The most recent learning facilitation work has been undertaken with doctoral students, namely Ernie Blackmore (English, University of Wollongong), Frances Laneyrie (Management, University of Wollongong), and Robyn Thompson (Education, Univer-sity of Canberra). The work takes place in the facilitator’s office, which in reality operates as a theatre. An electronic whiteboard occupies a wall and serves as a theatre scrim upon which to talk out our thoughts and draw them on the board. This board is not state of the art; it does not connect to a computer, and it does not record voices. Consequently, sessions are recorded, and students take both tape recording and type with them when they leave. It is not always quiet and demure in this theatre/office; it gets intense and stormy at times (receptionists camped adjacent to the office sometimes object to the work because they cannot hear their phone conversations).
The tape recordings, scrim drawings, and the physical movement and interaction between student and facilitator all contribute to the students’ telling of the stories that ultimately become their PhD theses; Ernie has coined the term “literary dramaturgy” for describing this process. Robyn experienced the process in a theatre that heavily relied on butcher’s paper pinned up to the balcony of her house as she brought her thesis to completion. Russell’s work processes were utilised by Robyn as a single site case study for her thesis. Others have experienced it as we have drawn with sticks in the red hot earth of north east Arnhem Land and the north west of the Kimberly.
The process does not require high levels of technology if you have people who can read and write and transcribe what is said or acted out into text in a timely fashion.
However, the participants need to be really dedicated to the task because of the sheer physical demands and the time required for transcription. Ernie and Frances have a collection of tapes that they have yet to transcribe, but more importantly they retain images generated as a result of the experience in the theatre of Russell’s office. The images are dated and provide a log of (access to) the conversations which transpired.
Also, the drawings and their development act as much more than simply providing a log or a reflective space. As Ernie says, “the process is diminished when we do not have immediate access to the text — text that is synchronised with our voices, not a machine-synthesised voice, what’s more.”
The white board process enables us to work quickly and spontaneously and to take risks with thoughts that we could not do if sitting and writing. Writing is slow and laborious and frequently requires “arse glue” isolation and demands that we express our thoughts and what we want to say through the tips of our fingers on a key board, pen, or pencil; moreover, it requires us to be stationary, fixed in front of a computer or book in which we record. Alternatively, the drawing, talking, and writing process allows us to physically move and to use and be aware of our voice levels, body postures, and language, as well as the way we position ourselves in relation to each other and to “the scrim”, within the theatre of our work. Awareness of our positioning in relation to each other, the scrim/whiteboard, and the forecourt or stage of our working theatre (the office floor) allows us to read each other’s body language and emotional responses. It allows us to observe and practice protocols of challenge without confrontation and aggression, for emotional violence to be contained, and for superior/inferior positioning to be handled in a way that safety and generative relationships are enhanced. There is no place
for loss of face because we are able to flow and become used to evolving rather than forming fixed positions. Fixity is not entertained, and direct eye contact and the challenge of posture and gesture is used within cross-cultural bounds. There is no escape as we are focused in a way that reorients the learning environment to conditions for learning focused on the student and the facilitator acquiring language and making meaning by co-production.
The theatre of our work and, in particular, the scrim or screen and the forecourt of our theatre upon which we place, stir, boil, construct, and project our work allows us to record and layer the evolution of the argument. Printouts allow us to locate where our diversions fit in the overall of the pastiche. This visual location and tracking of argument provides a good deal of security for risking our diving into and developing a part. The doing allows us to know how to locate and shift as we develop the whole; it definitely enlivens the process. The sharing of the pen and the eraser greatly enhances the collaborative role — one pen user at a time. The person with the pen has the talking and painting stick. Each person is not independent; we are in relationship with the other in the drawing-talking-writing of this white board theatre. Each person realizes that what is unfolding or evolving is mutually dependent on the other, in other words, a co-production or collaborative enterprise. It fits with a traditional process of developing, teaching, and sharing knowledge. No one holds the key to “the knowledge” or to knowledge production. We focus on co-creation, interdependence, and knowledge dissemination similar to the theatre of ceremony where bark paintings are developed and utilized in the conduct of indigenous ceremonies. Confrontation, conflict, and creation are contained within the theatre of healthy mutual inter-dependence and co-production.
The white board theatre process allows exploration to be concretized, pictured, and reworked at speed because the stored image provides a record that allows the fear of losing or forgetting or being distracted to be accommodated.
The process is particularly suited to a thesis because it is about the who, how, what, where, when, with whom, costs, and benefits of urban indigenous voices, and the role of contemporary theatre in the development and conduct of these voices.
Ernie: There have been any number of walks around the campus, for whatever reason, and many of these walks have been an extension of the work in the “theatre” space that is your office. And on many occasions, although not as many as ought to have occurred, the tapes continued to role. Under these circumstances, other localities became the theatre, including many visits for lunch to Food Re-Thought, where we used their paper tablecloths as substitute whiteboards. It is interesting to note that when we returned to the “theatre” of your office the discussions continued with the white board being very quickly drawn back into the process, as it allowed for the arguments to be presented to and into a “safe”, familiar, trustworthy, but most of all a familiar place where there was a feeling that judgement was on hold. This sense of “freedom” then permits the free flow of ideas and information from both student and facilitator.
Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Rumi (A Great Wagon, c1250).
The movement and the confrontation that can take place through the theatre or the
“literary dramaturgy” should not be underestimated. It invokes movement by allowing all participants to collaboratively utilise the many different conceptions or ideas and fields that are encrypted and present in the fragments of their individual and collective drawing, gesture, and speech. Most of all, it allows the participants to explore and depict the relationship between what is and what is becoming; it enables an understanding of relationships.
Frances: The drawing can be a lengthy process. It is not about getting the picture right;
it is about defining and putting the parts down in an image and then getting them
… or drawing the relationship between them so that the relationship is right for me. Spending all the time getting the drawing or the relationships between the elements of the image right allows the writing to flow because I have the structure and the relationship/interrelationship sitting not just before my eyes — I have it in my mind and my body. My body remembers how I put it together; it is also the physical process and the relationship process with the physical layout of Russell’s totally shambolic office, which almost comes up to the state of mirroring my private working space at home. I can see the positioning of ourselves before the electronic white board, and I can also associate the emotional state that is present as I produce the drawings and depict the relationships. The emotional content is that I identify with my thoughts as interviewer and empathize with the interviewee in my study. Synthesis of my identification and empathy produced moments of awareness, clarity and acceptance that led to the action of drawing.
Having gone through a similar sense of awareness to that being shared by the interviewees (in my study) and have that reflected back to me provided the light bulb moment As the drawing and the talking led to the awareness at the forefront of my mind, that awareness was drawn and accepted.
Drawing in the theatre provides a mechanism or task for bringing seemingly unconnected ideas, concepts, theories, and experiences into a visual image, and then I am able to talk to the image, record it, and then use that as a basis for writing. The unpacking of the meaning and the connections in the image provides for a well-articulated space, an interactive space, because it allows for a conversation and a shared drawing space that leads to the production and knowing of something that would otherwise not have been generated.
It should be pointed out that the drawings referred to above are artefacts and texts.
They are a concrete expression, the embodiment of a principle, an abstract idea. The drawings are part of a semiotic mediation process that is housed in the literary-dramaturgy (the semiotic mediation process also applies to movement and dance). The drawings are even more powerful when read and used as a thinking device and a basis for building further text and meaning through dialogue with self and others. Importantly, the drawings are representative of what the drawer knew at the time of drawing, and are tools for creating a platform for further coming to know and extending the upper bounds of the drawers’ ZPD. The drawings made in the literary-dramaturgy process are also part of a co-production.
It is no coincidence that the emphasis throughout is on the importance of all writing (all research) being about story, a developing story, a story of becoming. It is the belief
of the authors that life is a story, and that the tasks involved in the process that underlies the DTW software in many ways provides a technology that facilitates narrative development and narrative therapy processes. It also parallels language development processes in children and adults, particularly the way in which private speech or internal speech is used, and the impact that voicing or putting thought into words changes the mental processes or development.
In Ernie’s experience, the literary dramaturgy process provides him with the safety to write:
Many attempts have been made (to write), but if you’re not safe you’re not safe, and the resources are not resources. You have to join at the heart and the spirit and the soul. Safety is essential to enabling people to ‘go within in order to go without’ and ‘to go without in order to go within’; safety to go into the secret space within themselves so that they can begin to prepare their story, the private space (to) access and assemble the story. Safety provides the means of going through the (seemingly) impenetrable barrier to the theatre of work that houses the potential.
…the accepted norm is the written word, black print on a white page. …We do allow ourselves as adults to use visual aids, photographs, paintings, movies, videos, electronically and print-generated images to convey messages, Cartoonists tell stories in pictures without words, … I can create the image and then use my verbal account to develop the text.
There have been times when Ernie has been absolutely stuck, unable to begin work.
At this point, the learning facilitator has drawn a story or put an image on the board and proceeded to use the image to “spark up” or “kick start” the process. The following saying (aphorism) appears on the top of Russell’s white board that evokes a picture that fits with the narrative process:
In order to go within you have to go without; In order to go without you have to go within.