Drama and the law lecturer: lecturing law and performance art

1. Drama and the law lecturer:lecturing law and performance art Nottingham Law School and The Higher Education Academy

2. Welcome • Housekeeping • Programme • Icebreaking

3. What has brought you here? • What weakness, concern, worry or impediment do you think you may have that somehow stops you being the lecturer you want to be?

4. Some questions • Teachers are actors. We perform. Y/N? • Teachers are the vehicle by which the script (the curriculum) is delivered in an engaging way. Y/N? • The teacher training I had (if any) taught me to align outcomes more than engage students. Y/N? • The teacher is more than a conduit for information. Y/N?

5. “Teaching is at least as much art as it is science. Yet in our time we glorify the science of teaching and give short shrift to the art of teaching.” • (Baughman, 1979, p. 26)

6. The role of the lecturer? • To be interested and interesting • To galvanize our audience of students to want to learn more (we cannot cover it all, and why would we want to?) • To entertain • To engage • To have a repertoire to deploy in the moment • What are we saying and doing and how are we doing it? What are we observing and how are we reacting?

7. John Dewey. Art as experience. • 'an experience has its own individualizing quality. Experiences are individual and singular, each having its own beginning and end, its own plot, and its own singular quality that pervades the entire experience. The final import is intellectual, but the occurrence is emotional as well. Aesthetic experience cannot be sharply marked off from other experiences, but in an aesthetic experience, structure may be immediately felt and recognized, there is completeness and unity and necessarily emotion. Emotion is the moving and cementing force‘ • Paraphrased: The better it feels for teacher, the better it is for the student.

8.  Rod Hart’s ‘Impediments’ (edited) • From Indecision towards Strategy • Decide now who your teacher self is. Know your role before you go on stage. Strategiseyourself and your lectures.  

9. Who is your teacher self? • To summarise an in depth empirical study, do we need to be humorous, charismatic, enthusiastic and empathetic. • Or we need to act humorous etc? • Hart says: The notion that one can make one’s self, that is to say, one can consciously shape the manner in which she acts, speaks, behaves, thinks and responds to address her specific needs in a given situation is at the core of most modern acting training. • Be aware of your natural inclinations and disposition, but also of your traditional view of the teacher. Who, if anyone, are you imitating?

10. Terror towards Courage • Developing the teacher self • ConstaninStanislavski explained how an actor absorbs or becomes a role that is believable to an audience even though the person being depicted in the role is markedly different from the actor in real life.  • Emotional memory and the magic ‘if’

11. Bertolt Brecht • Verfremdungseffekt • ‘Appear strange’, ‘alienation’, ‘distancing effect’; very powerful, very political, very anti-establishment • The audience is not watching a narrative; the medium is highly constructed. The audience is engaged with the social/moral/ethical (other) commentary

12. From Embarrassment towards Presence  • Self consciousness, fear of being revealed as a fraud, terror from imposter syndrome: • Life will bring embarrassment and humiliation. Tripping up physically or verbally cannot be avoided, irrespective of preparation and confidence, but how we deal with them can be managed and handled with dignity, humour and an easy authority. • A life without mistakes would be very dull. • Avoiding mistakes means we avoid risks. Taking risks is vital for performance. 

13. The voice • One of the primary tools shared by actors and teachers is of course the voice. Given that words dominate so much of what occurs on stage or in the classroom and that actors receive extensive training in voice, it certainly seems that educators are remiss in not providing similar training for teachers. Vocal range, strength, and flexibility can add valuable variety, emphasis, and even drama to any lesson. (Timpson & Tobin, 1982, p. 29)

14. Body language •  And more. So for example, facial expression, animation, dramatic movement, even dancing.  Your body can complement and enhance your message. • Nice irony for you, be aware of unconscious behaviours! We all have unconscious distracting mannerisms. • How? Record and watch yourself. • It's about what we do, as well as what we don't do. ‘No movement without purpose’ says Stanislavski, Brecht, Hart and others

15. Using the physical space • Know what seating you have and is you need to, or even can, change it, do. But be very aware of where you should be in that room. What props do you have, do you need them all, are they in the right place. Do you need, or would the class benefit from additional props?

16. Script • But unlike actors, not to be recited verbatim. In fact, given we are academics not trained actors, NOT having a script is better to keep our performances fresh, dynamic and active.  • Every lecture differs even for lecturers who have taught the same lecture for a decade.  • We tend to improvise more in seminars than in lectures; we need to carry the confidence that we can do improv from the small to the large teaching area. • Remember the power in a well timed silence.

17. Awareness of audience • If we are analysing the role of the teacher, then to be fair, we have to analyse the role of the audience. • A nightly performance to a (mostly) fully different audience in a theatre is a completely different dynamic to an ongoing relationship in the classroom.  But that does of course mean we need a wider repertoire of skills but it is similar that the actor and the teacher guide the audience, in whichever form,  in a series of shared experiences and, done well, with a sense of a shared connection. 

18. Props • Plastic figures, books, maps, hand-outs, PowerPoint, learning resources in the biggest sense! • Staging • Presentation style, script • Timing • Voice • Costume and body language

19. Critique • ‘Peer review’

20. Break a leg