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This book records the work of a teacher making Shakespeare’s plays accessible to college students, including motor vehicle mechanic apprentices and secretarial trainees, through the drama-in-education life-learning principles, called “Mantle of the Expert,” of Dorothy Heathcote. These principles are also applied to those excluded from school, to music teaching for Special Needs pupils and English tutorials for young people. Included are detailed descriptions of workshops given by Dorothy Heathcote on “Antony and Cleopatra” and “Much Ado About Nothing” to students of the Mencap National College, Dilston, Northumberland.
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‘MANTLE OF THE EXPERT’THROUGH SHAKESPEARE
Dorothy Heathcote Guides Life Learning for Motor Vehicle Mechanics, Takes Shakespeare Workshops and Inspires Music for Special Needs Pupils
WENDY JEAN MACPHEE
‘Mantle of the Expert’ Through Shakespeare
Singular Publishing, Norwich, UK
© Wendy Jean Macphee 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owners
The right of Wendy Jean Macphee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-8381283-4-0
www.singularpublishing.com
IN MEMORY OF DOROTHY HEATHCOTE AND FOR MARIANNE, KEVIN AND ANNA HEATHCOTE WOODBRIDGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Moments performed by Theatre Set-Up in the plays Twelfth Night (1979) and As you Like It (1980) which correspond with the themes given to the students.
Fig. 1 Self-indulgent Emotion, Orsino’s suit of Olivia (Twelfth Night, II. iv.) Forty Hall
Fig. 2 The Person who is Ambitious, Maria (Twelfth Night, II. iii.) Forty Hall
Fig. 3 Deceit, Viola in Disguise (Twelfth Night, I. v.) Forty Hall
Fig. 4 The Conman and the Dupe, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Twelfth Night, II. iii.) Forty Hall
Fig. 5 The Outsider, Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch (Twelfth Night, III. iv.) inside Forty Hall
Fig. 6 Relationships within a Firm, The Fool and Malvolio (Twelfth Night, II. v.) Forty Hall
Fig. 7 The Brothers, Orlando protests to Old Adam about his brother’s mistreatment of him (As You Like It, I. i.) Forty Hall
Fig. 8 The Boasting Boxer, Charles the Wrestler (As You Like It, I. ii.) Chaplaincy Gardens, Isles of Scilly
Fig. 9 Prejudice, (losing the respect of his own family) Duke Frederick against Rosalind and Orlando. His daughter, Celia, leaves her father and pledges to accompany Rosalind into exile (As You Like It, I. ii.) Forty Hall
Fig. 10 Disguise, Rosalind (As You Like It, IV. i.) Tresco Abbey Gardens, Isles of Scilly
Fig. 11 The Flash Guy and the Steady, Touchstone courts Audrey (As You Like It, III. iii.) Forty Hall
Fig. 12 The Flash Guy and the Steady, Touchstone and William court Audrey (As You Like It, V. i.) Tresco Abbey Gardens
Fig. 13 The Ideal Society, In the Forest of Arden (As You Like It, II. vii.) Lyme Hall
Fig. 14 Disguise, Rosalind with Orlando and Celia (As You Like It, III. iii.) Forty Hall
CONTENTS
Preface
CHAPTER ONE—THE BEGINNINGS
The Challenge
Aspects of the learning stratagems of Dorothy Heathcote’s ‘Mantle of the Expert’ drama-in-education principles applied in this work
Additional factors that were necessary to make the dramas acceptable to most of the students
The nature of the classes which were involved in the filmed dramas
CHAPTER TWO—TWELFTH NIGHT (ACADEMIC YEAR 1978–79)
Themes of the play Twelfth Night analysed in terms of their universal application to everyday life
Filming with class MVM 1E
Filming with class MVM 1C
Filming with class MVM 1A
CHAPTER THREE—AS YOU LIKE IT (ACADEMIC YEAR 1979–80): CLASS MVM 1E
Themes of the play As You Like It analysed in terms of their universal application to everyday life
Class MVM 1E
CHAPTER FOUR—AS YOU LIKE IT: CLASSESMCC 2A AND MVM 3C
Class MCC 2A
Class MVM 3C
CHAPTER FIVE—AS YOU LIKE IT: CLASS MVM 2D
Class MVM 2D
CHAPTER SIX—THE TEMPEST (ACADEMIC YEAR 1981–82); SUMMERFIELD CENTRE (2000–01); REFLECTIONS
The Tempest
Summerfield Centre
Reflections on the work with mechanics students and young people excluded from school
CHAPTER SEVEN—SPIN-OFF; ORAL WORK WITH SECRETARIAL STUDENTS (ACADEMIC YEARS 1978–80); CONCLUSIONS
Spin-off
Twelfth Night and As You Like It used as a source of oral teaching material for secretarial students in the Southgate Technical College Business Studies Department
Conclusions
CHAPTER EIGHT—THE WORKSHOPS OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA AND MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING THAT DOROTHY HEATHCOTE TOOK WITH STUDENTS OF THE MENCAP NATIONAL COLLEGE, DILSTON, NORTHUMBERLAND
Antony and Cleopatra (1998)
Much Ado About Nothing (1999)
CHAPTER NINE—SOME OF DOROTHY HEATHCOTE’S LIFE-LEARNING STRATAGEMS APPLIED TO ABLE-BODIED CHILDREN AND TO THOSE WITH SPECIAL NEEDS
Music for special needs pupils (1998–2003)
Other special needs subjects (1998–2003)
The use of ‘secondary role’ in private tutoring of pupils in English language and literature
CHAPTER TEN—CONCLUSIONS
Notes
Biographies
PREFACE
This volume aims to promote the guidance and inspiration of the educational luminary Dorothy Heathcote to my teaching from 1978 to 2012.1 The necessity to document her contribution to my time spent in schools, colleges and private teaching is urgent as some aspects of her ‘Mantle of the Expert’ system which we discussed and practised together have not been mentioned or emphasised in other publications. In 1977–78 I used a year’s sabbatical leave to take the Drama-in-Education course at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I was privileged that the lecturer of the courses at this university and the consequent source of the variety of drama-in-education projects which are discussed in this book was Dorothy Heathcote. This culminated in a Diploma in Drama-in-Education in 1978 and a M.Ed. by thesis degree (which I studied part-time) in 1981.
I have demonstrated in this text that aspects of Dorothy Heathcote’s teaching mantras have had a continuous historic recorded source as far back as ancient Rome. I adapted them by: using themes from Shakespeare’s plays in order to promote life-learning for motor vehicle mechanics and oral work for secretarial students; making performances of those plays accessible for the motor vehicle mechanics through the life-learning sessions; participating in Dorothy’s workshops with Mencap students on Antony and Cleopatra and Much Ado AboutNothing; examining universals as the proper content of any school or college syllabus through comparing the universals in the Shakespeare themes with those suggested by Georges Polti in his The Thirty-Six DramaticSituations;2 using inanimate objects in secondary role in all subjects, particularly music for young people, especially those with special needs; and always using objects to represent abstract concepts for pupils and to make stories, songs, and dramas real with props, costume and suggested scenery.
My teaching and academic life began in South Australia, gaining at Adelaide University, in addition to teaching qualifications, the B.A. degree in 1960, and the diplomas, Licentiate of Speech and Drama of Australia in 1962 and Associate of Music of Australia in 1959. After teaching in Adelaide for three years, in 1963 I travelled to the UK to pursue further theatre studies, teaching in schools in London and qualifying for the Licentiate of the Royal College of Music in Speech and Drama Teaching in 1968 through studying part-time at the Central School of Speech and Drama. From 1968 to early 1969 I was a drama tutor in the professional acting course faculty of Manchester College of Art. In 1969 I returned to London to become a lecturer (initially in Drama, English and Liberal Studies and from 1982 onwards in GCSE and A level Theatre Studies) at Southgate College until 1991. From 1982 to 1996 I was diverted from ‘Mantle of the Expert’ teaching in studying Arcana in Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham for my Ph.D. (1996) and teaching GCSE and A level Theatre Studies at Southgate College (in a ‘road map’ style of teaching as Dorothy called it – see p.16).
The first of these projects (at Southgate Technical college as it was then called) I recorded in diary form as part of my Master of Education degree which was supervised by Dorothy. These consisted of sessions with a variety of students, but mainly with motor vehicle mechanic apprentices, in filmed drama-in-education programmes. These aimed to make accessible to them several Shakespearean productions presented by the professional theatre company Theatre Set-Up, which I ran during the college summer vacation.3 Dorothy suggested that I combine my work at the college with that of the theatre company. Themes from Shakespeare’s plays were also used to train secretarial students in their business oral work. Throughout most of these drama-in-education enterprises the significance of the universality of the themes in Shakespeare’s plays and their importance as a source of material for school and college curricula became evident. The main content of the sessions aimed at life-learning and evolved from the themes which benefited the students according to their needs.
The demand for Theatre Set-Up’s productions grew over the years from its inception in 1976 and its inclusion in the Southgate College drama-in-education sessions so that it served heritage venues throughout the UK for 35 years and ultimately in mainland Europe for 19 years. It was a registered charity, employing professional actors and costumiers, and observing the British Actors’ Equity terms and conditions for its employees. The company proved of considerable benefit to students at Southgate College – not only to the work with the vocational students in 1978–81, but to my Theatre Studies students from 1982 onwards. My theatre skills were honed by mounting and taking part in the productions during the college summer vacations and any of the Southgate Theatre Studies students who had the potential to be professional actors or theatre technicians had the possibility of access into the company after they had received training at one of the major UK Drama schools. Another benefit to my Southgate students was supplied by my professional theatre associates. Any students’ project work on aspects of theatre which were required by the Theatre Studies syllabus was welcomed by my colleagues in associated theatre companies who gave my students access to good professional material for their submissions to the examining board. Thus the combination of the work of the college students with that of the Theatre Set-Up company which Dorothy had initiated in 1978 proved to have lasting advantages both to the students and to Theatre Set-Up who benefited from the excellent services of the Southgate alumni. In 1998 and 1999 Dorothy, who had by then become a trustee of Theatre Set-Up, joined forces with the company again, running workshop sessions for the students of Dilston Mencap College introducing them to the company’s performances of Antony andCleopatra and Much Ado About Nothing (which were held in the college grounds).4
Retired from full-time work, in 1998 I began to do relief teaching in a wide range of schools, including those providing for special needs and pupils excluded from school, where Dorothy’s drama-in-education ‘Mantle of the Expert’ principles, applied to a range of subjects especially music, proved beneficial.
I found that the most remarkable of all these drama-in-education projects was that inspired by Dorothy’s amazing guidance on the life-learning evolved from the work with the Southgate Technical College mechanics students in making Shakespeare accessible to them. Unfortunately the films and tapes which recorded the work done by them became corrupted over the years and had to be thrown away, but the diaries record the work exactly as it was done. The students considered the work that was done to be strictly private. Respecting this, only first names are used of both staff and students in the following account of the sessions.
It is important to note that the sense in which the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ is used herein is not the same as that applied to work with school children – a threefold process involving the features of ‘expert’, ‘client’ and ‘commission’, which Dorothy Heathcote developed in the 1980s and which is recorded in her and Gavin Bolton’s book Drama for Learning and Tim Taylor’s book A Beginner’s Guide to Mantle of the Expert – but rather just the application of the ‘expert’ feature, endowing the students/pupils with its qualities.5 The features of ‘client’ and ‘commission’ were developed after I did my work with students in 1978–81 and they were mostly applicable to work with young pupils. They were not relevant to the later teaching I was doing with subjects such as English tutoring and music with special needs pupils.
I would like to say that in my long teaching career, I found the work that was inspired by Dorothy the most exciting and satisfying. The students involved in this kind of life-learning were engaged, responsive, creative, and often thrilled by the effects of the dramas which they learned by being given self-determined pleasurable experiences. I hope to share that excitement and satisfaction with other teachers and practitioners.
CHAPTER ONE The beginnings
THE CHALLENGE
My teaching life that was guided and influenced by Dorothy Heathcote started as an adventurous experiment. The story of this experiment in applying Dorothy Heathcote’s principles of drama-in-education to community life-learning was begun in 1978 at what was then called Southgate Technical College in North London.1 This was a very exciting Further Education establishment whose students represented all parts of the community and whose lectures covered many fields. There were seven major departments: Business Studies, Catering, Educational Technology, Electrical Engineering and Science, Fashion and Distribution, Mechanical Engineering, and English and Liberal studies which included A level arts and science subjects (including music and drama), with part and full-time day classes. In order to give people who worked during the day the chance to further both their occupational skills and general educational interests, evening sessions which included many subjects such as opera, orchestra and theatre, opened the college to anyone who wanted to enjoy what it had to offer. All the classrooms in the college were fully occupied from 9am to 9pm during weekdays and such was the demand for the courses of the college that in 1976 an additional floor had to be added on top of the main building and a large library was built on one half of the gardens in the front of the grounds.2
As a drama lecturer putting on productions of plays in the College Theatre and Octagon Studio I found this mix of people a rich source of talent and expertise and the young day-time students enjoyed the participation of the evening class adults in their plays. It was always a challenge to involve day-time craft practice students in productions of plays. We succeeded in doing this when we presented the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus and the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides in the Octagon Studio, with senior Greek Cypriot full-time motor vehicle mechanic students playing some of the male Greek characters in the productions, giving the plays a genuine ethnic reality with the young Greeks’ physical and emotional vigour. When these young people made their entrances to the plays, the audience felt the rolling back of two and a half thousand years as the ancient dramas achieved a modern relevance.
However the challenge still remained of inspiring day-time release craft practice students such as motor vehicle mechanic apprentices to participate in or to enjoy any theatre or art that they considered to be outside the accepted bounds of their ‘working-class culture’. The problem was presented to me by the Vice Principal of the college during my interview for appointment to the lecturing staff in English, Drama and Liberal Studies in 1969. When I expressed an interest in trying to involve the motor vehicle mechanic students that I would be teaching in performing and viewing dramas, he said that it would be impossible; that they had never expressed an interest in drama, never went to see plays and resisted all attempts to be enticed to see them or be involved in any ‘cultural’ activities (which they considered to be effeminate).
A year’s sabbatical leave from 1977–78, studying the Diploma in Drama-in-Education course at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne with Dorothy Heathcote offered a solution to that problem. On this course we studied the application of Dorothy’s principles of drama-in-education, most of which she called ‘Mantle of the Expert’, which means that the pupils put on the ‘mantle’, symbolising the professional attributes and status, of the experts in the field which is the subject of their drama, thus gaining control and responsibility. Dorothy herself is quoted as saying, “The mantle means I declare my calling and live up to what is expected of me in the community … I use it as a quality of leadership, carrying standards of behaviour, morality, responsibility, ethics and the spiritual basis of all action.”3 The sessions in Dorothy’s University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne course were also conducted outside the university with many different kinds of groups of all ages: including residents of the homes for mentally disabled adults and children which were then in existence, and with infant, primary and secondary school students.4
She showed us films which had been taken of her working with many different groups from all over the world in sessions which she had been engaged to give in those countries. Whatever the nature of the ‘pupils’, whether adults needing instruction in an aspect of their work, or children needing to acquire life-learning skills or to have experience of difficult aspects of their school syllabus, her methods succeeded in achieving the aims of the learning.
She emphasised to our class the need not to rush the process of the dramas but to listen to the needs of the pupils and move the drama accordingly. This, she claimed was her reason for our doing so much work with people who were learning disabled as they needed the time to absorb and react to the dramas. Often she used the framework of legendary stories such as children’s fairy tales with younger pupils. She gave the class I was in an example of this in a workshop in one institution with a group of sessions centred on the fairy story of the prince who had been turned into a frog. Among many things, this drama taught the power of love. I was lucky to be able to use what I had learnt from all this work in later years when working in special needs schools in Essex and North London.
In 1978 when I returned to my job at Southgate Technical College from my year’s sabbatical leave course with Dorothy Heathcote, I was given, along with my usual day-time and evening class drama students, many motor vehicle mechanic apprentice classes who were to take the English and Liberal Studies courses. The University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne had suggested to me that I might like to continue working with Dorothy on a part-time Master of Education course. By then, Theatre Set-Up, the theatre company I had started in 1976 which performed Shakespearean plays in the gardens of its home base of Forty Hall, Enfield, had become professional in order to tour Shakespearean plays to National Trust venues that were eager to have them. The play to be performed by the company in 1979 was Twelfth Night and in 1980 As You Like It. Dorothy and I decided that we would try to make these plays accessible to the motor vehicle mechanic apprentices and any other of the pupils I was to teach at the college, using whatever principles of her ‘Mantle of the Expert’ method of life-learning should prove relevant and applicable. We thus embarked on an exciting two years’ experiment involving all of my Southgate Technical College pupils, using the excellent facility of the small college television studio and any other equipment that our very competent technical staff could provide.5
ASPECTS OF THE LEARNING STRATAGEMS OF DOROTHY HEATHCOTE’S ‘MANTLE OF THE EXPERT’ DRAMA-IN-EDUCATION PRINCIPLES APPLIED IN THIS WORK
Examples of how these were practised in the educational dramas with the Southgate College students or in other projects featuring Dorothy’s work, are enclosed in brackets. N.B. It is important to note that Dorothy also said that this method of creating learning is not always appropriate: “Sometimes you just need a road map.”
The unknown material to be learnt is presented in the form of a metaphor which links it to the known experience of the students. (The selected metaphor for the As You Like It ‘Golden World’ pastoral location of the Duke Senior and his followers in The Forest of Arden was presented as ‘An Ideal Society’ in class MVM 2D p.77.)This metaphor is acted out by the students in the dramatic form whose events are suggested by them, the member of staff functioning as a ‘teacher facilitator’, drawing out any areas of learning that might result from the dramas. All courses in the actions of the story and decisions taken in the dramas must be made by the students. This is the sense in which they put on the ‘Mantle of the Expert’. (I learnt to allow the students to have free rein in the dramas when Dorothy once said to me, “Put your ideas away in a drawer, Wendy.” The effectiveness of the kind of ‘Mantle of the Expert’ role appropriate to this kind of drama-in-education is demonstrated in a film of Dorothy’s work with very young pupils in a programme in the United States whose imagined setting was on a farm where land was being divided up among the pupil ‘prospective farmers’. She was in role as one of the ‘prospective farmers’ and at one point pretended in role to fall asleep when the pupils were in role as ‘the experts’, legislators taking decisions about land distribution. She then pretended to wake up and protest that she had not been given enough land even “to grow a carrot or run a chicken”. The pupils looked suitably abashed and life-learning took place for them about the need to consider the welfare of other people when making decisions).
