Abstract
This study addressed one of the problems in the teaching of African languages in teacher education programmes in South Africa, namely, how do student teachers assemble a toolkit with a diverse set of pedagogical tools? In an era when ‘play-based learning’ receives much attention, the pedagogical power of classroom theatre is not recognised as much as other forms of play in the classroom. At the outset, the study claimed that writing plays for classroom production could enrich the pedagogical repertoire of future teachers. Specifically, about two indigenous languages that are on the University of Johannesburg’s curriculum, playwriting in Sesotho and isiZulu was the focus. Added to that, the expansion of learners’ vocabulary of AI-related terminology was considered a viable focus in 2020, when the study commenced, focusing on the everyday discourse of the students.
The modality of classroom theatre, and the playwriting that it encompasses, were argued as important components of future teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), accentuating developmental psychology knowledge for teachers as a vital component of their knowledge of learners (Shulman, 1986, 1987). The possibility of creating a signature pedagogy Shulman (2005) for playwriting was considered an important outcome of the study. Lev Vygotsky’s model of cultural-historical psychology served as a model for such an activity, emphasising the discourse of Vygotsky’s research, with its root in his work in the Moscow Art Theatre (Veresov, 2017). The study was framed in a bifocal model of pedagogic content knowledge and a signature pedagogy, with the intersection of learning and acting in a play as an important component of the framework, which includes the knowledge of what the Vygotskyan concept of a ‘zone of proximal develop’ comprises. The study includes discussions about drama as an educative medium, specifically ‘theatre for learning in the classroom’.
In the design of a case study, the researcher investigated her practice as a practitioner researcher who was a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg. She i) investigated the students’ classroom theatre artefacts and ii) conducted focus group interviews with participating students about their experiences during the semester course of 18 weeks.
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In the findings that emanated from the analysis of the data, it was evident that the students had learned how to write classroom theatre plays and how to do that by working in small collaborating groups, in an online format. Moreover, their engagement in the activity highlighted that they had moved from applying basic beginner author skills to completing pedagogic plays that are usable in primary school classrooms. With that, they had reached ‘higher mental functions’ (Vygotsky, 1978) in their ‘zone of proximal development.’ The findings also showed that the students had experienced perezhivanie (Fleer & Veresov, 2017; Veresov, 2004), meaning that they had an experience in which their intellectual work had blended with their emotional experience of the task.
The study has contributed not only with a playwriting model but also with suggestions for several applications of classroom playwriting and theatre. The findings imply that playwriting in students’ home languages to teach curriculum content may be an undervalued modality in teacher education.
Keywords: playwriting; vocabulary; drama; Sesotho; isiZulu; zone of proximal development; AI terminology; remote learning.