Riding Lights Theatre Company and Manor CE Secondary School in York used their CARA award to investigate how radio interview techniques and drama activity could help a group of Year 9 pupils develop awareness of and empathy for a community issue ? the closure of the Terry?s Chocolate Factory after 238 years of chocolate-making in the city. The school worked with two radio producers from BBC York and pupils were selected from history and drama classes, approximately 50% from each. Part of the intention was to observe how drama pupils learned from history pupils and vice versa. Altogether, there was a strong emphasis on the ?exchange? of learning and teaching ? from adult to adult, adult to child, child to adult, and from child to child.
Pupils began by researching the history of the factory and, with guidance from BBC York, interviewing people connected to it, including Sir Peter Terry, workers now facing redundancy as a result of the closure and a former employee who started work at the factory in 1926. With the material this generated, pupils then worked with Riding Lights Theatre Company to devise, rehearse and perform a dramatic script based on their findings.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for the adult team was to record and measure the development of pupils. They devised a questionnaire that enabled pupils to comment on the project at different stages. The wording did not, however, use the word ?empathy?, in the hope that pupils would allude without prompting to their empathetic involvement with the factory closure. A debate at the halfway stage provoked a passionate exchange of views, providing incontrovertible evidence of pupils? immersion in the project and deep feelings about the issues involved. Questionnaire responses also increasingly showed evidence of this.
CARA gave teachers and their creative partners at Manor CE Secondary School the opportunity to develop a close relationship, reflect on what was happening within the project and amend their plans accordingly. Close observation of pupils paid off: it became clear that some pupils gained more from certain activities than from others; that pupils were ? as the organisers had hoped ? learning from each other; and that many pupils had unsuspected qualities and skills which more conventional teaching methods fail to bring out. So would the school do something similar again? The answer is a definite ?yes?, but ? as befits an action research project ? with different subject areas and a few modifications to the methodology.
Sheila McGregor is a writer and freelance arts consultant.
For further information on CARA, contact CAPE UK t: 0113 200 7035; e: cara@capeuk.org