In two minds: what happens when we think in Role?

Abstract

‘In two Minds’ proffers a detailed concept of the in-role process. It illuminates hitherto underexplored phenomena regarding thinking and existing in the drama classroom. The contradictory dynamic of ‘escaping’ and ‘facing’ something ‘at the same time’ is unpacked revealing that the two are not, in this context, opposite processes but are necessary as bound forces progressing in the same emancipatory direction. This has significant implications for classroom drama practice reaching beyond the drama lesson, studio, and exam results, analysing how the in-role process facilitates self-transformation: the essential purpose of education. The research involves the stories of two 12-year-old girls, some 30 years apart. The first testimony provides the background to the thesis. The second provides the focus for the thesis, featuring the stimulus quote above, which forms the basis of an interview which took place in 2019 just before Covid lockdown. The interview fuels an online drama workshop for a group of contemporary PGCE students to excavate this paradox in their own way. The workshop takes place during the Covid lockdown, summer 2020. These unprecedented circumstances demanded new, creative dramatic online classroom pedagogies and research methodologies which capture unusual online video footage of the drama process and enable fresh ground to be explored. The work of three practitioners is drawn upon to illuminate the data arising from the interview and workshop, Konstantin Stanislavski’s work provides the early theoretical basis of how a role is adopted and sustained both physically and mentally. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological ideas about the unity of the mind and body and how this relates to learning casts more detailed theoretical light onto the in-role process. In addition, some aspects of Jacques Lacan’s thinking are brought into the study to consider our existential context while in role and its impacts on the thinking process. These theoretical lenses are considered alongside the work of Drama Educationalists, like Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton and Cecily O’Neill. The research illuminates internal role processes, considering embodiment in the here-and-now, alongside realms of existence in the not-here and not-now. While the focus is on positive self-transformation, the limitations of the study are also recognised. However, the limitations depend directly upon the skills, insight and education of the drama teacher. Consequently, the study provides strong arguments for the value of drama in schools as a subject in its own right, taught by subject specialists.