Jeroen van der Heijden
Disappearance of a drama teacher. A Whodunnit?
This research is an attempt to base my teaching as a theatre teacher at the PABO Leiden on the undercurrents more than on the governmental guidelines. By doing this, I am trying to connect the students in the part-time program at PABO to the content of teaching drama in primary schools on a more personal level, so that their feeling of competence and urgency will increase, and drama and art will play a bigger role in their practice. I’m trying to accomplish this by experimenting with different ways of questioning both my role as a teacher and the content of my teaching through play, scripted classes and making assignments.
I used the book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten as a framework to re-evaluate my current practice, and I use their term ‘study’ to describe learning as a social activity, in which we define what we find important at that particular moment despite the demands the program might have for us. I am trying to use theatre to free both teacher and student from an educational system in which result-based learning leads to result-based teachers. Instead, I’m trying to foster a way of working in which we can speculate on what it means to teach. My research project is a personal reflection of my repositioning as a theatre teacher in an institutionalized environment, but I hope others recognize the struggle of ‘how to play the game of teaching’ and find some comfort in it.
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