ON-LINE ISSUES

V.3 N.1, October 1995

A Dramatic Conception of Curriculum: Artistic, Emancipated and Feminist Possibilities Through the Emotional

by Renee Norman

Department of Language Education
University of British Columbia

1. In this paper I argue for a conception of curriculum that has the emotional at its heart, a curriculum drawn from the domains of arts education, critical pedagogy, and feminist theory; a curriculum conceived phenomenologically and mythico-poetically; a curriculum that acknowledges both lived experience and the tentativeness of the curriculum text; a curriculum that through drama education attempts to put into practice these various strands. Through a discussion of some of the theories of phenomenology, reconstructionist thought, post-structural feminism, the aesthetic experience, and drama education, I attempt to weave together the various strands that form a tentative curriculum web. By interrupting my text with stories that illuminate my own drama education practice and with poetry that was written during this particular study of curriculum, I attempt to de/construct my text with curricular considerations and feminist philosophizing. I attempt to elaborate upon my own lived experience in the classroom as a teacher and parent. I present both a theoretical base for this conception of curriculum and a means to put theory into practice. There are several voices in this paper: my scholarly and academic voice which appears in one font and which is at times mythico-poetic, at times more traditionally academic and theoretical; the voices of other writers and theorists whose texts form the intertext of my scholarly words, and which appear in a second font; the voices of myself as a poet and teller of stories, and which appear in a third font. The paper could be read by following each font singly through to its conclusion, or by allowing for the interruptions. Always present are the silent voices of all the women who have contributed to and shaped curriculum, but who never appear on any pages. Their voices appear between the lines, between the spaces of all these words, in a fourth font, the invisible font of absence.

   Introduction: Emotional Earth-dwelling

2. Like Ted Aoki (1991), I am an earth-dweller. I seek the ground beneath my feet, the smell of fresh soil when it is damp, put out the tip of my tongue to catch a drop or two of rainwater before it falls upon the earth and is lovingly absorbed. I also hear and see the way the horizon extends far beyond where I dwell, see and hear the distant songs I imagine are sung beyond that horizon.

3. As I am an earth-dweller, I live among other earth dwellers, and I feel that dwelling, feel that living. I live and feel and know through my emotions as well as my intellect, my heart as well as my head, through affect as well as cognition, my senses as well as my mind, through artistic as well as scientific modes of knowledge. I know that the rainwater which dampens the earth I live upon is caused by water that is condensed from the aqueous vapour in the atmosphere and falls in drops from the sky to the earth, but it is the taste of this rainwater upon my tongue and my hair dripping in my eyes and the poetic words I attempt to inscribe which give the factual knowledge life and depth and feeling. Emotion has left its trace upon my learning, and when I have felt its absence in my life, bereft, I have searched for it anew.

   I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (cited in Ratcliffe, 1993, p. 400).

   
   
        an educated person
   
        reads writes feels
   
        passion
   
        intensely
   
        a fire within
   
        flames burn hotbright
   
        spewspill scorching others
   
        fire felt
   
        not always seen
   
   
   
        there is humility here
   
        more questions to be asked
   
        interrogate all those answers
   
        touch the fire
   
   
   
        strength overrides
   
                 passion
   
        a length of steel
   
        upright
   
        hard to bend
   
        glinting
   
        the shine mesmerizes me
   
        a rod strikes the ground
   
                        with precision
   
                                decision
   
                                derision
   
        put out that fire
   
   
   
        feeling tempered by fact
   
        prove it
   
        it can't be true
   
        firm course ahead
   
        resolve that uncertainty
   
        take the path
   
        use the map
   
        enter the room
   
        use the map
   
        begin the journey
   
        use the map
   
        check that course
   
        who's lost along the way?
   
        add the changes
   
        to the map
   
        record that journey
   
        for the next course
   
        the next procedure
   
        walk around the fire
   
   
   
        the fire still burns
   
        hotbright
   
        touch the fire

4. Like Krista Ratcliffe, who argues for "a rhetoric of textual feminism that exposes the emotional which has been relegated in our culture's dominant discourse to what Julia Kristeva calls the 'speech of non-being'" (1993, p. 400), I want to argue for a curriculum that embraces the emotional, that speaks the often unspoken language of the emotions, that validates a way of knowing and seeing that involves the emotions, a seeing that Eisner (1991) names epistemic (p. 68), a seeing with all the senses. I want to argue for an education of the emotions that cultivates productive idiosyncrasy in the art of teaching (Eisner, 1991, p. 79) and learning, no two teachers the same, no two learners the same, no two curricula the same. I want to argue for a curriculum of the emotions that cultivates productive diversity (Eisner, 1991, p. 46) in the art of teaching and learning, a curriculum "derived from the world" (Bolton, 1992, p. 111), a production that is personal, political and aesthetic. I want to argue for a curriculum that not only has a place for the emotional, but places the emotional at the heart of teaching and learning. Such a curriculum can be re/conceptualized from several domains of curriculum and instruction, notably arts education, emancipatory (or liberatory or radical or critical) pedagogy, and feminist theory. And just as Virginia Woolf states that "it is the imagination that brings the severed parts together" (cited in Greene, 1991, p. 117), I shall in my imagination of curriculum attempt to bring these various severed parts of curriculum and instruction together, in order to demonstrate a conception of curriculum that enables us to live our lives through from the start.

   Yesterday the Grade Ones all moved the chairs into a circle when they finished making their mosquito stick puppets, and buzzing around the centre of the chairs, they said: this is a mosquito hive.

   Yesterday Stewart said I should do a drawing, too, like all the rest of them, if I was planning to be Queen Lion in our drama. One after another a child stood up on a chair beside the piano where I was drawing to check my progress. They said: Good work! I like the lion's head. You didn't want to draw the body, eh? Wow! Keep going! You certainly do nice work!

   Yesterday Geoffrey suggested that they bring their journals to drama next time they came, because the meeting we roleplayed was worth writing about.

   Yesterday Colleen said to me in a voice filled with conviction: Of course we don't like the darkness in this jungle, as if to say, what a silly question!

   Yesterday the classroom lights were off. It was like a theatre and you could hear the silence in the room until we all discussed the death of baby owlet in the story. Then Hari whispered: Sorry isn't enough.

   
   

   The Severed Curriculum: Curriculum Unpredictability
   and Artistic Possibility

5. "Curriculum is artifice" states Madeleine Grumet (1978, p. 45). Pinar captures this notion of curriculum as a de/constructed intentionality whose meaning is never fully realized in ways we can expect or can define by calling curriculum a "tissue of lies" (Pinar, 1992, p. 95), a web of tentativeness. Such phenomenological and post-structural considerations of curriculum move it in directions that we cannot always clearly see, in ways we may not be able to predict. One does not have to look at curriculum in just one direction in order to see it, but we may still hope for possibility in curriculum without a reliance on predictability. Curriculum becomes a dream, and as such, a vision somehow of a better world.

   
   
        curriculum is a dream
   
   
   
        I teach dreams
   
        learn them too
   
   
   
        days pass
   
        filled with steps
   
        bringing me closer
   
        closer to the dream
   
        never quite there
   
        always the dream
   
        is in front of me
   
        in the distance
   
        just a thought away
   
   
   
        days pass
   
        filled with plans
   
        filled helping others
   
        see their dreams
   
        like a benevolent pied piper
   
        I play on
   
        wanting them
   
   
        to hear the music
   
        unlike the pied piper
   
        I want the music
   
        to lead them
   
        to dreams
   
        want the caves
   
        that imprison them
   
        empty
   
   
   
        alienated and bereft
   
        we seek the dream
   
        seek the awe
   
        and tasting it
   
        change forever
   
        if curriculum is a dream
   
        I am the dreamer

6. I embrace such a mythico-poetic (Beyer, 1991, p. 202) philosophy of curriculum inquiry, a philosophy that is radically different than a transmissive approach with its rational reliance on scientific empiricism and behavioral objectives which are explicitly stated and standardly measured. Such a consideration of curriculum also moves beyond the stable environmental interaction of a transactional Deweyan approach which envisions a place for social involvement, experience, imagination and growth, all of which are important to a curriculum dream. However, even Dewey's characterization of mind as a verb which implies "process, improvisation, open-endedness and becoming" (Greene, 1986, p. 69) does not conjure for me the necessary ambiguity with which many phenomenologists regard curriculum.

7. A de/constructed phenomenological curriculum seems to hold some elements in common with the humanistic tradition which promotes a more humane and holistic approach to education, specifically, an emphasis on the lived experience and concerns of the individual. I believe this lived experience and these concerns are vital to any curriculum dream. However, a de/constructed view of curriculum also moves beyond the humanistic tradition which is individualistic, but not grounded in any firm social theory (Pinar & Reynolds, 1992).

8. The Utopian dream of curriculum is contextualized by the neo-marxist reconstructionists such as Giroux and Apple (Giroux et al., 1981) who view the social, economic, historical and political divisions within schooling as a reproductive force. This reproductive force can be critiqued and so produce the transformative possibilities which Paulo Freire refers to in his process of conscientization: awareness of the sociocultural reality that shapes our lives--how society makes us as we are--and the awakening as to how we can transform that reality. This critique and possibility add the images of social action as well as personal agency and autonomy to an otherwise individualistic view of transformational curriculum (Freire, 1985; Lather, 1991; Miller & Seller, 1990). These added images provide the colors of hope and optimism and community for the curriculum dream.

9. Recent feminist theory and pedagogy which bring together neo-marxism as well as post-structuralism seen through the lens of gender (Lather, 1991; Luke & Gore, 1992; Martusewicz, 1992) expand the current de/constructed phenomenological curriculum discussion to one which renders visible the female population who have previously been all too silent or neglected in curriculum. Such visibility complicates the curriculum dream with issues of gender as well as some critique of how we actually attempt to transform reality.

   
   
        a feminist curriculum
   
   
   
        all the women
   
        not on the pages
   
        silently there
   
        shaping education
   
   
   
        man acts upon the world as object
   
        man acts upon woman
   
        whose reality is eliminated?
   
   
   
        getting smart means
   
        academic adversary:
   
        geronimo, giroux!
   
        now I've upset you!
   
        straw men
   
        written by straw women
   
        who claim in the last chapter
   
        maybe this voice doesn't ring true
   
        lived experience but--
   
   
   
        impenetrable paragraphs
   
        no spaces between the words
   
        just strings of postmodern neo-marxist
   
        babble
   
        a new kind of baby talk
   
        mothers don't understand
   
   
   
        in flux
   
        only more and more questions
   
        my beliefs
   
        a set body through the years
   
        like a chameleon now
   
        soaking up whatever color comes my way
   
        the white of everything
   
        the black of nothing distinct
   
        me, Renee
   
        a new shade
   
        a different tone
   
        bordered by the white or black
   
   
   
        what color will I be
   
        when I am done?
   
        the colors leaking
   
        the colors dripping
   
        the colors drying
   
        me, Renee
   
        never-ending-spectrum
   
   
   
        getting smart
   
        means painting all those pages
   
        with me

10. All these historical movements in curriculum, all the recent phenomenological trends which move curriculum in currents of philosophic ebb and flow, all the philosophies which underpin and layer the (text)ural, (text)ual qualities of curriculum give both substance and flux to any curriculum dream. How do we pinpoint the possibility in curriculum without relying on the unpredictability, uncertain as the images that form any dream on any particular night can be? How do we envision that better world within what is ultimately a tissue of lies, within a structure that in its artifice is never structurally stable? How do we bring together the severed parts of curriculum in order to return us to the emotional?

11. I believe a curriculum that is centered on arts education, and in particular, on drama education, can bring together emotional as well as liberatory and feminist aspects of pedagogy in a phenomenological manner and form a web of deep meaning within the tentative web of a spidery curriculum text.

    
    
         m(other) of the text
    
    
    
         the blank page
    
         no tabula rasa this
    
         but white space
    
         Monique Wittig's workshop
    
         to play with text
    
         sub/text inter/text
    
                 words sounds images
    
                 voices visions
    
         in/scribed upon the blankness
    
         even the silence
    
         is a mirror
    
         cr(eat)or of
    
         page
    
                 text entered c(entered) dec(entered)
    
         a stage a re(e)al of film a canvas
    
         (posit)ion of an in(strum)ent
    
         collabor(ate)d in silence
    
         trans(form)ed in text
    
         b(ordered) by margins
    
         no c(enter)
    
         to the page
    
         found w(or)ld
    
         between the lines:
    
         self
    
         i/magined
    
         for/gotten
    
         re/membered
    
         un/known
    
         m(other) of the text
    
         inter/dependent but separ(ate) too
    
    
    
         I am a blank page
    
         about to turn

12. An artistic curriculum might build the circular and curricular lines between emotion and emancipation and feminism(s), however delicate the web that is spun or however subject this web may be to breakage. An artistic curriculum links the emotion that is a vital part of any aesthetic encounter (Greene, 1984) to the emotion that women have recognized as part of an intuitive knowing (Belenky et al., 1986; Estes, 1992). This emotion is an essential ingredient in educational and personal relationships and stands in contrast to the domination of a more scientific, rational, distant knowing. This emotion can also be linked to the satisfying emotional power inherent in critical educational practice which seeks to redress injustices and works towards a democratic society, one which can be "gender-sensitive" (Martin, 1990, p. 22).
    

    Background: Building Curricular Lines in the Web

13. The social-change strand of a transformational curriculum orientation (Miller & Seller, 1990) connects the work of reconstructionist curriculum developers such as Giroux, Apple, and Pinar (Giroux et al., 1981) with the work of feminist pedagogues such as Lather (1991), Luke and Gore (1992) and Weiler (1988). Both sets of writers are concerned with a critique of the existing institutional and unequal qualities of schooling, as well as the possibility of transformative action within classroom practice.

14. The work of Paulo Freire intersects with the earlier writings of the neo-marxist reconstructionists who call for the school to mediate between the class divisions in society and a vision of social transformation to a more democratic society and citizenship. Freire's discussion of conscientization suggests a means of altering power relations within a society that is comprised of the oppressed and the oppressors (Freire, 1985). Like Freire, Giroux is filled with hope for a better, more equal world (Giroux, 1981). Freire's notion of power, which is both positive and negative (Freire, 1985), like the earlier reconstructionist goals, encompasses personal empowerment and self as well as social consciousness. Freire's notions also intersect with post-structural feminist critical theory which posits that personal and social transformation come about as a result of consciousness-raising. Such consciousness-raising opens up oppositional knowledge (that is, that which is not in the dominant epistemology) and subsequent oppositional action (that is, social action which leads to change but is against the grain in terms of dominant discourse and practice) (Lather, 1991).

15. However, post-structural feminist critical theory, in contrast to critical pedagogy as espoused by the reconstructionist "founding fathers," looks critically at women's role in society and at power in the social world through a feminist lens (Luke & Gore, 1992). Post- structural feminists such as Elizabeth Ellsworth have critiqued some of the basic tenets of critical pedagogy which assume universal values about concepts like democracy and freedom without necessarily placing them in specific historical and political contexts (Ellsworth, 1992/1989, p. 92; Lather, 1992/1991). Ellsworth also contends that critical pedagogical practices which set out to alter power relations may in fact be subject to power inequities (p. 93). Particularly important in this discussion is the role of the critical pedagogue who can easily or unwittingly perpetuate oppression by her/his own subject positions and interests. We are all potential oppressors at one time or another, as Trinh Minh-ha emphasizes when she writes that "...any group--any position can move into the oppressor role" (cited in Ellsworth, 1992/1989, p. 114). Narratives about the world are considered to be partial, Ellsworth reminds us (Aronowitz cited in Ellsworth, 1992/1989, p. 96). Despite this critique, the radical (or liberatory) qualities of both critical pedagogy and post-structural feminist critical pedagogy are reminiscent of movements which broke away from traditional teaching, such as the open education movement. Grumet writes of the free school movement as a countercultural repudiation of the school's "allocation of time, space, authority, and activity" (Grumet, 1980, p. 101). Such a description could also be applied to liberatory education, which in its attempts to democratize schooling breaks away from traditional teaching. Indeed, Giroux, Penna and Pinar (1981) delineate curriculum as either traditional, conceptual-empiricist, or reconceptualist, emphasizing the distance between traditional curriculum and a re/conceptualization of curriculum.

16. Post-structural feminism shares those features of a reconceptualist curriculum that lead to a more just, humane, creative and radical existence arising out of social analysis and transformation, but a feminist curriculum suggests the search for truth and the struggle is rooted in and largely concerned with changing the social order for women as well as for men, in ways that liberate and emancipate women from gender inequality and other forms of oppression (for example, ageism, ableism) as well as from class and race conflicts. Schooling in both domains is an agent for subversion and political change. This subversion, this change, and the vision of what "should be" or "could be" re/constructs, emancipates and transforms the learner, the teacher, the curriculum. By including such critical and feminist strands in the curricular web, a conception of curriculum can be developed which acknowledges the school as a structure which is not only subject to change, but which should be changed: a dream of a better world.

17. It can be argued that the same possibilities for a better world could exist in a curriculum that endorses the arts in ways that interrogate and deconstruct our partial narratives. The arts are human endeavours, full of possibility, an expression and transformation of the creative potential and freedom within individuals and social groups in society. The arts are filled with emotion.

    The emancipation that is the promise of reflexivity, whether achieved through critical theory on the level of society or through currere on the level of the individual, demands that we embrace the forms of knowledge and society as our own and that we work through these forms. That "working through" requires more than verbal analysis and interpretation. It requires feeling those forms, actively participating in them, and through that engagement in our concrete situation finding the alternative action that lies dormant within us (Grumet, 1978, p. 42).

    Marcuse identifies the radical qualities of art, "that is to say its indictment of the established reality and its invocation to the beautiful image of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior while preserving its overwhelming presence. Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible...The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions" (cited in Grumet, 1980, p. 107).

    "The imaginative leap can lead to the leap that is praxis, the effort to remake and transcend" (Greene, 1978, p. 223).

18. Like the reconceptualist curriculum, an arts curriculum that interrogates and deconstructs our partial narratives recognizes subjectivity, the art of interpretation, the centrality of intentionality to understanding human action, and the political (power relations, class conflicts, resistance, and the political nature of culture, meaning, knowledge) (Giroux, 1981, p. 14). Arts education can provide the resistance necessary to counter the hegemony which is reproduced through socialized roles, cultural expectations, and disempowerment.

19. Like feminist and critical theory, the arts can examine personal autonomy and social agency, with the capacity to effect change in the social symbolic order and in the human condition.

20. Like feminist theory, an arts curriculum can recognize the personal as well as the political, the individual as well as society, women as well as men, the emotional as well as the intellectual. All the curricular lines of emancipation, post-structural feminism and emotion are spun in the web, and they glimmer with the hope and possibility made radiant by a way of learning that returns us to the emotional in curriculum.
    

    Education Through the Arts: A Dramatic Curriculum

21. Drama education is uniquely suited to self-reflection, the alteration of consciousness, the emotional inner life, the reflexivity, the validation of intuition and experience, the self-inquiry, the consciousness-raising, the subjectivity and the interpretation which are qualities of both a feminist and emancipatory education. Although there is some criticism of the way in which the arts might promote cultural reproduction (Greene, 1980, p. 22), drama education as espoused by leading drama educators Gavin Bolton (1992) and Dorothy Heathcote (Wagner, 1976), utilizes unique strategies that question existing structures and resist closure, preventing cultural reproduction by continually opening up and shifting perspective from within the art form itself.

    Such drama education, often identified as role drama (Tarlington & Verriour, 1991), is also uniquely phenomenological as it works existentially through the use of dramatic roleplay; as it shifts and changes as the teacher and the learner shift and change; as it relies on the lived experience of its participants who name and reflect upon these experiences as they are positioned as subjects in various roles and situations. In role drama as in phenomenology, the importance is focused on the relation of "the knower to the known" (Pinar & Reynolds, 1992, p. 2). Dramatic roleplaying is a "being in time" (Pinar & Reynolds, 1992, p. 2) which precedes conceptualization. Gavin Bolton describes this conceptualization through "a dual perception of the world...There is the world of fellow players agreeing to make-believe, and the fictitious world of the "play"--the thing created. The participants create their dramatic fiction experiencing a tension, a feeling that something special is going on, that something must happen" (1992, p. 11). These phenomenological qualities of this form of arts education demonstrate its unpredictability but also contribute to its possibility for what Hunt contends is the true aim of education: "giving pupils understanding, control, and the power to make decisions about changing their environment" (cited in Grumet, 1978, p. 56).

    I have finished reading the children a story about some dancing tigers who dance a Rajah to death in order to escape their usual fate at his hands when out tiger-hunting. The story mentions that no one has ever heard of such dancing, and Jamie comments after I read: but the story of such dancing is discussed in the story of the book. He is living in classroom space and the storybook space and perhaps somewhere uniquely in-between. Soon I place Jamie and his classmates in roleplaying space, first as villagers who are held accountable for the Rajah's death and whose stories of the dancing tigers are not believed, and then later as detectives who must solve the mystery of the Rajah's death. We move back and forth between these roles and the children roleplay the villagers intensely. They know and understand at an instinctive level what it is like not to be believed, and later when the roleplaying is over, I ask them if they think children are better than adults about accepting wonder and mystery and the unexplainable.

22. While Madeleine Grumet criticizes both the presentational (and often hegemonious) school play as well as the indulgent fantasy of the sort of creative drama which is a playing that is not answerable to anyone and therefore uncritical (Grumet, 1978), the kind of drama education advanced by Gavin Bolton and Dorothy Heathcote offers a critical as well as an artistic look at various social contexts drawn from students' experience and/or from texts which students can respond to and interrogate. Such a dramatic curriculum is not traditional in the sense that subject areas are clearly delineated, since many different disciplines (for example, literature or history) can be drawn upon if or when necessary. Such a dramatic curriculum is holistic in that many recognizable parts of other curriculum areas (for example, writing as communication or reading text for meaning) are integrated into the whole. Both students and teacher(s) decide upon the curriculum together, whether or not it is student or teacher who initially offers some beginning. The very collective nature of role drama work emphasizes a reliance upon mutual attention, interest and desire. Such work operates out of negotiation between participants, a negotiation of meaning as well as intention. Here the learner and the teacher work together and respond from within and without of the art form (Bolton, 1992).

23. In the film Three Looms Waiting, Dorothy Heathcote defines role drama as "man [sic] in a mess" (1971). Through a medium of roletaking people must find their way out of situations which bear the tensions and emotions of the human condition and which carry about them fragments of our narratives, however partial these may be. These situations are drawn from reality, roleplayed through the protection of role, and reflected upon in order to deepen understanding, widen experience and knowledge, and transform teacher and learner to a deeper awareness of life and the powerful effect of the art of drama and emotion.

24. Here Pinar's "currere" (1992) could be said to be at work through reflection of past experience, present situation, and future action. The alienation, depersonalization, and fragmentation which the reconceptualists contend separate the student from the curriculum (Grumet, 1978, p. 46) are diminished. Feeling and form are not disjunct. The scientific knowledge which Merleau-Ponty maintains "shifts the center of gravity of experience so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and...feel" (cited in Grumet, 1978, p. 48) is shifted so that the drama experience heightens seeing, hearing, and feeling. Knowledge is re/presented through the experiences of the student "in such a way that she is ever conscious of her own response...and can use that awareness as the ground for...action" (Grumet, 1978, p. 55). In the words of poet Elizabeth Bishop, "it is like what we imagine knowledge to be" (cited in Greene, 1980, p. 18), and so the role drama experience, through its inclusion of the emotional, can be a transformation. Maxine Greene writes: "...an emotion, a passion can be a transformation of the world" (1986, p. 81).

    Our drama is about a king who plans to build a fountain in his castle courtyard, for "the splendour of his kingdom and the glory of his name" (Alexander, 1971). But in building the fountain, the water supply will be cut off to the people who live in the city below the palace. The children have been peering through a circle I have drawn on the chalkboard, a magic peephole which allows us to see what is happening over at the castle: "I see the fountain growing larger and larger." "The water is very high and spouting out through an angel." "I see the king laughing."

    "Maybe the king doesn't care about us," Nick comments when we ponder the activity at the palace and how it will affect us, in-role as the people who live in the kingdom with our dwindling water supply. "What kind of a kingdom will he have," Colleen asserts, "if all the people in it are dead?" "We'll have to speak to him, tell him what he is doing to us, make him understand..."

25. Maxine Greene writes of educational experiences in the arts as ways to "come in contact with the concreteness of things, to experience tension, to feel what remains to be done" (1980, p. 24). She refers to Sartre's notion that the world with its deficiencies and injustices gives rise to the moral imperative at the heart of the aesthetic imperative which can arouse a "desire to repair" (cited in Greene, 1980, p. 24). This desire to repair can be evoked through a dramatic curriculum whose theatrical tension is embedded in specific, concrete, social situations. These situations, while fictitious, resonate with historic and political contexts and permit children to feel through the medium of the drama art form. Thus emotion gives rise to a powerful feeling level and a feeling of action which speaks of what can be done, what might be done, what alternative possibilities exist, what new ways of seeing are possible.

    The children have just shared some group ensemble work, in-role as the families of those held prisoner because of the Rajah's death. We have worked with frozen tableaux which have been brought momentarily to life and then are re-frozen. The work has been full of dogs and babies, barking and whining their way in and out of any deep consideration of the plight of the prisoners. I know that at this moment this is what some of these children need--the freedom to play babies and even disrupt the deeper work of the few others who are ready to look profoundly, but who are themselves still standing at the edge of any intense analysis, welcoming the dogs and babies because they are silly and keep the emotion at bay.

    I change focus, acknowledging that this is where they are right now in their thinking, and giving them the freedom of playing babies up until now, but desperately not wanting them to avoid the feeling at the precipice of their knowing. I place all of us in-role at the centre of the village. As teacher-in-role, I roleplay a rather overexcited and concerned villager who challenges and questions the situation. When some suggest we write articles about the dancing tigers to send to the newspaper, and take snapshots to prove the existence of the dancing tigers, in my role I declare that I am not literate, I am poor, there are others like me, and how is it that they have so much and I have so little, and how did things come to be like this in our village? How will articles and snapshots help me and my family? The tension in the drama is palpable, but productive. The children begin for the first time this day to consider the prisoners, to consider what it is like not to have the privileges that all of us take for granted, to work their way through the fiction without the magic of technology and the media. They understand and live with the power relations involved in the authority of school and adults, and now they begin to apply this knowledge to our fictitious prisoners.

    When it is time to disperse, they are all still clamouring to speak. But Debbie approaches me privately, tears in her eyes, because she has taken personally what I have said as teacher- in-role and she thinks I am criticizing her. I am surprised, since we have both experienced and discussed how the art form of our drama works, have already worked within this form, and I assumed they understood and separated the make- believe from the real. I explain again about teacher-in-role and distance the role I adopted by talking about "that woman," by encouraging her to discuss what that woman was like. Mean, says Debbie, but the overall discussion seems to heal and satisfy.

    When the children leave, I call good-bye to Debbie, calling her Deb, and she returns quickly to caution me to never call her Deb, please, only her friends call her that. I agree courteously, ruminating on the fact that even in drama where the teacher enters the play, where the children have expressive and emotional freedom, there are uneven power relations at work. There are lines which we cross but must be sensitive about in crossing.

    I wonder if I could have prepared the children more, been more sensitive, but then I remember how I was working on- my-feet to promote emotional depth and challenge superficial thinking. Inside I am smiling at Debbie's (not Deb's) reminder that I, too, have to earn her respect and the right to familiarity.

    

    Weaving the Feminist Line of the Web

26. While the feminist line of the curriculum web is more complex to spin into practice, teachers and students who are the substance of the curriculum web can bring feminist theory into practice in very real, very powerful ways: through both ideological awareness and state of mind.

27. Recent work in feminism(s) has raised awareness of many gender issues such as the language we use, the language in texts, and the way women have been seen in history and society. Participation in drama experiences which are gender-sensitive by teachers who role-model gender sensitivity can do much to bring about radical change. In drama education this can be accomplished by employing basic strategies that encourage the more silent (often females) to speak; asking females to play dominant roles or roles traditionally roleplayed by males; exploding gender boundaries into the androgynous zones where males take on the roles of mothers in the drama, or females take on the roles of kings. Many women teachers suggest role-modelling all the many facets of what it means to be a woman and subverting dominant attitudes through explicit examples such as deliberately doing the unexpected (Weiler, 1988).

    "Can I be a man named Mr. Fike and draw a fishing equipment store?" queries Debbie. "Of course," I respond. "You don't have to ask me."

    We are doing an updated version of the King Solomon story. "Who wants to roleplay Mrs. Brown, and who wants to roleplay Mrs. Green?" I ask, these roles representing mothers who both claim the baby is theirs.

    Many boys vie for this opportunity, and we settle on one male, one female Mrs. Green or Brown, who take turns holding the doll who represents the baby.

    "She can't roleplay the king," declares Dimitrios. "She's a girl." She can and she does.

    "You can't be an old man," declares Joe. "You're wearing a skirt."

    "I can think and feel like an old man, so I can be an old man in our drama," I reply.

    "There were women pirates in history," I comment.

    "Yes," says Sara knowingly. "The pirates were not sexist."

    playhouse reality

    
    
    he is ironing industriously
    
    handmade wooden iron
    
    slicking back and forth
    
    upon a glossy wooden board
    
    like a skater
    
    turning figures in the ice
    
    distracted
    
    he turns
    
    continues stirring pots
    
    and moving dishes
    
    small face intense
    
    with the concentration
    
    of his make-believe
    
    and the hard work
    
    of joyful play
    
    plastic Fisher-Price toy kitchen
    
    receiving
    
    small ministrations
    
    of yet another player
    
    
    
    I sit on a hope chest
    
    too tall to stand
    
    in the playhouse
    
    enter into the life
    
    of the play:
    
    he looks busy
    
    is he cooking now?
    
    yes and cleaning too
    
    he informs me seriously
    
    accepting my interest and intrusion
    
    is he a father?
    
    yes with six no twenty
    
    children
    
    there by me
    
    on the hope chest
    
    all twenty
    
    upside down
    
    in a basket
    
    twenty I exclaim
    
    impressed
    
    with this participant
    
    new-age father
    
    and parent-in-role
    
    sharing the burden
    
    of household responsibility
    
    a new model for the times
    
    socialized equality
    
    in the kindergarten
    
    
    
    with five year old suddenness
    
    an abrupt change
    
    of scene
    
    he dons a red helmet
    
    and announces
    
    he is off for a ride
    
    
    
    testing
    
    I enquire
    
    but what about the twenty children
    
    you look after them
    
    he responds quickly
    
    resonating authority
    
    
    
    there I sit
    
    beside twenty children
    
    upside down in a basket
    
    thinking:
    
    this is my life
    
    husband off riding motorcycles
    
    
    
    uncanny
    
    how that play episode
    
    echoed
    
    life

    

    Returning Emotionally to the Earth

28. A conception of curriculum that returns us to the emotional and encourages us through the emotional to live our lives as freely and creatively and justly as we can is not free of problematic or ethical considerations, as the narrative about Debbie demonstrates. The "desire to repair" is subject to the oppression which our own situations and contexts create. Surely though, such a conception of curriculum offers us tools which are less rationalistic and reliant on reason alone, Elizabeth Ellsworth's critique of much pedagogical practice. Through the emotional, we can "move about" in the curriculum dream, as Trinh Minh-ha suggests (cited in Ellsworth, 1992/1989, p. 113), embracing the "unknowability" (p. 112) which is part of our encounters in the classroom.

    We can all dwell upon the earth, catch the rainwater upon our tongues, and touch, taste, smell, hear, see, feel the earth beneath our feet, the earth extending beyond where we dwell, the earth beyond the horizon. Our tears can replenish us the way the rainwater replenishes the earth, fall coursing down our cheeks until they reach the tips of our tongues, and mingling with the rainwater caught there, become one liquid, the earth's elixir, the earth-dweller's potion.

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