Homi Bhabha would call a “third space” where critiquing of the binary is part and parcel of “eluding the politics of polarity” (Bhabha, p. 209). One of my all-time favourite teacher stories comes from a friend who worked as a Drama teacher, cricket coach and boarding master at a prestigious boys’ school in Brisbane. He recounted his first night on duty in the boarding house: I walked into the place, with grade 12 kids sitting down and they knew I was the drama teacher but I hadn’t really met anybody yet— I’m walking down the hall and they’re in corridors and—total silence—and I hear this “Drrrraaaama Faggot!!” (he laughs) down the hallway, and I walked along and I went “Yeeeaaah, that’s right, who wants a bit?” - and the whole hallway just pissed themselves volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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laughing… His answer instantly and comically summed-up the boys’ fear-of-the-fag context; he verbally queered himself in order to counter their queering of him, which simultaneously, and humorously, aroused and disappointed their expectations. He stated that he never had any problems with the boys in the dorm after this and it was never spoken of again, unless it was recounted humorously by him or the students. Throughout this research, moments of ambivalence such as these were often the most intense instances of experiential knowing because all of a sudden the potential of oppression and homogeneity is exposed and liberated through the use of irony, paradox, and intersection. Fraser’s response asked them to consider what could be, to weigh up whether he was or wasn’t gay. The humour placed his answer somewhere beyond language into the realm of complex understanding of gender construction and labelling, thus ‘queering’ and transgressing the normalised expectations of the muscular Christian and the Drama Faggot.
References Anderson, Zoe. (2007). Queer(ing) history: Queer methodologies, pedagogies and interventions in the discipline of history. Student Engagement: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Teaching Learning Forum, 30-31 January 2007. Perth: The University of Western Australia. http://lsn.curtin.edu.au/tlf/tlf2007/refereed/anderson.html Beynon, R. (2002). Masculinities and Culture. Philadelphia, USA: Open University Press. Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boal, A. (1992). Games for Actors and Non-Actors. (Trans. Adrian Jackson.) New York: Routledge. Connell, R.W. (1995). Masculinities. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 2nd Florida, Richard. (2005). Ed. The Rise of the Creative Class. Melbourne: Pluto Press. Freire, Paulo. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.
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Frosh, S., Phoenix, A & Pattman, R. (2002). Young Masculinities: Understanding Boys in Contemporary Society. Gordonsville VA: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodman, R. (1968). Secondary Education in Queensland, 1860-1960. Canberra AUS: Australian National University Press. Kopelson, K. (2002). Dis/Intergrating the Gay/Queer Binary: “Reconstructed Identity Politics” for a Performative Pedagogy. College English, 65(1), 17-35. Mangan, Michael. (2003). Staging Masculinities: History, Gender, Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mangan, J., & Walvin, J. (1987). Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940. New York: St Martin’s Press. McDonald, J. (1999). An Interrogation of Drama in Colonial Educational Contexts: Three Boys’ Schools in Queensland, Australia. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University. Morrell, R. (2001). From Boys to Gentlemen: Colonial Masculinity in Natal, 1880-1920. Pretoria RSA: University of South African Press. Neelands, J. (1984). Making Sense of Drama. London: Heinemann. O’Toole, J. (1992). The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning. London: Routledge. Spurlin, W.J. (2002). Theorizing Queer Pedagogy in English Studies after the 1990s. College English, 65(1), 9-16. Schmelzer, M. (1993). Panopticism and Postmodern Pedagogy. In J. Caputo & M. Yount (Eds.), Foucault and the Critique of Institutions (pp.127136) Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP Watson, F. (1908). The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
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SPORT PEDAGOGY,
Richard Light and Steve Georgakis University of Sydney Richard Light is Senior Lecturer, Social Theory in Human Movement Education in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. His research involves the application of social theory to research the social and cultural dimensions of sport and physical education, with a focus on the social construction of the body. He has published widely on the social and cultural dimensions of youth sport in Australia and Japan, and is a leading international figure in research on physical education and sport pedagogy conducted from a socio-cultural perspective. Steve Georgakis is a lecturer in human movement in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on sport history, sport and ethnicity and the scholarship of teaching.
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MASCULINITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES FOR EXPRESSION AND CREATIVITY IN SCHOOL RUGBY Abstract We argue in this paper that wholesale criticism of contact sport fails to recognize some of the positive aspects for boys’ social and personal development that are possible in team sports such as rugby, rugby league and AFL. To make our point we draw on an incident in a study on GPS high school rugby where the school 1st XV challenged the tradition of the school by playing a less structured, more intuitive and creative style of rugby. We use this to look at the ways in which rugby can offer opportunities for the development of creativity and for expression for young men when appropriate approaches to coaching are adopted. We argue that recent developments in sport coaching that are player-centred and inquiry-based such as Game Sense offer a means through which boys’ experiences of contact team sports in schools can be made more educationally valuable by contributing positively toward their social and personal development.
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Introduction Recent and widespread concern with rising childhood obesity has drawn attention to the need for physically active lifestyles but this ‘medical view’ of sport can mask the part that sport plays in shaping the broader development of children and young people and their growth into particular types of people. When children and young people participate in sport they learn far more than how to throw a pass, how to kick or how to do a tumble turn in swimming. Longterm engagement in sport can play a highly significant role in the social, moral and personal development of children and young people and their sense of who they are in the world (Light, 2006). It can also play a very significant role in the development of gendered identity and the reproduction of the ‘gender order’ (Connell, 1983; Messner & Sabo, 1990). As much research suggests, the discourse of heavy contact, commercial sports such as rugby, ice hockey and AFL promotes a hegemonic, ‘hairy-chested’, form of exemplary masculinity as the way of being a man that all boys should aspire to (Grunneau & Whitson, 1993; Hickey, Fitzclarence & Mathews, 1998; Light & Kirk, 2000; Wedgwood, 2003). This typically includes characteristics such as the explicit expression and execution of power and force to dominate others, the celebration of violence, the values of being tough, controlling, emotions (cool and detached), and having a disregard for personal welfare. It is often captured in the expression of ‘no pain no gain’ (Connell, 1995; McKay 1991; McKay & Middlemiss, 1995; Messner, 1992). Within this context, heavy contact sports understandably tend to be demonized in literature on sport and physical education, and their place in schools is regularly brought into question (Mills, 1997). While this is not completely unjustified, we argue in this paper that this is a simplistic view of contact sport that fails to recognize some of the positive aspects for boys’ social and personal development that are possible in contact team sports, and ignores the possibility of creative and expressive aspects of boys’ participation in sports such as rugby, rugby league and AFL. To make our point we draw on a study of GPS high school rugby (referred to as the GPS School) conducted by the first author and reported on in more detail elsewhere (Light & Kirk, 2000; Light &
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Kirk, 2001; Light, 2007). Specifically, we draw on one aspect of the study where the school 1st XV challenged the tradition of the school by playing a less structured, more intuitive and creative style of rugby. We use this to look at the ways in which rugby can offer opportunities for the development of creativity and for expression for young men when appropriate approaches to coaching are adopted. After a brief overview of rugby in Australian schools, we outline the traditional approach to playing rugby at the GPS School shaped by a classspecific form of hegemonic masculinity reproduced by generations of boys for over a century. We then look at the differences between this approach and the approach adopted at a rugby carnival played during a break in the GPS competition and continued for the last part of the GPS season in a challenge to the tradition of the school’s game style to identify very different experiences, social relationships, interactions and learning. Following this, we argue that recent developments in sport coaching that are player-centered and inquiry-based offer a means through which boys’ experiences of contact team sports in schools can be made more educationally valuable by contributing positively toward their social and personal development.
Rugby in Australian Schools Rugby has a long history in Australian independent schools as a mechanism for turning boys into particular types of men (Connell, Ashenden, Kessler & Dowsett, 1982; Light & Kirk, 2000). In the late nineteenth century independent schools serving the Australian middle classes adopted the practice of educating boys through team games and they have since formed a central element in the education of the sons and daughters of the social elite. In the absence of other markers of masculine status such as income earning power, the use of the body, its appearance and suggestion of power developed through sport, are central to the formation of adolescent masculine identities for many boys (Connell, 1983). The practice of sport and its discourses form significant factors in the shaping of emerging masculine identity for all young men in Australia including those who do not voluntarily play sport and even those who hate sport through their experiences of physical education at school and the inescapable discourse of media-sport (see for example Light & volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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Pickford, 2004). It is, however, in the schools of what Connell et al. (1982) refer to as the ruling classes where sport is most explicitly used to develop a class-specific form of hegemonic masculinity and to help in reproducing a particular, collective class habitus. These schools are masculinising institutions for the ruling classes within which rugby forms a pivotal physical practice for the reproduction of a hegemonic form of masculinity (Connell et al., 1982). It is in these schools that sport has been employed as a vehicle for the inculcation of a classspecific form of masculinity and for the gains in social distinction that it provides for the ruling classes (Bourdieu, 1978; Light & Kirk, 2001). Rowing and rugby in particular act as particularly important symbols of these schools’ worth and the quality of education they are seen to provide in a competitive education market place. They are also practices that are seen to distinguish these schools from their perceived social inferiors. During the first decade of the twentieth century, independent schools in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne formed sporting associations ostensibly for the purpose of organising sporting competition. However, as Sherington (1983) argues, these associations were also intended to establish and maintain social exclusivity. It is within this context that rugby has formed a central practice for what Kirk (1998) refers to as schooling the body in processes through which class and a class-specific form of masculinity is embedded in the bodies of young men.
The Research This paper draws on a four-month ethnographic study of the 1st XV rugby team in an Australian GPS school in 1997, referred to in this paper under the pseudonym of “the GPS School”. The study focused on the ways in which the practices of GPS rugby acted to embody a class and culture-specific form of masculinity in young men. The data generated a decade ago were revisited and re-analysed to provide a more detailed and focused examination of complexity and variation within a form of hegemonic masculinity operating at the school (Light, 2007).
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Data Generation and Analysis Data were generated through extended, conversational interviews using open-ended questions and observational notes focused on eight key informants, including the head coach. One-on-one interviews with duration of between 20 minutes to an hour were conducted with the eight key informants on-site, before and after training and before and after games. The first author spent two to three days a week at the school in the afternoons, attended every training session, every game during the season and every day at the schools’ rugby carnival on which this paper focuses. The research looked into the boys’ experiences of playing rugby at an elite school level and the ways in which the practices of training and playing are shaped by a particular socio-cultural environment acting to embody class - and culture-specific forms of masculinity. Analysis was conducted using a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This involved an ongoing process of generating data and then comparing and contrasting it to identify emergent themes and develop theories that were then tested through further data generation. The conceptual tools of Bourdieu were employed to make sense of the data. Specifically, it drew upon his conceptual tools of habitus, practice and field. Bourdieu uses his conceptual tools to circumvent a range of dualisms such as the division of mind from body and his concept of habitus allows for an anti-dualistic view of human existence. Of significance for this paper, it also allows the circumvention of the division of conscious and nonconscious learning. The habitus is the embodiment of an individual’s social experiences and practices engaged over his/her life and within particular socio-cultural contexts. Habitus can also refer to a collective habitus such as a class habitus. Bourdieu suggests that habitus determines an agent’s social action, but that it structures it – an important distinction. The habitus is constructed over time by engagement in practices within particular cultural fields. A field is a semi•autonomous social arena with its own sets of discourses and core values that Bourdieu terms doxa. Practice mediates between the habitus (in an individual or collective sense) and field.
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Traditional Practice at the School: No Mistakes Rugby While the nature of rugby as a heavy contact sport clearly requires power and force, its complexity also requires skill and tactical understanding. The style of play adopted by the school, the related training practices and the discourse of rugby at the school emphasised physical force and domination over skill and tactical knowledge. Some of the boys in the 1st XV at the time of this study (1997) described the school’s traditional approach to playing rugby as ‘no mistakes’ rugby. They said that it was highly structured, predictable and heavy. The approach to training for this style of play required particular regimes of training that, over time and combined with a dominant discourse of manliness at the school, embody a particular form of hegemonic masculinity. It encouraged the young men in the study to take an instrumental, detached view of their bodies through which their body becomes an object used as a weapon to dominate or even injure other young men – a view evident in most contact sports (Messner, 1992; Mills, 1997). The style of rugby played by the GPS School 1st XV involved training practices that reduced options and independence to emphasize heavy, powerful and purposeful physical contact. The training typically employed at the GPS School tended to focus on the generation and use of bodily force and power to overcome the opposition, to take opposition territory and get the team moving forward. While getting the team moving forward to facilitate attacking plays is basic to rugby, the training and discourse at the school often encouraged the seeking out of heavy contact for the sake of establishing and demonstrating superior power and dominance. This was invariably given preference over tactical play that involved creating and using space. In the words of one of the forwards, they had to get on top and “show them who’s boss”. They were encouraged by their forwards’ coaches in particular to put their “bodies on the line” for the team. In a rugby team the eight players in the forwards are typically more involved in direct physical confrontations where power, aggression and size are of prime importance. However, not all the boys in the forwards were inclined to disregard their physical welfare. For example, Tom’s parents were medical professionals and his father
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was an ‘Old Boy’ (a graduate of the school). He played in the forwards and ‘talked up’ the need for aggression and the need to intimidate the opposition, but he was reluctant to take the risks that one or two other boys (who were constantly injured) were. Early in the study, players in the backs (the seven players who typically do more open space running and are less involved in violent contests for the ball) had supported the school’s emphasis on power, intimidation and heavy physical domination during interviews. For example, in an interview in the lead up to the first game of the season one of the wingers, Tony made this clear: It’s a hard game and at this level you’ve got to get on top of them from the start. You’ve got to be skilful as well but especially in the forwards you’ve got to show them who’s boss to build a platform for the backs. While all the players in the firsts initially appeared to embrace the school’s traditional approach to rugby, interviews conducted during the study increasingly suggested that it was more complex than this. Each of the boys had complied with these demands to varying degrees and interpreted them in different ways, but had not been completely comfortable with what was being asked of them. While complying with the pattern of hegemonic masculinity at the school, they had also resisted it in significant ways, as expressed in the style of rugby they aspired to play.
The Opportunity to Play Expressive and Creative Rugby There was a two-week break in the GPS rugby competition during which the 1st XV took part in a schools rugby carnival involving teams from Victoria, NSW, Queensland, New Zealand and some Asian countries. The carnival was conducted over a week during which the team stayed in a hotel together and played rugby every day. The rules of the competition were modified to accommodate the large number of teams competing with shorter games that were freer flowing than GPS games. The firsts played in a way that was very different to normal GPS games. The relationships between the players and the general mood were also vastly different to that of training at the school and at GPS games prior to the carnival. volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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The transformation in the style of play they adopted involved very significant changes in the interaction and relationships between the players and between the coach and the players. The boys were excited by the way in which they played and looked forward to every game. They talked excitedly about games; they were animated in discussion at half time and discussed tactics in groups between games. As they progressed through the carnival their communication improved, shouting and calling to each other during games. They took more risks and were more supportive of each other when things went wrong. In the euphoria and backslapping following one game, one of the players captured the excitement of the team: “This is awesome. Everybody’s having a good time. We are just throwing it (the ball) around, trying lots of stuff and really enjoying it”. There was also far more communication and interaction between them off the field. Released from the shackles of must-win GPS rugby, the team played a game style that was more open than normal. It required better communication and understanding between players, more decisionmaking, more anticipation and more risk-taking than GPS rugby. This more intuitive game style required a different set of skills to the heavily structured ‘no mistakes’ style normally played at the school, and was not initially up to the demands of more creative rugby, but developed as the tournament progressed. Their enthusiasm for the open rugby they were playing also grew as they dared to experiment and be creative. This allowed a previously restrained sense of dissatisfaction with the traditional, no-mistakes rugby to emerge during conversations with the players. After a game during the carnival, Tony expressed frustration with the team’s normal training approach: The (GPS) training is too structured and we need to play more open rugby like we are here. Look at how we are playing down here. We’re moving the ball, trying new stuff and it’s all coming off. I reckon the way we train at school restricts us. Training should allow us to try more things and be more creative than we are in GPS games. The GPS School team had a very successful carnival, and after such a positive experience of playing a more open style of rugby the coach, Gordon, decided to experiment with applying the same approach in
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the remaining two games of the GPS competition. Just as the players had been prepared to take risks in their games, Gordon was prepared to take the risk of trying to play GPS rugby in a very different way. In addition to the way in which the team had played and the camaraderie the entire squad had experienced this decision was shaped by the development of professional rugby as entertainment. The development of rugby as a professional sport from 1995 has seen significant rule changes designed to make it more appealing to a wider market. The enthusiasm for open rugby by the players and the coach was triggered by their experiences of the carnival but was situated within the growing influence of professional rugby and its development into a valuable form of entertainment. During the carnival and immediately after it there was more talk about open, entertaining rugby shaped by the emergence of the professional Super 12 (now Super 14) rugby tournament played between provincial teams from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and financed by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Minor rule changes and a strong emphasis on entertaining rugby had produced a far faster and more open version of the game that the boys in the 1st XV aspired to. The French national rugby team was also in town at the time and were renowned for playing expressive and unpredictably open rugby with their presence stimulating conversation among the boys about open, adventurous and instinctive rugby, as was evident in an interview with Tom: You go to a Super 12 game and see the incredible pace of play and it blows you away. They’re just throwing the ball around and playing amazing running rugby and you compare it to how we have usually played rugby here and it’s boring and predictable. And the way the French play is open and running with the ball even from inside their own goal line and it makes you want to play better, faster and more open rugby and I think we have showed we can. The players and the coach had taken a considerable risk in adopting the new game style in the first GPS game after the carnival and were elated with a good win. The risks involved in departing from traditional ‘no mistakes rugby’ providing more to cheer about after the victory. The players were happier and more animated after this game than they had been for the entire study as they seemed to volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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express both joy and relief in the post-game euphoria, as this quote from a brief interview at the time with the front row forward, Lurch, confirms: Oh how good was that? That was just the best game. Unbelievable. We all just played so well and this is the best feeling to win like this. This game was so good. Awesome. We played how we wanted to and it all came off. Unbelievable. This is how we should be playing all the time. After the enjoyment of the rugby carnival and the euphoria of the victory in the first test of the new game style in a GPS game the fairytale came to an abrupt end. In the last game of the season a stronger opposition team did not provide the GPS School with the time and space that it needed to play its new style of rugby and the team finished its season with a disappointing loss. The approach adopted by the GPS School 1st XV requires very well developed skills and understandings that take more time to develop than the few weeks that the team had. A particular way of playing rugby developed over five years at the school was difficult to change in such a short time. As Bourdieu might suggest, while the habitus (of the team and the school) is not fixed neither is it easily changed. It seems that it takes longer than this team had to successfully challenge a style of play reproduced by generations of boys at the school.
Discussion Connell (1983) suggests that different forms of masculinity are developed around combinations of power and skill in sport. In rugby, Australian football, ice hockey and American football, the nature of combinations of force/power and skill vary according to the position played and to the tactics and strategies adopted. Analysis of the different emphases placed on skill and force (including tactical and strategic understanding with skill) offers a useful means of identifying the significance of particular ways of training and playing matches for the development of young men’s masculine identity. As the example used in this paper suggests, playing rugby in ways that place more emphasis on skill, communication, anticipation and tactical understanding would thus be likely to contribute to the
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learning of forms of masculinity that vary from those reproduced through the traditional approach to rugby traditionally practiced at the GPS school. The interaction and higher-order thinking that this stimulates might also be seen as a positive and more creative aspect of the learning that occurs through rugby as part of boys’ schooling experiences in any setting. The increased interaction between the boys and collective joy, excitement and enthusiasm evident at the carnival carried on into training for, and playing in, the final two GPS games of the season suggests a different experience of rugby for the boys in the GPS School firsts. Much of this enjoyment and enthusiasm arose from the experience of playing a new style of rugby, the different training employed to develop it, and the ways in which this seemed to free the boys from the shackles of tightly structured rugby. In this approach there was room and scope for more intuitive responses, creativity, anticipation and communication between players than had been normal at the school. It required a change in coaching from a highly structured approach to an approach that relied more on the capacities of the players to respond to what was going on around them and to make instant decisions. Such an approach also inherently involved a change in power relations between the coach and the players, and provided more player autonomy, more decision-making power and more responsibility both at training and on the field. The new style required more dialogue between coach and players, and between players, during training and in games. One of the core issues that emerges from an examination of the experiment by the coach and the boys in the 1st XV with a new game style is the importance of the ways in which rugby is taught/ coached for the social and personal learning that arises from young men’s participation in it. Wanting to play rugby in a different way involves training in different ways, and the difficulties involved in such a change in coaching is a limiting factor for the coach and team. Traditional views of teaching and coaching are underpinned by an objectivist view of learning as the transmission of knowledge from expert to learner (Evans, 2006; Light & Fawns, 2003). The coach, Gordon, was therefore ill-equipped to coach in a way that could provide an appropriate learning environment instead of telling the volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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boys what they should and shouldn’t do. We would argue that you cannot directly ‘teach’ students to be creative in any area of the curriculum from literacy to art, drama or physical education. The skills and understandings needed to play creative and intuitive rugby cannot be directly ‘taught’ by the coach who must, instead, construct an appropriate learning environment and a move from instruction to the facilitation of learning. Coaching for creative rugby requires an indirect approach that involves the design of appropriate physical and socio•moral learning environments instead of telling players what to do and when to do it. As has been suggested in other research on player-centred approaches to coaching, the physical context of games is too dynamic, fluid and unpredictable to take this direct approach (Evans, 2006; Kidman, 2005; Light 2004). Approaches taken to coaching the ‘hard rugby’ traditionally practised in the GPS School are invariably top down, authoritative and directive. They typically involve unequal power relations between coach and players and communication in the form of a monologue from coach to players rather than the dialogue that is possible with some of the more recently developed, alternate coaching/teaching approaches such as Game Sense (Evans, 2006; Light & Fawns, 2003; Light, 2004) and Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU). TGfU is a student-centred, inquiry-based approach to teaching games that places all learning within modified games and conceives of learning as a holistic process through which contextualised skill, tactical understanding and decision-making ability are inseparably linked (Light & Fawns, 2003). These approaches reflect a view of knowledge as an object, reduce player autonomy and emphasize the development of superior physical capacities to win games. With this approach decision-making in training is primarily the responsibility of the coach. The coach in the study, Gordon, took full responsibility for training and for the team’s fortunes in games. He led all training and, with a little input from the captain, he planned and drilled the set attacking moves. He did not shout at the boys, intimidate them or ridicule any of them in any way but was, instead, almost always calm and approachable. There was, however, little player autonomy, independence, or room for creativity and risk-taking. While he suggested that he gave the captain some autonomy in training this
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appeared to be comparatively limited. Gordon admitted that the extreme pressure on him to get results in GPS rugby made it difficult for him to let go. Early in the study there was little evidence of any player dissatisfaction with traditional regimes of training and game style and players seemed to accept that this was the way in which the GPS School played and trained. It was not until after the team’s participation in a school rugby carnival that dissatisfaction with traditional rugby became apparent. The experimentation with creative rugby involved more debate and discussion between the players and between them and the coach than in the traditional approach as they took on more power and responsibility. Such an approach also involves opportunities for players to experiment by developing ideas and strategies, testing them and reflecting upon the results in a process that is central to a constructivist approach to learning (Fosnot, 1996) and to some new approaches to teaching games and coaching sport (for example, see Griffin & Butler, 2005; Light, 2004). Such an approach offers learners/players the opportunity to collectively develop and ‘carry through’ ideas (Dewey, 1916/97). For players to develop the intuition, anticipation, communication and flexible skills required to play creative rugby they need to be provided with a socio•moral environment in which ‘mistakes’ are seen as a positive aspect of the learning process (DeVries & Zan, 1996). To play the rugby the boys in this study aspired to, they needed opportunities for decision-making and developing independence from the coach during training. Developing the intuitive and creative style of rugby to which these players in the firsts aspire requires a particular pedagogical approach that empowers the learners and involves a more collaborative learning. It requires pedagogy that encourages players to collaboratively solve problems through talking, discussion and negotiation. These are typically areas in which boys are seen to need encouragement within academic and popular writing on boys’ education suggesting that such coaching pedagogy would contribute toward positive learning for boys (Imms, 2001). They are aspects of boys’ schooling that are now often lacking through an emphasis on the ‘academic’ curriculum and the subsequent marginalization of subject areas such as creative arts, music and drama that can and does provide for creative, expressive and affective education. volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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Arguably, had the first XV won their last game of the season with the new game style the experiment would likely have been more successful and had more impact upon the boys’ development of gendered identity. Continued over a longer period of time the nature of the social interaction arising from this is likely to have contributed toward the construction of masculinities that would have differed from the hegemonic pattern traditionally reproduced at the school. This suggests that pedagogy in sport coaching is both shaped by particular forms of masculinity (or femininity) and shapes developing gender identities. An authoritative ‘command’ style approach conceived as the expert passing on objective knowledge and the notion of mastery embedded in it involve the transmission of the coach’s knowledge with little interaction and a strong power imbalance between coach and players. More playercentred approaches involve more interaction between players and between coaches and players, with more equal power relationships between them.
Conclusion While much literature is wholly critical of the impact that contact sport has on young men (for example see Messner, 1992; Mills, 1997) there is a range of positive social learning that can, and often does, take place through sport, and team sport in particular. The historical belief in sport as a vehicle for particular social and moral development is not completely misplaced – yet this is not to say that such positive learning is necessarily an automatic outcome of just playing a team sport such as rugby. The learning that arises from involvement in sport, including the implicit learning of gender, is shaped profoundly by the interaction of the interwoven discourses of hegemonic masculinity and elite-level commercial sport and the discourse of sport as a form of moral education originating from the nineteenth century schools of the rising English middle classes (Mangan, 1981). When viewed as being part of the school curriculum and structured to achieve desired learning outcomes and objectives sport can offer a valuable medium for social, creative and moral learning in schools. New pedagogies for teaching games and coaching sport that have emerged over the past two decades, such as TGfU (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982) and Game Sense (see for example Light, 2004), hold considerable potential for
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beginning to actively address what has been seen as sport’s role in the ‘problem’ of masculinity (Messner, 1992; Tomsen & Donaldson, 2003). Research and writing on these pedagogies indicates that they are capable of realizing the potential that team sports hold as educational media for positive social learning in the education of boys and young men (Chen & Light, 2006; Light & Fawns, 2003). Regardless of what pedagogical approach is adopted the negative influences that elite and highly competitive contact sport can have on young men, with the ways in which it can glorify and encourage violence and the injuries that they can inflict upon them, will always be a problem (see for example, Messner, 1992; Messner & Sabo, 1990; Mills, 1997). However, as this paper suggests, appropriate pedagogy, awareness of this negative impact and teaching focused on achieving positive learning outcomes can begin to address this problem. Team games in schools such as rugby can offer opportunities for valuable social and creative learning when this is made an explicitly articulated learning objective and appropriate pedagogy is adopted. Despite the raft of problems involved with boys’ participation in heavy contact sports, they can provide for positive social learning such as learning to work as a member of a team, striving to achieve collective and individual goals and subjugating individual needs to the needs of the group. They also provide ideal media for developing skills needed in the work place and for leading a successful life, such as problem solving, resilience, facilitating expression and creativeness, and deciding how much risk to take to achieve a goal. The heavy contact involved in rugby requires the development of physical force and the physical capacities to successfully play and it is certainly not a sport for every boy (or girl). This does not, however, preclude boys from developing creativity and using rugby as a medium for a degree of expression within the context of a heavy body contact sport in which physical confrontation forms a significant aspect of play. While the generation and execution of physical force is an important aspect of rugby there is an equally important dimension of play that requires higher-order thinking, embodied understandings, intuition, anticipation and creativity at all levels of rugby from the school under 13s to the national team. Indeed, the national team, the Wallabies, has been widely criticised over the past few years for volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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its overly structured and predictable approach that many feel has blunted the creativity and flair of players and is boring spectators (for example see, Kimber, 2005). A player-centred, inquiry-based approach that empowers players would not only be helpful in making school rugby a more valuable part of boys’ schooling experience, but might also assist in liberating the attacking flair and creativity of the best rugby players in Australia.
References Bourdieu, P. (1978). Sport and social class, Social Science Information, 12(6), 819-840. Bunker, D. & Thorpe, R. (1982). A Model for the Teaching of Games in Secondary Schools, Bulletin of Physical Education, 18(2) 5-8. Chen, Q. & Light, R. (2006). ‘I thought I’d hate cricket but I love it!’: Year six students’ responses to Game Sense pedagogy. Change: Transformations in Education, 9(1), 49-58. Connnell, R. W. (1983). Which way is up? Essays on sex, class and culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Connell, R. W., Ashenden, D. J., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W. (1982). Making the difference: Schools, families and social division. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. DeVries, R. & Zan, B. (1996). A constructivist perspective on the role of the sociomoral atmosphere in promoting children’s development. In, C. T. Fosnot, (Ed.) Constructivism: Theory, perspectives and practice. New York & London: Teachers College, Columbia University. Dewey, J. (1916/97). Democracy and education. New York: Free Press. Evans, J. (2006) Elite level rugby coaches’ interpretation and use of Game Sense, Asian Journal of Exercise and Sport Science, 3(1), 17-24. Fosnot, C. T. (1996). Constructivism: A psychological theory of learning. In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives and practice. New York & London: Teachers College, Columbia University.
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Glaser, B. & Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of grounded theory, Chicago: Aldine. Griffin, L. L. & Butler J. (2005). Teaching Games for Understanding: Theory, practice and research. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Grunneau, R. & Whitson, D. (1993). Hockey night in Canada: Sport, identities and cultural politics. Toronto, Garamond Press. Imms, W. (2001). Multiple masculinities and the schooling of boys. Canadian Journal of Education, 25(2) 152-166. Hickey, C., Fitzclarence, L. & Mathews, R. (1998). Where the boys are: Masculinity, sport and education. Geelong: Deakin Centre for Education and Change. Kimber, B. (2005). Students’ coach signs off with caning for powerbrokers. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 68. Kidman, L. (2005). Athlete-centred coaching: Developing inspired and inspiring people. Christchurch, NZ: Innovative Print Communications. Kirk, D. (1998). Schooling bodies: School practice and public discourse 18801950. London & Washington DC: Leicester University Press. Light, R. (2007). Re-examining hegemonic masculinity: The body, compliance and resistance. Quest 59, 323-339. Light, R. (2006). Situated learning in an Australian surf club. Sport, Education and Society, 11(2), 155-172. Light, R. (2004). Coaches’ experiences of Game Sense: Opportunities and challenges. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 9(2), 115-132. Light, R. & Fawns, R. (2003). Knowing the game: Integrating speech and action in games through TGfU. Quest 55(2), 161-176. Light, R. & Kirk, D. (2000). High school rugby, the body and the reproduction of Masculinity. Sport, Education and Society, 5(2), 163- 176. Light, R. & Kirk, D. (2001). Australian cultural capital – Rugby’s social meaning: Physical assets, social advantage and independent schools. Culture, Sport, Society, 4(3), 81-98. Light, R. & Pickford, M. (2004). Competing discourses of school sport and media-sport: Primary school students’ responses to media representations of Australian football. ACHPER Healthy Lifestyles Journal, 51(2/3), 23-27.
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Mangan, J. A. (1981). Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian public school, The emergence and consolidation of an educational ideology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McKay, J. (1991). No pain no gain? Sport and Australian culture. Sydney: Prentice Hill. McKay, J. & Middlemiss, I. (1995). ‘Mate against mate, state against state’: A case study of media constructions of hegemonic masculinity in Australian sport. Masculinities, 3(3), 28-4. Messner, M. (1992). Power at play: Sports and the problem of masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press. Messner, M. & Sabo, D. (1990). Sport, men and the gender order: Critical feminist perspectives. Champaign: Human Kinetics. Mills, M. (1997). Football, desire and the social organization of masculinity. Social Alternatives, 16(1), 10-13. Sherington, G. (1983). Athleticism in the antipodes: The AAGPS of New South Wales. History of Education Review, 12, 16-28. Tomsen, S. & Donaldson, M. (2003). Male trouble: Looking at Australian masculinities. Melbourne AUS: Pluto Press. Wedgwood, N. (2003). Aussie rules! Schoolboy football and masculine embodiment. In S. Tomsen & Mike Donaldson (Eds.), Male trouble: Looking at Australian masculinities. Melbourne AUS: Pluto Free Press.
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FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE SPORT FIELD:
Richard Pringle University of Waikato Richard Pringle is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Waikato. His main areas of research lie in the sociology of sport and include gender relations, pain, pleasure and governmentality. He is the co-author (with Pirkko Markula) of Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self.
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MASCULINITIES, SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION AND CREATIVE TEACHING STRATEGIES. Abstract The apparent links between sport and masculinities have generated critical concern from a number of educationalists, feminists and sport sociologists. These concerns have inspired the development of various pedagogical strategies for transforming understandings and practices of gender within educational settings. This paper reviews the connections between sport and masculinities, and contributes to the development of a critical pedagogy by illustrating how the creative arts can be used within tertiary educational settings to raise awareness of the gendering influence of sport. I detail how I drew on Foucauldian theorizing and the work of Laurel Richardson to develop a teaching strategy, involving the use of dance and a ‘collective story’, to promote marginalised knowledge and stir political emotions. I present a shortened version of the collective story and discuss its impact on tertiary students. I conclude by encouraging other educators to draw on the creative arts as tools for promoting discussion, legitmating the voice of the ‘other’ and to encourage an empathetic response.
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In a research project that examined the links between rugby and masculinities (Pringle, 2003; Pringle & Markula, 2005) I interviewed two men who were in their last year of training to be physical education (PE) teachers. I had previously taught these men in an undergraduate sport sociology subject and was aware of their passionate involvement in rugby. Both men (aged 21 and 28 years) revealed themselves as seemingly violent, sexist and homophobic and I was worried about their suitability for the teaching profession. The 21-year-old celebrated violence while recounting his rugby experiences: He went really low to tackle me and I kneed him in the head and he got knocked out and the ambulance had to come and take him off the field. And I scored a try from that move and when I was running back from the try line, he was on the ground knocked out and I pointed at him and raised a fist in the air to our sideline. And they … clapped … and the other side was going “boo” and the whole thing just made me feel good…. In my last team we had this real scrappy hooker and he’d always start a fight and I’d coming running in from the backs to join in … wherever there was a fight we would always jump in … and keep punchin’ ‘til someone’s down. The 28 year-old interviewee had similarly told me about his violent exploits on-and-off the field, “I just came into the ruck and laid one on him, broke his nose and he was off … I didn’t have a problem with it, he asked for it…”. He also revealed that he thought female rugby players were “dykes and butch” and they should not play rugby, as “it’s a man’s game”. With respect to my concerns about the future influence these two men might have on younger males and females, I was inspired to reflect on strategies for raising critical awareness about sport, violence and gender amongst trainee PE teachers. In this paper I begin by reviewing research that raises concerns with the links between schools, sport and the construction of masculinities and gender relations.i I then discuss strategies that have been used in schools to transform understandings and practices of gender by promoting critical awareness. To promote an alternative strategy, I then illustrate how I drew on Foucauldian theorising and the work of Richardson (1997) to develop and trial a pedagogical approach that
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uses the creative arts for resurrecting marginalised knowledge and allows for transformative possibilities. I conclude by reflecting on the impact of this teaching strategy on the tertiary students’ awareness of the connections between sport and masculinities.
Schools, sport and gender troubles The examination of the links between gender and relations of power has been one of the most researched topics within sociological studies of sport. Although this topic has been examined from numerous theoretical perspectives, there is general agreement that sport has long been valued as a masculinising practice (Hickey, Fitzclarence & Matthews, 1998; Messner, 1992). The historic assumption that sport can transform ‘boys into men’ has been drawn upon to explain why the sporting field is far from an even playing field for males and females. Researchers suggest that this masculinising discourse helps explain why youthful males are typically encouraged to play sport, and why those who display skills and competitiveness, particularly within the winter football codes, are often rewarded for their participation, whereas teenage males who show little interest in sport or are unskilled can be prone to marginalisation and even abuse (Light & Kirk, 2000; Messner, 1992; Parker, 1996). Giulianotti (2005) also suggests that this masculinizing discourse accounts for why the history of female participation in sport has been one of ongoing struggle for legitimacy and equity. Indeed, in spite of the recent and quite dramatic growth in women’s sport, contemporary researchers have illustrated an assortment of gender inequities, including the marginalisation and trivialisation of female performances, and the sexualisation of their athletic bodies in the media (Caudwell, 2002; Hargreaves, 1994). Many sport sociologists have extrapolated from these gender inequities to suggest that sport helps to affirm and produce a popular form of masculinity that acts to marginalise other masculinities and subordinates females. Critical commentators have also illustrated that sport problematically links aggression, bodily force, competition, and physical skill with a dominant form of masculinity (e.g. Hickey & Fitzclarence, 1999, 2000; Messner, 1990; Miller, 1998; Phillips, 1996; Skelton, 1996, volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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2000). Hickey and Fitzclarence (1999) warned, for example, that the primary messages that boys receive about ‘appropriate’ masculinity through sports are grounded in traditional notions of masculinity, so that boys “in intensely ‘male’ ways… are supposed to learn how to get back up after being knocked down, how to express themselves physically, how to impose themselves forcefully, how to mask pain and how to release anxiety” (p. 52). Sport has also been viewed as a “crucial site for the ‘legitimate’ training in, and expression of, male violence, both on and off the field” (Miller, 1998; p. 194). Messner (1990), for example, stated: It seems reasonable to simply begin with the assumption that in many of our most popular sports, the achievement of goals (scoring and winning) is predicated on the successful utilization of violence – that is, these are activities in which the human body is routinely turned into a weapon to be used against other bodies, resulting in pain, serious injury, and even death. (p. 203) The concerns about the possible connections surrounding sport and the production of a dominant but problematic form of masculinity has encouraged researchers to examine the role of educational institutions in promoting sport. The subsequent research result has raised further concerns. Parker (1996) illustrated that school sport and physical education was influential in shaping gendered notions of boys and girls, and in determining hierarchical peer group positions that favour boys who excel in sport. Skelton (2000) similarly concluded that sport “defined relationships between males and females in the classroom and (even) took a central place in the classroom management strategies of the male teachers” (p. 5). More specifically, Edley and Wetherell (1997) reported that a consensus view of the staff and pupils at the UK secondary school they examined was that the most powerful group in the senior school was made up largely of the school’s rugby players. They observed that a key aspect of the rugby players’ domination was physical: During breaktime, for instance, they would literally take over the common room with their boisterous games, forcing everyone else out on to the peripheries. Moreover, these games, like rugby, served to underline the players’ ability to give and take physical punishment; a core aspect of the traditional definition of masculinity and a constant reminder of the threat posed to anyone wishing to challenge their dominant position. (p. 207).
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The overriding conclusion from this school-based research is that schools are implicated in the construction of a gender regime that acts to empower the sporting boys at the expense of girls and other boys. Yet researchers also widely recognise that schools can play an important role in transforming understandings and practices of gender. Indeed, policies to address gender reform in schools have existed since the 1960s (Wright, 1999). These policies have typically aimed to provide equal opportunities for females. In more recent years, a number of researchers have examined pedagogical approaches to enhance a critical gender awareness concerning masculinities (e.g. Denborough, 1996; Jordan, 1995; Kenway, 1997; Kenway & Fitzclarence, 1997; Wright, 2000). These strategies are often similar to the premises that underpin narrative therapy (see White, 1994) and, therefore, typically revolve around the provision of alternative narrative or discursive resources to enable “individuals and groups a means for remaking the dominant story-lines which have governed their lives” (Kenway & Fitzclarence, 1997; p. 129). Fitzclarence and Hickey (1998), for example, suggest that coaches of boys’ sport are in a position of responsibility to help develop counternarratives to the dominant ones that surround sporting masculinities. Although many university lecturers present critical forms of knowledge to students, few researchers have examined specific strategies for transforming understandings and practices of gender by teaching critical thinking skills to tertiary students (e.g. Clayton & Humberstone, 2007; Kenway, 1997; Markula & Pringle, 2006; Wright, Macdonald & Burrows, 2004). Clayton and Humberstone (2007), as one such example, examined how a feminist-inspired module associated with sport and gender shaped a cohort of tertiary male football students’ views on sexism and masculinities. Their results suggested that the male students did not appear to value the module, perceived it as intended for female students and were somewhat resistant to its prime aims. These findings are perhaps not surprising given that the male ‘footballers’ are likely to have much invested in their sporting identities. These students, accordingly, might perceive a critical reading of sport as a personal threat. Kenway and Bullen (2001) further warn that school pupils often interpret the delivery of a critically informed pedagogy as authoritarian and consequently “do volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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not tend to appreciate teachers who make them feel ashamed about their choices and lifestyles all in the name of helping them” (p. 155). Clayton and Humberstone (2007) similarly concluded that “creating the environment for sensitive, respectful critique is problematic within an HE (Health Education) culture and particularly sportsrelated studies which are steeped in masculinist and positivistic discourses, thus making it difficult to legitimate the voice of the ‘other’” (pp. 529-530). A pedagogical issue, accordingly, relates to devising effective strategies for raising critical awareness without fuelling resentment or risking an anti-feminist backlash amongst (male) tertiary students studying sport. In the following section, I present a pedagogical strategy that I have implemented with third-year sport degree students that draws on the arts and appears to have had modest success in raising awareness of gender issues associated with sport involvement. The strategy does not directly aim to challenge sporting identities but to enhance an understanding of potential problems concerning the connections between sport, hierarchical peer group positionings and masculinities.
A Foucauldian and arts inspired critical pedagogical approach My pedagogical approach for raising awareness was based on Foucault’s ideas associated with social transformation and a ‘creative arts’ based approach for raising empathy. In the following I briefly sketch Foucault’s political aims and illustrate how I adapted them for use in the lecture theatre. Foucault (1978) argued that people’s ideas are shaped by their experiences as connected to the workings of discourse and power that operate within specific historic contexts. He did not believe that there was a ‘right or wrong way’ of viewing the world or social issues. In assuming that there were no overarching social truths, Foucault (1989) argued that the “role of the intellectual does not consist in telling others what they must do. By what right would he (sic) do so?” (p. 305). In spite of his anti-essentialist and postmodern views of truth, Foucault was politically concerned with minimising the problems
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associated with inequitable relations of power. Foucault (1987) stated that it was unrealistic to think of a world without power relations but it is important to develop a “…practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination” (p. 18). To help alleviate social problems, Foucault provided erudite studies of the workings of power, within specific institutions (e.g. hospitals, asylums and jails) and with respect to specific identities (e.g. the ‘sick, mad and debauched’) to enhance critical awareness. More specifically, he believed that many social problems – such as associated with sexism, homophobia, nationalism and terrorism – stem from how people know themselves and others. He was therefore interested with promoting new forms of subjectivity as a strategy to alleviate power problems. To allow opportunities for people to develop new ways of thinking about themselves, Foucault (1988) argued that it is important to reveal the history of ideas (or discourses) to “show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes, which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this socalled evidence can be criticized and destroyed” (p. 10). Associated with attempts to encourage people to think ‘differently’, Foucault was interested in promoting marginalised knowledges, as these knowledges could challenge people to analyse taken-for-granted assumptions associated with, as examples, sexuality, madness and disciplinary practices. Drawing from Foucault’s ideas on the role of the academic and social transformation, I decided it would be inappropriate to present knowledge of sport or ‘rugby masculinities’ as inherently problematic. In contrast, I thought it suitable to present students with marginalised ways of knowing sport and gender to provide opportunities for students to reflect on possibly ingrained assumptions and allow them opportunities to develop new ways of thinking. In thinking of how to present students with marginalised knowledge, I turned to Foucault once again. Foucault’s (1977) work may often be thought of as dense and difficult to read. Yet he recognised the power effect of emotive prose and, at times, aimed for his written work to emotionally stir readers to engender political action. He hoped that his books would allow volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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readers to have an ‘experience’ that could transform how they think: “what is essential is not found in a series of historically verifiable proofs; it lies rather in the experience which the books permits us to have” (Foucault, 1997; p. 36). He, accordingly, presented some of his work in an evocative manner to emotionally provoke readers out of their comfort zones. The beginning of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977), for example, describes the excruciating account of the botched execution of “Damiens the regicide” (p. 3). The account is horrific and difficult to read, yet it works in pushing readers to an emotional edge and allows possibilities for inducing “an alteration, a transformation … with our knowledge” (Foucault, 1997; p. 37). Foucault’s (1965) first book Madness and Civilisation similarly challenges readers’ understandings about madness and psychiatric practices by presenting a history of madness in a somewhat lyrical fashion that, at times, appears to blur fact and fiction. The writing style works to draw readers in and paint a picture of ‘strange times and practices’ that still haunt us today. Foucault found that stirring emotions within a critical context was a useful political strategy. His work on madness, discipline and sexuality, for example, have played respective roles in promoting political awareness associated with psychiatric practices, capital punishment and gay rights. And this political awareness has promoted social changes. In a related sense, I wanted to stir my students’ emotions to help engender political awareness concerned with links between sport and gender. To help do this I drew from the creative arts (drama and narratives) to develop a pedagogical strategy for enhancing critical awareness and allowing students to ‘experience’ social problems within sport. My pedagogical approach did not aim to tell students what to think but provided an opportunity for them to develop an empathetic understanding of issues associated with sport and gender through an experiential approach based on the creative arts. I now describe my teaching approach.
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Teaching sport students critically and creatively I have used my approach for stirring emotions over successive years with final year students studying towards a Bachelor of Sport Studies. I begin with a so-called ‘ice-breaker activity’. I ask the students to sit quietly for 30 seconds and listen to the sounds surrounding them. I then ask them to draw the sounds that they have heard. This is, of course, a seemingly strange task to undertake within a sport sociology class yet they all duly oblige. Once their art works are completed, I ask them to get into small groups to reveal and discuss their compositions. I am aware that for some this might be potentially embarrassing. After a short discussion, which typically involves a degree of levity, I ask them to select the most artistic piece. This selection task helps create a competitive motivational climate (similar to sport). After a work is selected, I then tell the students that they have 15 minutes to create a dance to represent the art piece. I also inform that each group will perform the dance in front of the class and it will be judged on its artistic merit and a prize will be offered. The students, with remarkably little protest, set about planning and practicing their dances. The tone of the class has changed and a sense of nervous excitement pervades. Some students are energized by the task whereas others take a very low-key role. Immediately after each dance has been performed I provide feedback on their creativeness and ability. At times, I single out individuals and offer praise or critique. I then provide a score marked out of 10 to each group. At the awards ‘ceremony’ I announce the winning group and ask them to come to down to the front of the class to receive their prizes (chocolate) and I warmly shake their hands. I then invite the students to talk about the similarities between their art/dance performances and sport. The students typically offer many ideas, as related to: physical movement, competition, excitement, the need for practice, the influence of skill and working as a team. The sports students tend not to mention that both movement forms are performed under a public gaze that allows others opportunity to judge the quality of their bodily performance. To draw their attention to this factor, I ask the students how they felt about performing the dance in front of the class. Some students report that
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the public performance made it more exciting and helped get them focused. Others, however, suggest that the public performance made the experience embarrassing, threatening and frightful. With further discussion there is agreement that the competitive motivational climate, critical feedback and public performance was detrimental for some of the students. I point out that sport is also typically performed so that bodies and skill level are readily observable. The ‘marginalised knowledge’ that I seek to resurrect is that sport is performed under a panoptic gaze, and that this gaze influences emotional responses amongst participants in sport. More specifically, I suggest that for some individuals, the visibility of their performances on the sporting field can make the experience embarrassing, threatening and frightful. As such the students agree that the competitive element in sport, as combined with the visibility of embodied performance, can enhance or destroy enjoyment and motivation for different individuals. This artistic experience and subsequent discussion has allowed an opportunity for some of the students to gain a different way of viewing sport, and I aim to encourage feelings of empathy for those who do not enjoy playing sport. An empathetic response, as Sparkes (1994) argues, is an important first step for promoting transformative possibilities. To help encourage an empathetic response, I turn to research literature to provide information about the place of sport in schools and its impact on peer groups (e.g. Edley & Wetherell, 1997; Parker, 1996; Skelton, 2000). By illustrating that sporting ability and performances are influential in shaping hierarchical peer group positions that favour boys who excel in sport, I aim to raise the issue of whether this is unfair. While examining the literature, I ask the students to reflect back on their school experiences with respect to sport and peer group hierarchies. Wright (1999), for example, argues that to help students view their social worlds differently they “need to become ‘active researchers in their worlds’ (and) interrogators of the taken-forgranted” (p. 187). I therefore raise a discussion by asking: Which students were popular at their schools? Who got marginalized? How were the boys and girls who did not enjoy sport treated? The answers reveal a general trend suggesting that the more popular boys (and to a lesser extent girls) were those who were good at sport and that the
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boys who found sport embarrassing, threatening or frightful were often unpopular and, at times, even subject to abuse. To further engender an empathetic response for the boys who did not enjoy the public context of sport, I ask the students to read a rugby narrative. I had crafted the narrative after collecting 14 different men’s accounts of their youthful rugby experiences during my doctoral studies (Pringle, 2003). Although many of the interviewees’ reflections were somewhat nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ of school rugby I focused the narrative in relation to eight of the interviewees’ recollections. These interviewees revealed that school rugby was a dividing practice that made them feel inadequate and somewhat abnormal. Rather than representing just one of the men’s stories of rugby, I produced a ‘collective story’. The concept of a collective story stems from the work of Richardson (1997) who explains that the aim is to give voice to groups that are silenced or stigmatized by dominant narratives. The eight interviewees revealed that they had not talked about their rugby experiences previously as it was somehow inappropriate to disclose they were fearful of making mistakes on the field or of getting hurt. In this manner I considered the eight interviewees as a ‘group’ silenced by dominating discourses surrounding rugby and masculinities. Richardson’s political task was to understand the private stories of members of ‘silenced’ groups in relation to broader social forces, to discern the workings of power that act formidably against them, and then to represent their stories as a collective, unified, chronological narrative to engender opportunities for social change. With similar political intentions, Sparkes (1994) has argued in favour of publicising previously marginalised stories as they “can provide powerful insights into the lived experiences of others in ways that can inform, awaken, and disturb readers by illustrating their involvement in social processes about which they may not be consciously aware” (p. 178). Although Sparkes (1994) cautioned that there are paternalistic notions concerned with ‘giving voice’ to a group, he also states that until we live in a social world that celebrates diversity and allows individuals to publicly tell their own stories without threat of
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marginalisation or retribution, then the “connecting of individual stories to wide socio-political and economic issues via life histories has an important role to play in assisting change” (p. 180). In writing and presenting the collective story to my students I hoped that it would generate what Max Weber (1964) referred to as ‘verstehen’ or an empathetic understanding. In the next section, I present excerpts from the collective story, Fear and loathing on the rugby field (Pringle, in press).
Fear and loathing on the rugby field I would have been about aged ten when I was required to pick a winter sport to play for our primary school. I had to decide between rugby and soccer. But there really wasn’t much choice and most of the boys lined up in rugby. Yet, I wasn’t ready to play rugby. I thought I might play when I was older, so I decided to line up in the soccer line. And that’s when the rugby coach came up to me and asked: “Aren’t you Mike Harrison’s little brother?” “Yes”, I replied proudly, thinking about his sporting exploits. “Well, you are in the wrong line” he said, and he physically shifted me into the rugby line. That is how I started playing rugby. Yet I only played for two seasons … I was the weakest link in the team. I was tall but always felt weak and weedy. I was very thin and I couldn’t run fast. I don’t know if I was more afraid of getting hurt or doing the wrong thing. I couldn’t really tackle to stop somebody. The best I could do was delay people until somebody else got there. And if somebody wanted to run around me, they could – not a problem – I certainly didn’t have the speed. It was embarrassing at times. And I knew that as soon as I got on the field there were going to be some occasional moments of terror but I also knew that it was just the way things were.… I definitely couldn’t have talked to the other boys at school about this; it just wasn’t the done thing to say you didn’t like rugby, or worse that you were scared of playing. Yet, playing rugby sort of destroyed me, it made me feel like I wasn’t quite good enough, I felt soft. Looking back now I can remember it well, it’s quite clear; it made me feel soft.
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Anyhow, by the time I got to secondary school there was no compulsion to play rugby, so I quit. I still had friends that played but I had done my bit and was pleased to get out. Rugby was still a big thing at the school though…. If there was a big game on, where another school visited to play rugby, classes were cancelled and we’d all go to the main field and watch these guys play rugby and clap and so forth. And stand there for the presentations at the end and listen to the rugby boys congratulate each other on how they all played a great game. It was very much a rugby school. The First XV players were looked at as heroes …. I guess I was a little envious of the rugby players. They were bigger, more powerful people … but I had no desire to play rugby again …. At lunch times I hung out in a little group and we’d often go to the library. I didn’t know what else to do at lunchtimes but there were enough of us so it didn’t really matter. There were four or five of us as a close group that frequented the library and that number was enough to have validation that you weren’t entirely screwed up. Yet we knew that we were different. By the time that I was fifteen or sixteen years old I hung out with a group that had a lot of girls in it, which was a little unusual. We were the nerds of the school. There was no doubt about it; kids used to call us that. I guess I felt a bit of a failure…. In my last years at school I began to quietly resent all the attention that the rugby boys got. There were a lot of people that deserved attention from the school and they never got it. I’m thinking of people who played different sport codes, like the hockey players, and girls’ teams. I mean I wasn’t even really aware of girls’ teams until I had a girlfriend playing netball. But there were other people as well, good artists, musicians, people involved in dance and drama. Looking back, and I hope it has changed, it was a mistake to give so much attention to rugby.
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Response to the story The tertiary students appear interested in the story and read it silently. When they are finished, I simply ask what they thought about the story. The students often comment that compared to other class readings the story was easy to read, somewhat eye-opening and provocative. Some add that they felt sorry for the main character (many nod in agreement) and were annoyed with the difficulties he faced in school. Others wanted to know more information about the character, for example, did he play other sports, what does he do now and does he like watching the All Blacks? I then tell the students how the story was crafted from eight different men’s accounts and ask – given that a range of men had similar experiences of sporting ‘fear’ which left them feeling somewhat inadequate – what we as future PE teachers could do to help change this situation? The ensuing discussions suggest that the majority of the class took the sport issue seriously. Their answers tend to focus on pedagogical rather than sociological strategies in offering ideas, such as: not forcing anyone to play particular sports, providing ‘equal’ rewards for other leisure activities, providing a greater range of sporting activities during PE, deemphasizing the competitive aspects of school sport and giving less status to rugby players. These suggestions indicate that they do not blame individuals for being fearful of rugby. These answers, however, indirectly reveal that they had not problematised the ‘heavy•contact’ aspect of rugby (something they appear to take for granted) and did not identify the story as related to a masculinity issue. To help identify the story as a sport and masculinity issue I raise further questions, for example: why did ‘failing’ in rugby cause so much angst? What sorts of names might he have been called for being fearful of rugby? Why did the story have little reference to females? The answers to these questions indicated that the students could grasp, with prompting, the story as a sport and gender issue and as worthy of critical reflection. Moreover, the tones of the discussions suggest that the (male) students do not appear threatened by the topic under analysis. Importantly, no one is tempted to suggest (at least publicly) that the character in the story is somehow at fault or flawed. The discussion, in contrast, hinges around social factors
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connected with the construction of masculinities and the popularity of rugby. I am accordingly aware that some of the students’ social imaginations have been stirred. At this point the two-hour lecture finishes and we are in a position to examine more ‘traditional’ forms of knowledge concerning sport and masculinities in the next class.
Some concluding thoughts Schooling processes associated with sport and PE have been implicated in the production of a dominant form of masculinity that acts to marginalize other ways of performing masculinity and femininity. It is, accordingly, important that future sport coaches and PE teachers are critically aware of practices that are linked with gender troubles. Yet an issue arises with respect to how to critically educate individuals whose identities are closely linked to the subject of critique – without inspiring resentment or risking a backlash. In this paper, I presented a pedagogical strategy for this issue that appears to have had a degree of success with my final year students in a sport/PE based degree. The strategy drew on use of the creative arts and Foucauldian theorizing to problematise taken-for-granted knowledge concerned with rugby and masculinities. The strategy did not rest on an assumption that sport is inherently problematic, nor did it attempt to tell others what to think. In contrast, through use of dance and narrative inquiry students were able to gain understanding about why some individuals are fearful of participating in sport and, for some, this encouraged an empathetic response. This approach, more specifically, helped legitimate the ‘voice of the other’ and was useful for encouraging discussion within a respectful climate about a potentially provocative issue.
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References Caudwell, J. (2002). Women’s experiences of sexuality within football contexts: A particular and located footballing epistemology. Football Studies, 5(1), 24-45. Clayton, B. & Humberstone, B. (2007). Gender and race – what’s that to do with football studies? Contested ‘knowledges’ in sport and leisure curricula in HE. Gender & Education, 19(4), 513 – 533. Denborough, D. (1996). Step by step: Developing respectful and effective ways of working with young men to reduce violence. In C. McLean, M. Carey & C. White (Eds.), Men’s ways of being: New directions in theory and psychology. (pp. 91-115). Boulder: Westview Press. Edley, N. & Wetherell, M. (1997). Jockeying for position: The construction of masculine identities. Discourse & Society, 8(2), 203-217. Fitzclarence, L. & Hickey, C. (1998). Learning to •ationalize abusive behaviour through football. In C. Hickey, L. Fitzclarence, & R. Matthews (Eds.), Where the boys are: Masculinity, sport and education (pp. 67-81). Geelong: Deakin Centre for Education and Change, Foucault, M. (1965). Madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. M. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975.) Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY, Random House. (Original work published 1976.) Foucault, M (1987). The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984. In J. Bernauer & D. Rasmussen (Eds.), The final Foucault (pp. 1-20). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L.H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P.H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 10-49). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, M. (1989). The concern for truth. In S. Lotringer (Ed.), Foucault Live: interviews, 1966-84. New York: Semiotext(e).
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Foucault, M. (1997). Remarks on Marx: Conversation with Duccio Tromadori. New York: Semiotext(e). In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel Foucault: ethics, subjectivity and truth, Volume one. London: Penguin Books. Giulianotti, R. (2005). Sport: A critical sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hargreaves, J. (1994). Sporting females: Critical issues in the history and sociology of women’s sports. London: Routledge. Hickey, C. & Fitzclarence, L. (1999) Educating boys in sport and physical education: Using narrative methods to develop pedagogies of responsibility. Sport, Education and Society, 4(1), 51-62. Hickey, C. & Fitzclarence, L. (2000). If you listen you will hear: Building relationships using ‘conversational flow’. In J. McLeod & K. Malone (Eds.), Representing youth. Melbourne AUS: Australian Clearinghouse on Youth Studies. Hickey, C., Fitzclarence, L. & Matthews, R. (1998) Where the boys are: Masculinity, sport and education. Geelong: Deakin Centre for Education and Change. Jordan, E. (1995). Fighting boys and fantasy play: The construction of masculinity in the early years of school. Gender and Education, 7(1), 69-86. Kenway, J. (1997). Boys’ education, masculinity and gender reform: Some introductory remarks. Curriculum Perspectives, 17(1), 57-61. Kenway, J. & Bullen, E. (2001). Consuming children: Education – entertainment – advertising. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kenway, J. & Fitzclarence, L. (1997) Masculinity, violence and schooling: Challenging ‘poisonous pedagogies’. Gender and Education, 9(1), 117133. Light, R. & Kirk, D. (2000). High school rugby, the body and the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity. Sport, Education and Society, 5(2), 163-176. Markula, P. & Pringle, R. (2006). Foucault, sport and exercise: Power, knowledge and transforming the self. (London, Routledge). Messner, M. A. (1990). When bodies are weapons: Masculinity and violence in sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 25, 203-219.
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Messner, M. A. (1992). Power at play: sports and the problem of masculinity (Boston, Beacon Press). Miller, T. (1998). Scouting for boys: Sport looks at men. In D. Rowe & G. Lawrence (Eds.), Tourism, leisure, sport: Critical perspectives (pp. 194•203). Rydalmere, AUS: Hodder Education. Parker, A. (1996). The construction of masculinity within boys’ physical education. Gender and Education, 8(2), 141-157. Phillips, J. (1996). A man’s country? The image of the pakeha male: A history (2nd Ed.). Auckland: Penguin Books. Pringle, R. (2003). Doing the damage? An examination of masculinities and men’s rugby experiences of pain, fear and pleasure. Unpublished doctoral dissertation: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Pringle, R. (in press). ‘No rugby - no fear’: Collective stories, masculinities and transformative possibilities in schools. Sport, Education and Society. Pringle, R. & Markula, P. (2005). No pain is sane after all: A Foucauldian analysis of masculinities and men’s rugby experiences. Sociology of Sport Journal, 22(4), 472-497. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Press. Skelton, C. (1996). Learning to be ‘tough’: the fostering of maleness in one primary school. Gender and Education, 8(2), 185-197. Skelton, C. (2000). ‘A passion for football’: Dominant masculinities and primary schooling. Sport, Education and Society, 5(1), 5-18. Sparkes, A. C. (1994). Life histories and the issue of voice: Reflections on an emerging relationship, Qualitative Studies in Education, 7(2), 165-183. White, M. (1994). Interview by: Michael White and the narrative perspective in therapy. By D. Bubenzer, J. West, & S. Boughner. The Family Journal: Counselling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 2(1), 71-83. Weber, M. (1964). The theory of social and economic organization (Trans A. M. Henderson & T. Parsons). New York, NY: Free Press of Glencoe.
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Wright, J. (1999). Changing gendered practices in physical education: Working with teachers, European Physical Education Review, 5(3), 181-197. Wright, J. (2000). Gender reform in physical education: A poststructuralist perspective, Journal of Physical Education New Zealand, 34(1), 15-25. Wright, J., Macdonald, D., & Burrows, L. (2004). Critical inquiry and problem-solving in physical education. (London, Routledge).
i An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Forum on boys’ education: the construction of masculinity in practice-oriented subjects (organised by Richard Light & Wes Imms), University of Sydney, December 16-17, 2004. This version was significantly reworked and constituted a chapter in Markula & Pringle (2006) and another paper in Sport, Education and Society (in press). This current paper stems from a request from Wes Imms to rework the original paper presented to the Forum on boys’ education for this special edition of Journal of Artistic and Creative Education.
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THE FUTURE OF ARTS EDUCATION -
Anna-Lena Østern Åbo Akademi University Professor Anna-Lena Østern is Professor of Didactics in Swedish language, literature and drama at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, guest professor of Drama Education at the University of Vaasa, Finland and visiting professor at Bergen College, Norway. She is a teacher, educator and researcher in the fields of drama, cultural literacy and artistic learning process in arts education. She is coordinator of the Nordic Drama Research group, Drama Boreale. Anna-Lena.Ostern@abo.fi
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A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE
Abstract I want to thank Melbourne University for the honour to be an invited speaker at the Dialogues and Differences symposium. I am happy to be here and I pass on the warmest greetings from the Nordic network in arts education.1 We share many of the visions -and threats -concerning the future of arts education.
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The Alta Stone Story In northern Norway in Alta there is a big stone (‘Storsteinen in Alta‘), on a rock which is about 60 metres square and flat on the top. Only when you are standing on top of the stone are the rich carvings in the stone visible. The carvings are about 9000 years old, and according to Jon Nygaard (1998), a Norwegian theatre science researcher, these carvings are the directions for the play leader, the shaman, regarding some kind of ritual performance. Nygaard suggests that the Alta stone is one of the oldest theatre stages in the Arctic zone. Over a period of about 4000-5000 years this was a place for ritual performances. The stone is situated in the landscape so that different lines naturally meet, and long ago the sea and the land met here. It could have been that this was the spot where the sun first rose above the surface of the sea after the long dark period during the winter. The shamanistic rite may have been to call the sun back after the winter. At some distance from the main stone a small stone for contemplation is situated; between them are two stones placed to form a narrow passage for the shaman. If the shaman did not pass through the narrow, dangerous passage, or if he died for some other reason, it was absolutely necessary to maintain the rite; the knowledge must survive. That’s why the carvings can be interpreted as instructions for the next shaman. Nygaard calls this the very first theatre. The proto•theatre shows the ecological balancing act between humans and nature where the Arctic people lived. The theatre was an expression of Arctic culture and identity. Even today the ritual performances of Arctic people show traces from the time when the theatre was conceived as a total tool for insight and communication in the society. Nygaard has found similar stones in North America, where Indians have ritual places. He thinks it is even probable that similar or parallel sites might be found in Australia. There might be thematic similarities. At the time of the shamans the theatre played a more important role in the life of the society than ever in later ages; it was considered a necessity for survival. Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA), the Arts, Culture and Education Network 1
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What is there left today of the special importance of theatre, of arts? Jon Nygaard (2005) might suggest it is the sense of presence. The Shaman performed the rite to bring the sun back after the dark period during the winter. First came theatre, then came religion, and then came technology, argues Nygaard. When religion came, the shamans were banned and burned with their drums. When technology entered the scene, people learned that the sun comes back, regardless of what people do or don’t do. Nils Braanaas from Norway in the 70s outlined the features of drama education history and theory in the Nordic Countries. In Children, youth and theatre from Ancient Greece till today2 (2001) he writes that the periods when theatre has had a vital influence on education have been when theatre was part of a meaningful project closely connected to religion. What is left of the heightened state of emotion and presence in ritual theatre? Can we achieve this today – without the beliefs connected to the shaman’s world view? What is the mission of arts education today and what are the prospects for the future? Today I will address a few issues which are considered central from a European, and especially a Nordic, perspective on arts education. The main points of my lecture are my ideas about arts education as connecting not competing, supporting integration of thoughts, feelings and reflection, arts for all, the necessity of artistic competence and the skills as well as in the pedagogy of the teacher. I will include a short report from a contemporary Swedish project Culture and school and from a Finnish project Drama, theatre and identity-forming education. The second example draws attention to the notion of otherness and cultural rights from an inclusive perspective. The second part of my lecture looks back to some aspects of arts educational history through a consideration of the ideas of the Czech teacher Jan Amos Comenius from 1650, along with my construction of a tree metaphor for arts education. In the third part of my lecture I ask you to join me in the contemporary attempts to find a place for arts education within the European Community – considering the UNESCO Road Map and the Arts-in-Education Approach. My final section, the fourth, introduces the idea of us forming the future by what we are doing now. I especially address volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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the notion of ‘Bildung’ – how a technocultural character-forming takes place in the interface between young people and information technology. My final words will suggest that social constructivism is not enough, we need a more thoughtful approach to transformative learning, an approach including awe and wonder beyond the socially constructed.
Cultural literacy through aesthetic learning processes I will argue for the importance of an aesthetic perspective on learning processes in school and in teacher education. I consider cultural literacy as one important goal for school in late modernity. If aesthetic learning processes can be a dimension within teaching different subjects you need a teacher education where the students learn what it takes to teach aesthetically. This means that the art form you are working in gives you the rules and the frames for the work. Teaching is connected to meaning-making learning processes. Art is connected with skill and for a teacher to take the opportunity to integrate ‘art as method’ this demands that he or she is capable of handling the dramaturgy of the classroom and can challenge aesthetic learning processes to take place. An aesthetic or artistic learning process is characterised by learning where the individual’s relationship to something is changed, a new perspective on reality is opened. One task for school is to provide children with images of a future worth living in. What this looks like is uncertain. A sustainable development culturally, ecologically, socially and economically is part of the images of the future. A notion of citizenship (as for instance described by Helen Nicholson, 2005) is part of a culturally sustainable development that considers preservation as well as shaping of new cultural expressions. In the Nordic countries informal learning arenas are discussed as important parts of young people’s learning. The fascination of the international youth culture challenges school as a learning arena, because the virtual world is a qualified supplier of 2
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knowledge as well as fascination. If children and young people learn about 80-85% of what they learn outside school – what is the value of the learning in schools, and what should be focused on? The cultural construction of reality in arts education has learning as its focus; in many ways work in an art form will teach human beings how to live their lives. Susan Wright (2003:303) writes about the cultural construction of reality in the following way: Artistic expression, in a modest or grand way, communicates and shapes our thoughts, perceptions and feelings. It helps us represent our experiences of life, and to develop, strengthen and transform our beliefs and values. Hence, the arts not only reveal cultural heritage, they are also a means by which the culture is defined and evaluated. Today young people learn about aesthetics in their spare-time culture. This culture is to a large extent a hybrid, a performative culture with cross-over back and forth from drama to visual art, dance and music. This blurring of art forms often happens in a sophisticated and developed way. Young people today have a competence which has an educational potential. Their literacy is multimodal (Kress, 2003) and their character formation is taking place in an interface where humans and machines (digital media) interact in a symbiosis. Aesthetic means are used to attract young people’s interest and the type of fascination supplied by dramatised performances has a strong appeal to a need for emotional experiences; this kind of market aesthetics has a value foundation that is rarely in accordance with the value foundation of school. In Finland there is a drift back to basics and measurable achievements. What kind of learning should be supported in school? How can teachers and pupils work in school in order to provide the adults of tomorrow with the learning needed in order to be active in their own lives and in society in a constructive way? Anthony Giddens (1991) writes about the ontological uncertainty that young people experience, when the values and the places where they belong are not there for them anymore. Thomas Ziehe (1985) writes about the importance of aesthetic education, where young people can develop their self reflexivity and find and explore
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otherness in a good enough way. Character formation today includes the notion of otherness. To take in otherness in thoughts, cultures and in oneself has long been part of the changes of perspectives undertaken when building fictional worlds. Kirsten Drotner (2004:16-17) writes that drama education has been developed in relation to two discursive and educational fields of practice: ‘namely the cultural field, where drama belongs, and the pedagogical field, where education belongs’. She suggests a dialogue scenario for drama education in the future. This scenario encompasses both the cultural and the pedagogical dimensions, but crucial is that drama education builds upon the complexity of the aesthetic processes themselves. Drotner thus suggests that drama can be equally an arts subject, a cultural subject, and support learning processes in other subjects. She links this thought strongly to the notion of understanding otherness, considering the necessity for young people today to take in the perspectives of foreign cultures and people. In my (2004) research a ‘dromena tree’ metaphor has been developed to serve as theoretical description of the role of storytelling in dramatic modes using different dramaturgies. The tree metaphor also can be considered a theoretical description of what drama education is. In the tree metaphor the historical perspective is visualised in the roots and the stem. The human drive to survive shapes community with structure, symbols and artefacts, disobedience, fantasy and sexuality. The ‘dromena’, or performance cult, is a place for storytelling in what can be traced as the beginning of dramatic expression. The Greek word thea = to see can later on be found in theatre as well as in theory. From the dromena have developed the theatrical forms we recognise: tragedy and comedy, scripted theatre and non scripted theatre. The way the story is told can be described through four different dramaturgical models: dramatic, epic, simultaneous and metafictive: (Szatkowski & Kjølner 1989). The dramatic dramaturgy is used in classical drama, and in most films of today. In drama education those kinds of living-through, experiential role-play with emotional engagement and a defined climax can be seen as using the dramatic dramaturgy model. The epic dramaturgy has montage as its basic form, and contains the narrator position -like in Brecht’s theatre. There are layers of fiction (concrete, abstract, thematic, metaphoric) with
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symbols pointing into the same direction. In for instance Dorothy Heathcote’s drama form epic dramaturgy can find its place as well as in the later developments of process drama. This epic dramaturgy contains various distancing elements.3 The simultaneous dramaturgy builds upon the notion of fictional layers and the montage of them. In much performance you can see the collage form with symbols simultaneously pointing at different fictional layers, and in different directions – concerning possible meaning potentials. The metafictive dramaturgy used in post modern performance and theatre is very close to youth culture’s forms of expression, for instance in music videos. The metafictive dramaturgy has a certain irony and points at itself. It is sometimes highly interactive in giving the audience the possibility of choosing which story is to be continued. Lars von Trier in the dogma films for instance uses handheld camera and long shots in order to give another voice to the film. In performance using video recordings of the audience, or close ups from the players you also have constant comment on the fiction being performed right now. The simultaneous and metafictive dramaturgies both occur in young people’s drama as well as in the expressions of the youth leisure culture they are a part of. The outcomes of the applications of the dramaturgies are in the crown of the tree: described as existence and meaning, containing cultural learning and empowerment. With this metaphor in mind I will give a few examples of arts education projects in the Nordic countries today. I will then make a juxtaposition looking backwards at a European endeavour from Johan Amos Comenius’ time.
Stig Eriksson’s (2004) research in progress has Distancing as its theme. He studies Brecht’s Lehrstücke and their didactics, in order to compare the distancing elements here with Heathcote’s didactics in ‘Man in a mess’. 3
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A Swedish project: School and culture In the Swedish research project Culture and school, Lena AulinGråhamn, Magnus Persson and Jan Thavenius (2004) proposes radical aesthetics as an alternative to the modest aesthetics found in schools of today. A modest aesthetics is discipline-based, where the art subject in question has a few lessons in a space of its own. Modest aesthetics is marginalised, because it fights for a place of its own instead of demanding to be a fundamental principle in all teaching. It is restricted in terms of being active and creative regarding new art forms and aesthetics -uninterested in the content and thus in the aesthetic form as part of meaning-making. Radical aesthetics is radical in the sense that it in a fundamental way uses the possibilities of aesthetics to create meaning, qualify the learning and develop schooling. The project suggests art as cross-curricular in all subjects and projects. The researchers argue that school today has a shortage of meaning for the pupils. By introducing arts as method the meaning project can be focused. Art welcomes questions, it embraces the notyet-ready, it promotes a seeking and open attitude and it appreciates divergent thinking and personal solutions. The kind of negotiations necessary in collective productions could introduce school as an arena for democratic dialogues about what kind of society young people wants for themselves tomorrow. They write: …personal/individual processes are kept together with social/ collective, the popular-cultural is kept together with established art forms, natural science perspectives are kept together with linguistic, aesthetic and cultural historical perspectives and so on. If teachers shall be able to keep all pupils’ learning processes in this way it is demanded that teacher education offers rich experiences of how aesthetic practices can be staged and how aesthetic perspectives on learning processes in all the school curriculum subjects and fields of knowledge can be introduced. The students must be able to use their own and other people’s experiences, reflect upon them, and critically and creatively relate themselves to the theories which exist concerning knowledge, culture and aesthetics. Then they might as teachers, (and already as students), stage aesthetic practices and qualified learning processes in school, contribute to school
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development and participate in developing the field as a whole. (Aulin-Gråhamn & Thavenius, 2003:16, my translation from Swedish)
A Finnish example: Drama and theatre and identity-forming education Over three academic years (2002-2005) a drama and theatre as arts education project was carried out with 14 participating schools, located within the Finland-Swedish school system. At the beginning of the project the pupils were about 10-11 years old, which in Finland means grade 4. At the end of the project in April 2005 they were in grade 6 and 12-14 years old. The idea of the project was to support the pupils’ development in arts education, in language arts and performing skills. Every participating group had made an agreement that they would work within this program at least two hours weekly during the three years. The first year was devoted to storytelling, oral and written. The second year was focused on physical theatre and mime. The third year was focused on production, writing a play, rehearsing it and performing it. About 300 of the participating children met at a ‘Theatre party’ (‘Teaterkalaset’, a children’s and youth theatre festival) held in Tampere one weekend in April 2005. There the groups from different schools performed for each other, participated in drama and theatre workshops and carried out some final evaluation tasks regarding the impact of the project from the participants’ point of view (the pupils and the teachers). The project was a joint venture with The Swedish Polytechnic’s Program for Performing Arts in Vaasa as the leading partner, along with The Faculty of Education at Åbo Akademi University and The Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Every year there were one or two 2 day courses, where the teachers involved learnt about the ideas in the project and gained some basic skills in the focused area for the year in question. The teachers kept contact with a coordinator of the project. The students from the performing arts program had some of their practice done with the groups participating in the project. One of the participating schools was a school for visually impaired children. I will in this presentation focus on the final production of a small group of four girls. The girls participated in the project for volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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all three years. Their teacher had a Masters in Special Education as well as a specialisation in Drama Education and another in Physical Education. She worked extensively with the four girls during these years. She introduced drama as part of the school curriculum, which was new for this school. The second year she worked with a teacher assistant, one of the students from the Performing Arts Program at the Polytechnic. This assistant also participated in the final event. All four girls had been born blind and some also had other difficulties. This group was picked out to open the festival in Tampere with their performance The battle between the four elements. This performance raises a question about what kind of meaningmaking processes can be identified during this project. I ask a set of exploratory questions: What kind of aesthetic thinking is informing this project? The ideas of cultural rights and inclusion are quite obvious, but what kind of aesthetic-artistic experience is at stake when describing the participants’ discourse, the teachers’ discourse versus the discourse created through the performance, for a live audience of pre-adolescent sighted children? It was confusing and disturbing to watch the first minutes of the performance: the chaotic bodies, the restricted movements, the staccato tempo, the intervals spent seeking, the meta-comments produced by taps with hands on chairs, adjusting to the space; confusion of direction, the tendency to fall into introversion, the stepping out of role and laughing with the audience, the happiness and relief when it was all over. But something was happening to me during the process of watching. It definitely made a familiar event strange, defamiliarises it (as in Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenjie). Here are some of its basic features. The children have produced a performance, 15 minutes long, concerning one of the great conflict themes of humanity: human against human or here nature against nature. Their structure is quite clear: Scene 1: Introducing the four elements, introducing the conflict: who’s the strongest?
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Scene 2: More competition, giving each other good or bad credits for their dance. Scene 3: Escalating conflict, they show how they can destroy each other. Scene 4: Desires and dreams, what each element wants. Scene 5: Resolution: together can we make this happen. Together we are strong. They reveal a dramaturgical thinking. They elaborate form clearly: using space in various ways, levels, body parts, form lines, connections, exaggerating their blindness. If I revisit aesthetic thinking in the light of the apparent confusion, I am forced to ask: who has made the rules for aesthetics such as being symmetrical, with even rhythm, and fast? In post-modern performance and in radical art you can find this same kind of unfamiliar, touching beauty. You can fill out the gaps with your empathy, with your interpretations of the intentions, the moments of fulfilment. I was able to identify different discourses (a teacher discourse, a performer discourse and an audience discourse), each one of them pointing in the same direction: this performance is the result of a transgressive, transformative arts education process. The audience must abandon their presumptions about what is aesthetic and artistic, revisit them and look at a strange, unfamiliar beauty, which forms new frames of references for everyone involved.
A Norwegian project with artists in Schools: The Cultural Rucksack In Norway for several years already the state has been supporting groups of artists giving performances and workshops in schools. It is called Den kulturelle ryggsekken, or Den kulturelle nistepakken – referring to two national metaphors, the back-pack and the piece of bread and butter children take with them to school. The Norwegian Inclusive Dance Company4 has for instance produced two dance theatre performances for this cultural rucksack, for children aged 4-8 volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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years old. One performance Dunderklumpen (A troll) is a gentle story about getting friends. The other one Fisk (Fish) is a fantasy about the creatures living in the sea. This later was performed outdoors by the sea-shore. The idea is that these performances can be connected to workshops with the children, thus giving them a possibility of enjoying dance as an art form as well as of working in the art form with skilled teacher-artists.
European arts education: then, now and in the future The Czech education philosopher Jan Amos Comenius5 in the 1650s (when he worked as headmaster of a school in Sárospatak in Hungary) suggested that school should be a joyful place where children learnt through play. In his program leaflet Scholae Panssophicae (1650) he demanded four theatre plays every year in school. His speciality was educational theatre, and in Scola ludus (c.1650/1974) he delineated all the knowledge of his time through eight plays, which the children performed throughout the school. His famous statements include: • The one who wants to change what is happening on the stage of the world, firstly must educate man. • The future sits at the school bench. What they play today becomes serious tomorrow. (p.25) • Our life is a play, the world a theatre, and school must be a preludium to life (p.25) • Schola ludus, the ludic, playful element Comenius writes about how play, a free, creative and orderly activity, is natural for the human being, is authentically human, and is social: Play/acting reinforces a stronger life than any other. All children learn remains more strongly in their minds when they act themselves and especially when they say and perform for many other people, on the stage; and they learn better together with others than they do alone. (p.15) Comenius is considered one of the most influential European reform 4
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pedagogues, and his notion of the ludic element has been reinforced by many later educational philosophers. The percentage of obligatory arts teaching hours for 12-14 year olds in European countries and the US shows large variation. The range is from 3% of total teaching time in Turkey and in Belgium to as much as 14% in Spain, with the average being 9% (excluding the use of arts within physical education and reading). Finland is one of the countries in Europe with the lowest amount of time for arts education for 12-14-year old (6%), ranking lower than the US (7%) In a 2001 study Finnish arts education researcher Arja Puurula (2001:17): distinguishes between three prevailing arts education traditions in Europe: 1. The German and Anglo-Saxon tradition 2. The Latin tradition 3. The former Soviet tradition The German and Anglo-Saxon tradition uses a broad definition of arts subjects. Textile design, handicrafts, needlework, woodwork, creative textiles, technology, drama and dance are included in the arts education curriculum, and of course music and visual art. The subjects are taught separately. The Latin tradition associates arts education with the fine arts comprising just one or two subjects. The former Soviet tradition describes arts education as music and visual arts; special schools cater for gifted children. None of these traditions bodes well for the future, and an important question concerning the future of arts education is what kind of teacher education is needed for the more integrated arts education needed in the future. There are some vital networks working to promote arts education. Here are a few of the attempts to place arts education on the political and educational agenda. There have been conferences like A must or a•muse – conference results. Arts and Culture in education: Policy and practice in Europe (2002). In Finland there is a conference report from the University of Oulu: Let’s do it together. The future of multidisciplinary arts education (Hyvönen & Lindfors, 2001). There
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exists a Nordic network Arts, Culture and Education, which meets annually in order to present recent research regarding arts education. UNESCO has organised quite a few conferences on arts, for instance the series that concluded in the provisional Road map, presented at the 1st World Congress on Arts Education, March 2006 in Lisbon. Ken Robinson has been most influential through the reports he has written: Culture, creativity and the Young, Arts Education in Europe: a survey (1997), and All our futures: creativity, Culture & Education (2001). This last report presents a strategy for arts education in its widest sense. Creativity is a central concept, not only present in the arts but also fundamental to the advances in science, mathematics and technology, in politics, in business and all areas of everyday life. The four challenges for education in the future, according to Robinson, are: economical, technological, social, and personal. In the future, he argues, education will be a shared enterprise, local artists will be used as visitors, local enterprises support arts education. The report combines the emotional and humanist theory of arts education with the national economy based view – and an egalitarian view. Elsewhere, (1997:30), he writes that arts do make significant, distinctive, and in some respects unique contributions to learning processes. Art makes comparably important contributions to intellectual development. Some of his main points regarding the influence arts can have can be summed up as follows. Science and arts are not opposite but complementary to each other. The arts in education support development of skills: emotional, cultural, moral, aesthetic, creative, physical and perceptual development, personal and social development. Arts, Robinson writes, are not a separate area of a community’s life; they are a pervasive dimension of it. If language is the heart of cultural identity, it tends to beat most quickly in its literary and poetic traditions. Furthermore he states that religious and moral values are most deeply expressed in music, art and dance; that history, as lived experience of other lives, is often best evoked through music, art and poetry of the day which it was given contemporary form and meaning, (33). Arts education (ie making, and learning about the arts) has central roles to play in cultural education, helping children understand cultural diversity, acknowledging cultural relativity,
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helping them to understand the evolutionary nature of culture and the process of cultural change. Robinson’s survey and conclusions have been taken into account when planning new curriculum frameworks, for instance in Finland. An essential theme for the future is the extent to which school curricula can respond to the new horizons in the arts beyond the school gates. There are several attempts to implement arts educational thinking instrumentally, like UNESCO’s arts-in-education approach (AiE): AiE is a pedagogical approach, which uses art as a tool in teaching. This approach does not simply aim to bring art subjects into curricula (arts education) and it is not about teaching art, although artistic skills and art appreciation are also learned in the process. The AiE approach aims to provide students with knowledge and skills in a range of subject areas (such as mathematics, science and heritage education) and, more significantly, it aims to also stimulate cognitive development and to encourage innovative and creative thinking. (UNESCO 2006) There is a general agreement about the importance of arts education. There is no clear map however for how to implement this knowledge. There are constant threats that arts education may become even more marginalised. The networks in the field are fairly strong.
Artistic and transformative learning in drama In order to try to take a step deeper into what an artistic learning process might look like, I will report from the field of drama education. Artistic learning processes generate a knowledge which is deeply rooted in the sensuous, a knowledge of the body where feelings and thinking are integrated in a holistic understanding. That’s why it is important that the teacher is able to stage aesthetic learning processes. The aesthetic response implies for the student an active and conscious experimentation with form in order to generate meaning. Through conscious work in the art form of drama the teacher is able to challenge the student to give an active aesthetic response and the students might overcome the need to keep total ownership of their productive response and experience the satisfaction of functioning creatively both as an individual and as a volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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member of a group. The activity of constructing fiction within a dramatic genre gives an aesthetic frame (the ’rules’ of process drama in this case and an aesthetic distance through work with characters who are fictive constructions), which enables the student to go very close and deep in the exploration of the theme. Through the dialogue about different types of solutions to the dramatic tasks, the students express their understanding and, simultaneously, the negotiation of and experience of different personal solutions to the task develops their understanding. The introduction of meta-language when consciously experimenting with form gives the students the possibility of shifting between analytic reflection and emotional experience. Cinematic techniques such as freeze, still picture, slow motion, montage, and simplification incorporate the media literacy competence of the students, a literacy they have gained in the youth culture outside the formal learning arena at school. The teacher also might explain the serious playfulness as a necessary pre-requisite for aesthetic doubling: you have to devote yourself to the construction of the fiction, you make it conditionally (not for real, ‘for play’ – you bracket the demands of ‘reality’ for a certain amount of time and then you leave it) and you are not obliged to do anything else than to obey the rules of the play. The learning potential of drama is in the aesthetic doubling of role, place, time – and plot. In drama the use of symbolic representation is at the core of the learning potential of the art form. Through the use of powerful signs a significant dramatic action can be constructed. Pamela Bowell and Brian Heap point out that: Once the drama teacher begins to understand that she has symbolic, iconic and expressive systems of representation at her disposal she can begin to fulfil the requirements of the drama more efficiently by plugging in to the most appropriate signing system. (2001:72) Thus a space will be created for what John Dewey (1935) called transformative artistic learning processes. His theory is often referred to as the transformative aesthetic theory (placed beside the expressive and the mimetic aesthetic theories). An artistic learning process can be described as one where the learner
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through a transformative process creates new relationships of meaning. The person gets a new perspective on reality, him-or herself, other people, nature, on life in general. The Finnish researcher Inkeri Sava writes about artistic learning processes as transformative, and her main point is that the learning person through these transformative processes forms a new inner reality. The concept of transformation is according to Sava thought of as a mental process of change within the person concerning interpretation and meaning making. (1) Every process starts in some immediate sensuous experiences (memories, materials, emotional experiences), which are transformed into reflection. (2) The impulse is reflected upon individually and in the group – and elaborated, thus giving place for new transformation. (3) The elaboration takes place in two ways: forming concepts metaphorically in the art form and forming concepts theoretically (meta language). (4) Further work will aim at a developed artistic action through several phases of transformations. (5) These will be carried out in a certain chosen mode (in our case theatre/drama) using different signs and artefacts. This is a meaning-seeking and meaning-producing action which will lead to increased knowledge about and change in one’s relationship to oneself, other people, nature or society. A change in the understanding, an insight about relationships, a new structure in one’s knowledge. This change will lead to new artistic learning processes. (Sava, 1993:15.) In order to be able to conduct artistic learning processes the drama teacher needs to know her craft, need to know the main characteristics of a drama poetics. Janek Szatkowski and Niels Lehman (1997) have outlined the key features of a drama poetics using the concept ‘pragmatic dualism’. Their point of departure is that there is a difference between being in the fiction and analysing the fiction. The call the analysis phase ‘logos’ and other experiences like being in fiction, emotional experiences and memories ‘mythos’. Their
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starting point thus on one hand is literary theory and on the other the piece of art. In a drama group the participants reflecting upon the drama are in logos, but they are making excursions to mythos when remembering. In the aesthetic action during drama sessions or performances the players are in mythos, but make excursions to logos when planning the development of the role. The individual moves in between these two modes, which implies moving in a dynamic space, between different cognitive levels. According to Szatkowski (2001, interview) this kind of dramaturgical thinking is very important: To me it is important to use the art form to offer our participants the chance to create moments of precious significance. Precious because they are based on senses, and significant because they produce important differences that makes you wonder and reflect. To provide them with tools to do this seems to me to be what the drama teacher should be able to do. An artistic learning process in drama is made possible because the participants get the chance to be co-writers of the drama they construct. The pragmatic dualism might offer the corner stones of a poetic teaching, a space in-between where children and young learners can participate. Sava’s cognitively oriented model identifies those elements absolutely necessary to give the artistic expressions of oneself and others an interpretation, a meaning. Then aesthetic and ethic are quite close to each other, and merge, because the developed awareness and the increased insight gives an ability to take an ethical responsibility for oneself, others and nature: ‘The aesthetic evaluation and the aesthetic are in a close internal relation; they mean that you surrender to life and they are active life supporting forms of human activity’. (61, my translation). Sava underlines that artistic learning processes contribute to developing mental models at least in two ways: metaphorically through the language of arts and verbally through conceptualisation. The change in artistic learning process makes possible what she calls ‘deeply spiritual human insight’ and she mentions a change of perspective regarding some aspect of human life, life in society and thought. In conclusion I want to come back to where I started, but now
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pointing at the future, and I suggest, paraphrasing Michael Lerner (2000), that we should let awe and wonder be the basis of education. This spiritual learning or learning with mindfulness urges the teacher to give the pupils/students possibilities to be present here and now in an attentive way, to be active and reflective. In Australia the Aboriginal dreamtime spirituality perceives human beings as being connected to the earth and to other human beings. This is also characteristic of an arts education with sustainable development and ecological citizenship in focus. Lerner (2000) writes about spiritual education and mindfulness, that both the teacher and learner in the classroom take from the situation an organic connection with life itself; a mind that sees things freshly as if for the first time; compassion for all beings including oneself; a more authentic way of encountering the world; and joy. The students see themselves as connected to others. In All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture & Education Robinson (2000:14) gives five priorities in order to enhance the overall quality of education: the need to overcome economic and social disadvantages, the creation of greater fairness within the education system, the encouragement of aspiration, economic competitiveness and unlocking the potential of each individual. When Walter Ong (1988) wrote his famous text on how the shift from an oral cultural tradition to a written culture changed the ways people’s minds worked, he could not have anticipated the rapid change in the relationship between humanity and machine which has happened during the last 20 years. Children and young people today live in a highly aestheticised world. Aesthetics are not only seen as superficial phenomenon of youth culture. Aesthetics are the foundation of culture, the form the thinking basically has (See Welsch, 1997). Today the place of learning thus can be described as an interface, where young people form their identities in a symbiotic relationship to the mobile and the internet. The communication is fast, it is often very poetic, it is full of accessible knowledge, and creative expressions. The virtual, fictive world is very real for young people today, and their artistic competence is developed in the interface, connected to the technology of the virtual age. They are ‘Cyborgs’ as Lars Løvlie (2003:348) calls them, and he writes that volume 1 • number 2 ISSN 1832 0465 © University of Melbourne
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young people today form their characters in the interface where their self and the culture meet. This is really a main challenge for education today. The conclusion from a Nordic perspective is: let arts be the basis of education, like a thread bringing awe and wonder into the teaching and learning in and out of school.
References Aulin-Gråhamn, L., Persson, M. & Thavenius, J. (2004). Skolan och den radikala estetiken. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Bowell, P. & Heap, B. (2001). Planning process drama. London: David Fulton. Braanaas, N. (2001). Barn, ungdom og teater fra antikken til det nittende århundrede. Trondheim: Tapir. Courtney, R. (1974). Play, Drama and Thought: The Intellectual Background to Dramatic Education. New York: Drama Book Specialists. 3rd ed. Dewey, J. (1934/1980) Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Books. Donelan, K. (2004). ‘Overlapping spheres’ and ‘blurred spaces’: mapping cultural interactions in drama and theatre with young people. Nadie Journal 28 (1). Drotner, K. (2004). Formation of Otherness: Handling the complexity of late modernity. In A-L. Østern (Ed.). Dramatic Cultures. NERA symposium in Reykjavik 2004. Report No 10 from the Faculty of Education. Vasa: Åbo Akademi University. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Korhonen, P. & Østern, A-L. (toim). (2001). Katarsis. Draama, teatteri ja kasvatus. Jyväskylä: Atena kustannus. Lerner, M. (2000). Quoted from E. O’Sullivan, A. Morrell, M. A. O’Connor (2001) Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning. Essays on Theory and Praxis. New York: Palgrave. Nygaard, J. (1998).Teater som uttrykk for kultur og identitet hos arktiske kulturfolk. Spillerom Nr 1-4. Nygaard, J (2005). The origins of theatre. Lecture given at Åbo Akademi
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University, 21.10.05. Ong, W. (1988). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: Methuen. First published in 1982. Puurula, A. (2001). Arts education in Future – some European scenarios and trends compared. In L. Hyvönen & E. Lindfors (eds.) Tehhään yhessä! Taide-ja taitokasvatuksen tulevaisuus. Let’s do it together! The future of multidisciplinary arts education. Oulu: The Faculty of Education, University of Oulu. Robinson, K. (2001). All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture & Education. Department for Education and Employment, England. Robinson, K. (1997). Culture, Creativity and the Young. Arts education in Europe: a Survey. Council of Europe. Sava, I. (1993). Taiteellinen oppimisprosessi. In I. Porna & P.Väyrynen: Taiteen perusopetuksen käsikirja. Helsinki: Kunnallisliitto. Løvlie, L. (2003) Teknokulturell danning. In R. Slagstad, O.Korsgaard, L. Løvlie (Eds.) Dannelsens forvandlinger. Oslo: Pax. Comenius, J. (c.1650) Schola ludus – skulen, eit spel. Scener frå live tog skuleteaterspeli til Comenius, tilrettelagt for framsyning av Milada. Suttung. (1974). Szatkowski, J.(1989). Dramaturgiske modeller. Om dramaturgisk tekstanalyse. In E.Exe Christoffersen, T. Kjølner & J. Szatkowski, Dramaturgisk analyse. En antologi. Århus University: Department of dramaturgy, pp.9-90. Szatkowski, J. (2001). Interview with a Nordic drama researcher, made by Anna-Lena Østern. Szatkowski, J. & Lehman, N. (1997). Pragmatic dualism – outlining a poetics for drama education. Lecture given at a Nordic Research design Course at Trondheim University, 7th March 1997. UNESCO (2006) Arts-in-education. http://www.unescobkk.org/index.php?id=1057 Retrieved 14.4.06). Welsch, W. (1997). Undoing Aesthetics. London: Sage.
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Wright, S. (2003). Arts, young children, and learning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Ziehe, T. (1985). Ambivalenser og mangfoldighed. Köbenhavn: Politisk revy. Østern, A-L.(2001).Teatterin merkitys kautta aikojen lasten ja nuorten näkökulmasta. In P. Korhonen & A-L. Østern (Eds.) Katarsis – drama, teatteri ja kasvatus, Jyväskylä: Atena. Østern, A-L. (Ed.). (2004). Dramatic Cultures. NERA symposium in Reykjavik 2004. Report No 10 from the Faculty of Education. Vasa:Åbo Akademi University.
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jace | volume 4 | number 1 | 2010