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PUBLICATIONS: How
Theatre Educates
Excerpt from: Hoogland, C. (2003). The land inside Coyote:
Reconceptualizing human relationships to place through drama.
In D. Booth & K. Gallagher (Eds.), How theatre educates: Artists,
educators, and advocates respond. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press.Drama underlies my work as a writer (poet and playwright),
teacher, and ecofeminist. Drama's investigative actions and its
storytelling conventions such as plot, character, setting, and
metaphor facilitate the exploration of facts, ideas and feelings
in each of my forms of inquiry. Drama's ability to inquire into
a topic as well as its ability to touch a subject's emotional
heart make it pedagogically suitable for my study of human relationships
to place. In this chapter I am interested in a specific aspect
of place, namely the natural world. The natural or the non-human
world of plants, animals, rocks, sky, weather; in other words,
the places and things that envelope human life in rural, urban,
and wilderness landscapes.
I haven't always been aware of the usefulness of drama in teaching
and learning. Until feminist theory brought the body into theoretical
view, I didn’t appreciate the body's contributions in making
sense of experience and in creating understanding (Hoogland, Taboo,
2000). Though I've been a practicing artist for longer than I
have been an academic, I didn’t understand how my practice
was inextricably fused to my scholarship, and how my art informs
my research and teaching. As an ecofeminist I view my own connections
to my body and to the earth as the basis from which to understand
the relationships that are commonly presented as dualistic and
contradictory. Namely, those of body/mind, woman/nature, and culture/nature.
I present my work as narrative accounts that form the two main
parts of this chapter. The first is a general discussion of human
alienation from place; in particular, how most children are unconnected
to their local geography, and its flora and fauna. I assert the
value of place and community and the natural world as a source
of authority and meaning. This meaning is more than personal;
I believe our survival as a species depends upon reconceptualizing
our relationships and acting upon a dynamic in which the human
is but one voice among many.
In the second half I describe my research which explores the ways
in which artistic approaches can increase children's awareness
of the natural world and their place in it. I use drama to help
kindergarten children make connections with the place in which
they live and go to school. As the children in my research study
became more comfortable and knowledgeable about the natural world
(its paths, contours, creatures and plants), they made observations
and told stories. Their texts—words, phrases, and sometimes
stories and drawings—which were dictated to the attendant
adults, were taken back to the classroom to be used as the students'
"field notes" in writing and acting their own stories.
Drama has been instrumental in shaping the research and in helping
children articulate their experiences. A notable byproduct of
the study was the illumination of the processes of literacy as
the children's experiences were mediated through artistically-informed
symbol systems.
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