“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.” Winnie the Pooh

Within Malbank’s drama department we acknowledge that education has multiple purposes (see, for example, the three broad ‘fields of purpose’ proposed by philosopher of education Gert Biesta, illustrated below).  At times these purposes are in tension with each other.  We as drama practitioners have a responsibility to keep asking questions about educational purpose, make pedagogical judgements based on these purposes and develop a curriculum model that incorporates these ideas;

1. Head:  Qualification:  Gaining knowledge, skills, dispositions etc. needed to go on and do something
2. Heart: Socialisation:  Becoming part of society (existing ways of doing and being) – culture and tradition.
3. Hand:  Subjectification:  Becoming more autonomous and independent in thinking and acting… the opposite of socialisation

These three core principals have been embedded into the drama schemes of work and are supported by a clear focus on dialogical learning.  Moving on, we as a department, will develop students to have the ability to explore complex questions, through imagined situations, in a safe and supportive learning environment.   This will encourage our students to have a learning adventure and an initiation into the conversation of mankind and fundamentally, they will learn, what it is to be human.  At the heart of Malbank’s drama department’s KS3 curriculum is the opportunity for role-taking-to imagine oneself as the other – to try and find oneself in the other, and in so doing recognise the other in oneself.  This is the crucial and irreducible bridge between all forms of drama and theatre work and this is the value of drama at Malbank.

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper.  It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”  Maya Angelou