Dramatic Arts and the Waldorf Curriculum
Waldorf education aims to educate the inherent potential in every student.
Human beings from ages seven through fourteen digest their experiences of the world primarily through their feelings. Learning through the medium of artistic expression is therefore crucial to attaining comprehensive and profound understanding of the concepts presented through our curriculum. One of the most significant means to this end is ongoing engagement with the dramatic arts. [Our drama program] offers a safe experimental arena in which students have the opportunity to develop all-important social skills through artistic collaboration, building empathy, and strengthening self-confidence.
In middle school, this becomes particularly important, as students begin to awaken to a new sense of personal identity and simultaneously arrive at a stage in which they begin to assume responsibility for their actions in the world. Our drama curriculum teaches practical performance skills while fortifying and enhancing aspects of the morning lesson curriculum.
Each year, every Grades class (1-8) prepares a play or similar performance, which is then offered to the school community. All students in every class are expected to play a role, which includes memorizing lines, learning music, and blocking. In addition, most students will have begun to participate in the visual aspect of these productions by creating props, sets, and costumes. In this way, they engage the practical work of their hands toward a communal artistic enterprise.
By the time the students have reached middle school, they have become used to performing in front of an audience and have internalized many of the aspects of stagecraft. Our work with the dramatic arts rests firmly on the efforts that have come beforehand in the early grades, but in these three important middle-school years, as the students begin to experience a new sense of self, they require opportunities to re-orient to themselves and the world. Middle school students not only work to produce a class performance; they also engage in role-playing activities, debates, and individual oral presentations, which all provide such opportunities.
As students enter their teens, they incline toward self-involvement, which can widen the gulf between what is of immediate importance to them (themselves and their social life) and the substance of the curriculum. As educators, our work is to narrow and eliminate this gap as much as possible. Dramatic work invites students to step out of themselves, imaginatively, into the experiences of others and to expand their sense of empathy in a very real and immediate way. Very often, historical themes are chosen as the content of middle school class plays. Students investigate the historic figures they play not only for their emotional content, but for their motivational character.
[Drama allows students] to practice and learn through immediate experience what might be desirable and what might be less desirable ways of approaching, working through, and resolving various social difficulties.
This is the golden age of researching and inhabiting the “backstory.” Students at this age are far more able to fully enter into their characters, and are more likely to feel safe doing so because performing has been part of “what they do” from First Grade onward. In addition to providing the students with opportunities to try on and experience various personalities, dramatic work also enables students to experiment safely within entirely new social dynamics. In other words, they get to practice and learn through immediate experience what might be desirable and what might be less desirable ways of approaching, working through, and resolving various social difficulties.
Through their dramatic work with historical themes, students gain a personal experience of and appreciation for significant events of our collective past and people whose actions have influenced our current times. They begin to directly experience the truth that a person’s actions in the world will have consequences in the scheme of history. This constitutes education not only of the students’ intellect and their feeling life, but also of their moral life – at a time when they begin to bear personal responsibility for their choices and actions.
As important as it is for students to be able to successfully enter into and empathize with the characters they play and work through various social knots through the medium of dramatic play, it is equally essential that students gain a visceral experience of their own individual selves. They must be able to “bump up against themselves” as it were, to re-establish boundaries between themselves and the world in a newly conscious way. In effect, dramatic work is the work of balancing the self with the other and, in this balancing act, we find a perfect reflection of the circumstances of real life. What is more powerful than the sense of self-possession a person acquires when she must be able to discipline herself to overcome personal anxiety, fear, lethargy, or the “mood of the moment” in order to play a role and do what must be done for the sake of the group?
Ongoing experience with the dramatic arts expands and strengthens the students’ sense of self and through this activity, true confidence grows. Viewed superficially, one could conclude that drama is a nice “bonus” for Waldorf students to carry with them to high school, where they will be able to audition for and win parts in high school productions. Of course, that is always an option, but it minimizes the essential nature of the importance of the dramatic arts for a Waldorf student who, having completed eight years of work in drama, has an advantage in high school even if they never attend a single audition.
A person who has worked through the medium of dramatic arts will be able to deeply listen to peers and adults and imagine themselves in the shoes of other. This capacity is essential for the construction of strong social bonds and it is a characteristic of all who would undertake to change the world for the better. A person who has been educated through the medium of drama will be able to respond flexibly in the moment, having practiced exercising such mobility and improvisation in class plays for years. When action is required, Waldorf students take initiative and follow through on their actions. Students who have been schooled through drama develop a sense of self that enables them to know what they need to do to accomplish their goals and accept the temporary sacrifice such self-discipline requires. Students who are used to pouring themselves into a character while simultaneously adhering to the wisdom of their inner voice are well-prepared to put their balanced intellect to academic pursuits. The living aspects of knowledge offered by their high school curriculum will be sought after, experienced fully, observed carefully, and then measured against the individual experiences each student has accumulated.
Through alternating sympathetic identification with the other and antipathetic interest in themselves, students educated through the dramatic arts gain the tools they need to shape and refine their judgment. By the time they become young adults, they are able to stride confidently onto the world stage and play the part they have come to play.
Written by Cynthia Way, Lead Teacher, Classes of 2009, 2018, and 2027