Democracy Over-Ruled, or how to deny young children's agency and voice through drama!

Abstract

Stephen, a character in James Joyce's (1922) famous novel Ulysses, explains to the central character, Leopold Bloom, that mistakes are portals of discovery. Here Joyce offers a positive view of mistakes-one that suggests that errors are an important means of gaining new insights within both our personal and professional worlds. If this is the case, and I like to think that it is, then in order to journey through this portal, a vehicle is needed. This vehicle is reflection-that sometimes painful process that forces us to look closely at our experiences, both positive and negative, in order to take advantage of the learnings inherent within them. In this chapter, reflections, both shared and individual, are used to help me identify and make explicit new understandings about pedagogy, power, children's agency and voice and somewhat surprisingly, about research. Set within the context of an early years' classroom where I participated in a small-scale research project, the mistakes described here occurred as I worked simultaneously as both practitioner and researcher. Aimed at examining the connections between play, drama, literacy and narrative, this case study research was focussed on a series of process drama, play and literacy experiences designed for a group of 6-year-old children. I had never met these children prior to the start of the research work, although I had met with their teacher who was involved in the planning process. The experiences themselves were based upon a created about two young children who encounter a community of "little people;' while the lesson sequence, as planned, included opportunities for the children to generate written texts in response to the tensions inherent within the story and experienced during drama and play episodes. I had successfully used this plan and narrative previously when working with young children and I was therefore confident that the children would be engaged and interested. Before describing the major mistake central to this chapter, together with the smaller ones that led up to it, in the section below I outline three categories of mistakes relevant to classroom drama.