How theater pedagogy helps in school. Introduction to the theory of theater pedagogy Theater pedagogy and its specifics
Ticket number 11. The concept of “Theater pedagogy”.
Theater pedagogy is the involvement of children in active verbal communication, it is a diverse range of emotional experiences, it is a whole world where the child’s intellect is liberated.
Staging performances is not only a game and entertainment, it is one of the main methods of stimulating the creative activity of children and increasing the motivation of verbal communication. Children learn that actors in their work use the tools that nature has given them: body, movement, speech, gesture, facial expressions... Children try very hard to play a trusted role as believably as possible, and this is another incentive for the development of speech.
The introduction of theatrical activity into the educational process involves its use not as a means of entertainment, but as a method of stimulating the creative activity of children, where the teacher is focused on the child’s personality as a whole, and not just on his functions as a student.
theatrical activity allows you to develop the experience of moral behavior and the ability to act in accordance with moral standards. Theatrical activities eliminate painful experiences associated with speech defects and strengthen mental health, contribute to improving social adaptation.
Theater pedagogy puts emphasis on the process of training actors in the theater troupe, as well as on expanding the creative range of actors, both middle and older generations. In practice, educational work, teachers theatrical arts, is aimed at developing two important qualities in students: artistry and aestheticism. At the same time, it is believed that it is impossible to exclude any of the above qualities, giving priority to another, because, in the end, this will lead to the collapse of Tatra art. Children under 12 years of age will benefit from participating in plays. puppet theater, which will allow the child to be not only an actor, but also a stage director. The teacher will be able to examine the child’s inherent creative talents. After participating in a puppet theater, children may well be interested in dramatic theater.
Theater pedagogy as universal remedy education of Man.
Theater pedagogy has been used in educational activities since Antiquity. School and theater are very similar. Both the theater and the school create models of the world, these are small planets where people (you and I) and our children-students live - we communicate, interact, work, quarrel, and achieve certain results.
Children have no life experience, their social circle is mainly their peers with similar life experience, and our goal, the goal of the school, is to produce a socially adapted personality, comprehensively developed and harmonious. And I, as a teacher of Russian language and literature, an organizer of extracurricular activities, through trial and error, found the optimal way for the social adaptation of children - modeling life situations in which a graduate may find himself after leaving school, in class and extracurricular activities, using methods and techniques theater pedagogy.
Soviet teachers - Makarenko, Lunacharsky, Vygotsky - also spoke about the effectiveness of its use in educational activities. There is enormous interest in this pedagogy today. Example – annual municipal, regional, international festivals school theaters, of which we are successful participants. And this is a strong motivation for students.
Advantages: mastery of live spoken language, body and facial expressions, development of emotionality, feelings, empathy, the ability to feel a situation and get out of it, education of taste and sense of proportion, publicity, the ability to control an audience, interaction with others while maintaining individuality, immersion in another era and the proposed circumstances, success here and now are a universal means for educating a Person.
The specificity of theatrical art is such that from the first minute of communication to the final one (release of the performance), the teacher has a direct influence on the development, education and formation of the student’s personality. The choice of exercises, tasks, topics for sketches, conversations, and other forms and methods of teaching are aimed at developing the personality as a whole. A pianist has a piano, a violinist has a violin, and an actor has an “instrument” himself. How this “tool” will be “configured” depends on the personality of the teacher himself. The student may “sound up”, or may remain “closed” to the teacher for a long time. Of great importance are the teacher’s interest and love for children, his passion for pedagogical work, psychological and pedagogical vigilance and observation, pedagogical tact, pedagogical imagination, organizational skills, fairness, sociability, exactingness, endurance, and professional performance. In order to master the qualities listed above, it is necessary to study and master the patterns and mechanisms of the pedagogical process in theatrical activities. This will allow each topic or section to be divided into its component elements, to comprehend each part in connection with the whole, to find the main pedagogical problem and ways to optimally solve it. It is necessary to rely in your activities on scientific theory. There are not so many of them in theatrical art, unlike pedagogy. But you need to keep in mind that any scientific theory is a set of laws and rules, and practice is always specific and momentary. In addition, the application of theory in practice requires some theoretical thinking skills, which the teacher does not always have. Pedagogical activity is a holistic process based on personal acting and life experience, pedagogical methods, psychology, philosophy, etc., while the teacher’s knowledge is most often sorted “on shelves”, i.e. have not been brought to the level of generalized knowledge necessary to manage the pedagogical process. This leads to the fact that a teacher engaged in theatrical activities not under the influence of theory, but on the basis of superficial ideas about pedagogical activity in the theater, turns out to be helpless in a professional sense. Entertainment becomes the main thing, while the first place should be the formation of moral and value orientations, awareness of public duty and civic responsibility.
Theatrical activity is a collective activity. Without a mutually understanding teaching staff, there will be no good result. It is theatrical activity that forces you to work only with like-minded people. A teacher-choreographer, a teacher - in stage speech, in stage movement, in vocals - are united in the educational process and when working on the stage embodiment of dramatic material, they are obliged to work according to the same rules, to be like-minded people.
Nekrasova Lyudmila Mikhailovna
Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, theater specialist,
Leading Researcher,
supervisor problem group theater and screen arts
Institutions Russian Academy education
"Institute art education»,
Moscow
The concept of theater pedagogy is associated in Russia with creativity famous actors M. Shchepkina, V. Davydova. K. Varlamov and the director of the Maly Theater A. Lensky back in the 19th century. The theatrical pedagogical tradition itself began with the activities of the founders of the Moscow Art Theater K. S. Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. The goal of theater pedagogy is the professional training of the future actor and director. The legacy of K. S. Stanislavsky and his “system” of teaching acting and directing are the fundamental sources of the entire theatrical process to this day. In the works of such students of Stanislavsky as E.B. Vakhtangov, V.E. Meyerhold, M. O. Knebel, V. O. Toporkov, M. A. Chekhov, as well as in publications by directors A. D. Popov, B. E. Zakhava, P. M. Ershov, O. N. Efremov, G. A. Tovstonogov, A. V. Efros, theater pedagogy acquired its status and content, but did not go beyond the boundaries of a professional educational institution and the theater.
During the 20th century, theater pedagogy gradually and purposefully began to be mastered by another sphere - school education, which is directly related to children.
As a pedagogical phenomenon, the problem of “theater and children” dates back to the very beginning of the twentieth century. In 1915, a children's subsection worked as part of the All-Russian Congress of People's Theater Workers. Some of the materials about her were published in the magazine “People's Theater” in 1916 and 1919. From these documents it becomes clear that the activities of church and secular theater groups, professional theaters performing for children, amateur troupes, school theaters, as well as organizations that engaged in role-playing games with children, were considered as phenomena of the same order. The first repertoire collections “Home Theater” (1906–1913) and “The Curtain is Raised” (1914) appeared even before October revolution. And in 1918 and 1919, magazines and non-periodical publications began to appear, specifically dedicated to the topic of children's theatrical creativity: “Game”, “Theater and School”, “Plays for school theater", "Children's Theater".
In the 20s, many publications appeared on the topic “theater and children”, they were published in the publications “New Spectator”, “Life of Art”, “Rabis”, “Pedagogical Thought”, “On the Ways of a New School”, etc., but Problems of relationships between children and theater were still interpreted widely. The appearance of works by major figures in professional children's theater: A. A. Bryantsev, N. I. Sats, S. Ya. Gorodisskaya, S. M. Bondi, A. I. Solomarsky expanded the range of discussed problems, since they identified new topic: interaction of Theaters for Young Spectators with their audience, including children's theater groups.
In the thirties and forties, there was a certain decline in activity in discussing the problem of “theater and children” on the pages of the press. This was due to the specific historical situation existing in the country. Only repertoire collections that contain ideologically selected literary works. However, it was during this period that professional actors and directors came to schools and Pioneer Houses, who laid new traditions of the children's theater movement.
At the end of the forties, a theater laboratory was created at the Institute of Artistic Education of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR, which became a kind of center for research work in two areas: children's theatrical creativity and professional art intended for children. Since 1947, the laboratory begins to publish the scientific and methodological collection “School Theater,” which is dedicated to the problems of the theater in which children play, regardless of whether it operates at a school, the House of Pioneers, or a rural club. In the period from 1960 to 1986, the theater laboratory, together with the Cabinet of Children's Theaters of the All-Russian Theater Society (VTO), published scientific collections “Theater and School”. On the pages of the collections, directors, actors, and teachers discussed both the issues of interaction of professional theaters with their children and youth audiences (problems of perception of the performance, education of theatrical culture), and various forms of the presence of theatrical art in school.
In the 50–60s, the scientific research of the laboratory of the Scientific Research Institute of Chemical Arts had two main directions: children's theatrical creativity, including work on artistic reading and stage movement, as well as the study of the problems of professional theater for children and the perception of theatrical art by children of different school ages.
The 70s and 80s were years of active research into the possibilities of theatrical art, both as a tool for general artistic education, and as a search for the diverse use of theater as a means in the school educational process. At this time, the laboratory staff published two serious monographs that summarized the results of research over two decades: “Theater and the Teenager” by Yu. I. Rubina (1970) and “Fundamentals of pedagogical management of school amateur theater performances” [Yu. I. Rubina, T. F. Zavadskaya, N. N. Shevelev, 1974). It should be noted that both publications have not lost their relevance in terms of the ideas contained in them and their practical significance for modern theater teachers. In fact, the staff of the theater laboratory of the Scientific Research Institute of Art and Culture developed the concept of pedagogical management of amateur theater for schoolchildren.
The concept considered “the general orientation and objectives of theatrical art classes with children in a secondary school, the role and functions of the lesson leader, the connection of children's theatrical creativity with the basics of professional art, the possibility of teaching schoolchildren the basics of stage literacy.” In this sense, the use of theatrical methods in the classroom is effective not only in the study of drama, but also in the analysis of narrative and poetic works.
The literature lesson presented researchers with extremely diverse opportunities for including all schoolchildren in that sphere of acting and directing activity, which is associated with “awareness of one’s own attitude to the literary basis of the performance and is limited by the period of birth of the stage idea” (26, p. 22). Laboratory employee L.A. Nikolsky developed a model of a student’s director’s creativity in a literature lesson. It was based on “the principle of individual choice, the identification and integration by students of such figurative and emotional components and motives work of art, which, for subjective reasons or due to the relevance of their sound, attracted attention, seemed particularly significant or impressive in the endless richness of the multifaceted image of a play, story, short story, etc.” . And today, the patterns identified by the researcher in the creative searches of students and the problems of a theater director working on the concept of a performance seem extremely relevant:
1) an associative-figurative generalization of the perception of the play and an initial analysis of its emotional sound;
2) effective-motivational analysis of dramatic material:
a) identifying the main characters of the future performance, interpreting the motives of their behavior and the nature of their interaction;
b) determining the main episode of the play, revealing the event and structure of the action of this episode and its figurative system;
3) identifying the visual and musical images of the play, the nature of their stage embodiment.
As L.A. Nikolsky writes, “...for a student, solving each of the assigned tasks is a stage in the formation of his own idea for the performance and, at the same time, a stage in individual comprehension of the drama.”
It should be noted that it was in the 80s that the term “theater pedagogy” began to be actively used in the field of school education. Of great scientific interest in these years are the works of A.P. Ershova, which are devoted to the analysis of the problem of universal accessibility of theatrical and performing activities. The idea of widespread use of artistic and educational opportunities for theatrical creativity in secondary schools was successfully tested in the previous decade. The use of theatrical and creative methods in literature lessons was part of this educational direction.
Research at the theater laboratory in the 80s made it possible to prove that teaching theater arts in secondary schools effectively influences the educational process as a whole. Creative theatrical activities of all schoolchildren and the deepening of spectator culture “can significantly increase the level of emotional responsiveness and organization of students, their mobility and training of attention, memory, and a responsible attitude towards their words, deeds and actions.” Widespread experimental work and the introduction into teaching practice of methods developed in the laboratory proved that classes in theatrical performing arts have great educational potential as training and development different types communication and teamwork skills. “The “game of behavior” as a moment of acting art, arising at any point in the classroom space and constantly changing the places of spectators and performers, requiring collective coordination of actions, is a pedagogical tool unique in its structure.”
So, considering theater pedagogy as an interdisciplinary direction, we can highlight the following areas of its application:
- children's theatrical creativity in the form of amateur theater (school theater, studio theater, theater at the House of Creativity or other artistic association). Accordingly, training of specialists, directors and teachers working with children;
- theater lessons in the educational space of the school: the use of theatrical techniques and methods in teaching academic disciplines, theater lessons themselves. Accordingly, training existing school teachers in the basics of acting and directing and training specialists to conduct lessons at school;
- education of theatrical culture and study of the perception of theatrical art by children of different ages. Accordingly, training teachers in the basics of spectator culture.
It was in the 80s that the activity of a teacher-director or theater teacher became a special problem of the modern school. “Theater turned out to be the only art form in the school that was devoid of professional leadership. With the advent of theater classes, electives, and the introduction of theater pedagogy into general educational processes, it became obvious that a school cannot do without a professional who knows how to work with children, as has long been realized in relation to other types of art.” It should be noted that this problem has not been solved even after a quarter of a century. Professional personnel for theatrical work with children are not trained either in pedagogical or in theater institutes. The problem is being solved by the Institutes for Advanced Training of Education Workers, but this is not the subject of our consideration.
As a special case of solving this problem, we can consider the activities of the creative association “Moscow School Theater”, which was created on the basis of the Institute of Art Education in 1987. The Regulations on the Moscow School Theater say that it is “designed to assist Moscow schools in shaping the artistic, creative and spectator culture of children, strengthening the school’s ties with professional artists and providing organizational, methodological and advisory assistance to children’s theater groups.” For a decade, the Moscow School Theater became a scientific and methodological base in Moscow for regular advisory assistance to teachers-leaders of school theater groups who do not have professional training.
For this purpose, talented teachers, professional directors, actors, artists and playwrights were involved in working with children. The leaders of the Moscow School Theater set themselves the goal of qualitatively enriching the pedagogy of children's stage creativity, as well as introducing theatrical pedagogy into general education and educational processes at school. Unfortunately, the commercialization of some areas of additional art education, which began in our country in the late 90s, did not allow this association to be realized.
In the 80s, such a form of theater education and upbringing of schoolchildren as theater classes appeared and began to spread. A. P. Ershova and V. M. Bukatov, members of the theater laboratory of the Institute of Art and Culture of the Russian Academy of Education, who have been involved in the problems of theater education for many years, proposed their own classification of the experience of theater classes, based on the interpretation of the concept of “children’s theatrical creativity.” According to their characteristics, there are three types of theater classes:
- class clubs, “in which theatrical art is considered as a means of general development of schoolchildren”;
- class theaters, the activities of which “are based on the educational opportunities for schoolchildren to participate in the creation of a performance as an integral work”;
- class-school; the leaders of these schools “see the maximum benefit from the inclusion of the student in mastering the technique and literacy of theatrical art, i.e. rely on the educational possibilities of theatrical training."
The authors supported the then-current idea of the need to open theater departments in art schools. Organize the process of initial and secondary vocational education children is possible “only as a result of theater pedagogy’s awareness of its subject, the sequence of its development, the boundaries and possibilities of individuality at each age,” wrote the authors of the concept of theater education.
In the early 90s, the pedagogical community actively discussed the socio-game style of teaching, the origins of which were a team of teachers primary school– V.N. Protopopov, E.E. Shuleshko, L.K. Filyakina, and further development belonged to A.P. Ershova and V.M. Bukatov. Socio-game approaches were initially developed on the basis of teaching reading, writing and mathematics to children in primary school, as well as in classes with preschoolers in kindergarten. At the same time, socio-game techniques were also developed in teaching teenagers the theatrical and performing arts. At this time, the developing direction was actively enriched with techniques of theatrical pedagogy. The development scientists argued that socio-game approaches to teaching practice are characterized by a lack of discreteness; in them, didactic knowledge and advice are not divided into parts: principles and methods are separate, and the result is separate. “As the authors and developers of “socio-game pedagogy,” write A. P. Ershova and V. M. Bukatov in their monograph “Communication in the Lesson, or Directing the Teacher’s Behavior,” we had to hear that teachers, especially in primary grades, always used and use various – for example, didactic – games. But the socio-game style is the style of the entire teaching, the entire lesson, and not just one element of it. These are not separate “insert numbers”, this is not a warm-up, rest or useful leisure, this is the style of work of the teacher and children, the meaning of which is not so much to make the work itself easier for the children, but to allow them, having become interested, to voluntarily and deeply get involved in it.”
In many years of experimental work, in a large number of seminars conducted by researchers with teachers in different regions of the country, they combined two areas: the artistry of pedagogical work and the socio-game style of teaching. When these two directions were joined by hermeneutics, the study of which was carried out by V. M. Bukatov, a new, somewhat unusual and intriguing term for teachers appeared - “dramo-hermeneutics”. The authors of the study wrote that “drama-hermeneutics is a variant of teaching and educating the joint living of a lesson by all its participants, including the teacher. As a direction in pedagogy, it is still awaiting its detailed description, further development and wide dissemination.”
Drama-hermeneutics arose at the interweaving of three spheres: theatrical, hermeneutic and pedagogical. In each area, central positions were chosen. In the theater it is communication, effective expression, mise-en-scène; in the hermeneutic – individuality of understanding, wandering, strangeness; in pedagogy – humanization, exemplary behavior, dichotomy. The authors emphasized that “drama-hermeneutic definitions are not characterized by rigid discreteness; they are emphatically conditional in nature, naturally “flowing” into each other and being reflected in each part of the integrity.”
It should also be noted that the direction of the research activities of the theater laboratory is devoted to the study of the problem of the child’s relationship with professional art. This direction was widely reflected in the research of A. Ya. Mikhailova, devoted to the study of spectators of primary school age, and the works of Yu. I. Rubina, covering the whole spectrum of the problem of “theater and the young spectator”. Back in the 70s, the theater laboratory successfully solved the main problems of aesthetic education through the means of theater. It can be argued that the laboratory actually studied the process of theatrical education, considering as mandatory components of the latter, the unity of live stage impressions and certain knowledge about the theater, direct spectator experience and its critical understanding. The process of theatrical perception is carried out at several levels - from the direct aesthetic and emotional experience of the performance to its subsequent interpretation and evaluation. As researchers point out, each of these stages of perception requires special skills and special training, ultimately leading to a holistic judgment about the performing arts.
Based on data from a study of children's artistic interests conducted by the Institute of Artistic Education of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1974, 1983), the laboratory solved the problem of developing schoolchildren's need for theatrical art. The need for a particular form of art is determined to a large extent by the skills of using this art. The program of the so-called “aesthetic decade” in the field of theater presupposed, on the one hand, an appropriate structure of the theatrical repertoire, taking into account the needs and capabilities of various age groups of spectators, and, on the other, a systematic and thoughtful introduction to this repertoire for schoolchildren. For both theatrical and pedagogical practice, the issues of the age orientation of performances, the specifics of the stages of child development and the age-related characteristics of artistic perception become extremely relevant.
Based on a generalization of many years of experimental experience, the Laboratory is developing a set of programs dedicated to the education of theatrical culture for schoolchildren of different ages: “Fundamentals of Theater Culture” (1975), “Fundamentals of Theater Culture for Schoolchildren” (1982), “Theater” (1995). The widespread introduction of programs into the practice of secondary schools requires a teacher with theatrical knowledge and performance analysis skills. That is why seminars on spectator culture, lesson directing, and theatrical and playful teaching techniques, conducted by laboratory staff, are so in demand.
In conclusion, I will give one more quote from the monograph of my colleagues: “Upbringing and teaching are inextricably linked with the teacher’s ability to influence students during communication, influence their actions, stimulate their positive activity and restrain negative activity. These skills go beyond the scope of any applied subject methodology and constitute a pedagogical technique, which clearly must be based on a culture of action and interaction. And this is precisely the subject of the theory and practice of theatrical art.”
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The audience I'm addressing are music teachers, visual arts and the Moscow Art Theater, and not at all the heads of school theaters. Nevertheless, we will talk about theater pedagogy, and, it seems to me, this is for all teachers educational field“Art” is equally interesting and relevant. Because theater pedagogy is, first of all, “how”, not “what”.
But first, a small digression.
In pitch darkness
Imagine waking up after a nightmare in complete darkness and having absolutely no idea where you are. And just as you begin to move your hand to touch what’s there next to you, a stern, dry voice commands: “Don’t move! Lie still and listen. I will tell you where you are and what is around you." And they really do tell. But any movement of yours is strictly suppressed. And all around is impenetrable darkness. What picture of the world appears in your imagination? Agree that it is creepy.
From the pitch darkness, distorted and blurry outlines of incorporeal objects float towards you. They appear in a chaotic order, intangible, weightless, tasteless and odorless. They do not fill space and at the same time can appear unexpectedly at any point in it. Fantastic, unreal and fragmented world.
As you might guess, this is exactly the world that should arise in the imagination of a schoolchild under the traditional teaching system.
A man sits motionless at his desk and listens. He must sit still and believe that the world is exactly as he is told it is. He cannot touch and smell a flower or taste a fruit that he is taught about in biology class. He cannot himself experience the sensation of speed or the force of friction that is discussed in physics class. And at every lesson he hears about some new phenomena that are completely disconnected from each other, intangible, and therefore unrealistic. A scary, alien, fragmented world.
The lessons of the educational field “Art” seem to be conceived in such a way as to put together a broken picture of the world, to help a young person feel the warmth of this world, to help him find his own place in this whole, multi-colored and harmonious world. However, a serious contradiction arises between the tasks and means of execution. It would seem to go without saying: in order to help a person understand the whole picture of the world, it is necessary to allow him to be holistically involved in the process of cognition. His body, soul and intellect must participate in this process equal rights. All six senses must be involved in this process. The cognizable must be imprinted in muscle memory, in the sensations of taste, smell and touch as actively as in abstract concepts. Only then will a bright and holistic image emerge.
But in fact, in art lessons, as in all other school lessons, most often we ask children to assimilate information rather than perceive holistic images. And we suggest that you absorb this information primarily by ear. One can, of course, argue that in an art lesson a child not only listens, but also creates, that in a music lesson he sings, that in the Moscow Art Theater he looks at pictures and listens to music. However, let's be honest: 90% of the time the child still sits or stands motionless, even if he sings and draws. His body is limited in its cognitive capabilities, and his mechanical memory and intellect are endlessly overloaded.
Path of knowledge
Let's think about simple facts. What kind of education did the flower of the Russian nobility receive in the best Russian educational institution - the Lyceum? Agree that Pushkin did not teach the biography of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol and all those who followed them until the end of the 20th century. The lyceum students also did not study the periodic table, organic chemistry, electromagnetic induction, and had no idea about the study of functions and other similar wisdom. They, of course, studied languages and ancient cultures more than the average modern schoolchildren. But the lyceum students were not average schoolchildren.
Today, the program of humanitarian lyceums also includes languages and ancient cultures to a significant extent. And if we talk about the program of the Tsarkosye Selo Lyceum as a whole, then in terms of the volume of information it was approximately equal to the program of our 5th–8th grades. And, besides studying at a desk, there are walks, dancing, fencing and other various physical exercises, not once a week for one hour. And also collective games and creative activities: publishing magazines, French language days, etc. So what? Did all the lyceum students manage to assimilate the entire volume of information offered? We know very well that nothing like this happened. Pushkin, for example, had a “zero” in mathematics. And, by the way, no one was particularly worried about this.
And today's average schoolchild is required to master much larger volumes of information, while limiting him in movement, play and opportunities for individual choice. Isn’t it ridiculous to demand from a certain Sasha Ivanov what Sasha Pushkin could not cope with and what his brilliant classmate Sasha Gorchakov had difficulty coping with?
Meanwhile, psychologists, anthropologists and historians explain that our brain is no different from the brain of our ancestors, those Homo sapiens who began to explore this world about 40 thousand years ago. The capabilities of intelligence and memory have not changed at all, but their load has increased enormously.
And here another paradox arises. Our distant ancestors, who did not possess even a hundredth of the information that we possess today, discovered almost all the fundamental laws of the universe. Even today we rely on the knowledge possessed by the sages of the first civilizations. The life of an individual person is similar in this regard to the life of all humanity. We learn fundamental laws in the first years of our life, when significant amounts of information are completely inaccessible to us. Neither an archaic person nor an infant experiences information and intellectual overload, and at the same time they manage to master the most complex laws of existence and recreate a holistic and harmonious picture of the world in their minds. Why? How?
The answer is obvious. The baby and our distant ancestor comprehend the world holistically: they recognize it by touch, inhale it and taste it with their tongue. The body and soul collect and imprint information, this information is cast into a holistic image, and only then the mind and intellect realize and analyze this image, this holistic reality. Cognitive loads are evenly distributed among all the mechanisms of cognition inherent in a person. Cognition proceeds in the natural way that was determined for man by nature or God. This is holistic figurative cognition.
This is precisely the path of knowledge that theater pedagogy offers.
Based on game action
Actually, the very concept of “theater pedagogy” is very conditional. Teachers at theater universities mean by these words the system of actor education. Managers theater studios- raising a child through theatrical art. We mean something different, we interpret the term broadly.
Theater pedagogy in secondary schools, of course, is based on play. However, play here is a necessary but not sufficient condition. When we talk about theatrical pedagogy, then, firstly, we mean playing with images.
Let us explain with an elementary example. There is a game of “tag” - in itself it has nothing to do with theatrical pedagogy, but we can turn it into a theatrical game, for example, into the game “magic wands”. How? Very simple. Each one holding an imaginary magic wand is in his hands. By touching the person with it, he is free to turn him into someone else. For example, at an acute corner, if we are playing in a mathematics lesson, or as a punctuation mark, which must find its place in a sentence consisting of “greasy words”, if we are playing in a Russian language lesson. If I was insulted, I will move, live and act like what I was turned into, I will accept its form, its character, its logic of action. I will try to imagine and embody a complete image of my character.
However, playing with an image is not necessarily a role. You can listen to music and transform the musical image into a visual one, or express it in dance. And this will also be a game with the image.
The presence of a role setting is the second condition for the existence of theatrical acting and theatrical pedagogy. Of course, you can turn into a ciliate slipper, an electron or a Greek slave and realize the role-playing setting through the actor’s creation of the image. But you can implement the role setting in the lesson in a different way, for example, through activity motivation.
Take, for example, the situation from feature film“Pharaoh” and set before each student the task that faces the main character of the film. Each student is an ancient Egyptian architect. He knows the tomb protection system that was used before the construction of the Cheops pyramid (the child is given a reference text with pictures). He (the child - an ancient Egyptian architect) must determine the weaknesses of this protection and come up with a more reliable design. If he is able to complete the task, he will receive a reward (in the form of a grade or otherwise - as the teacher comes up with), and if he does not complete the task, he will fall into long slavery (for example, he will have to complete some additional task at home). In this case, the child does not need to wear a chiton and chains, and does not need to use sticks and papyrus for drawing. His role setting will not be developed through acting means, but will become the main motivation for his creative activity.
And one more condition: theater pedagogy organizes the lesson according to the laws of art, and not according to the laws of free children's play. After all, play, according to psychologists, is an unproductive and undirected activity that has no spatiotemporal boundaries. A theatrical game is another matter. This is a conscious creative process aimed at creating a final creative product that has clear space-time boundaries. As a result of each lesson, the class - the creative team - achieves a very specific result, enshrined in an artistic image.
In the example we gave above, an exhibition of “ancient Egyptian pyramids” projects is being created. With equal success, a lesson can end with a dance of transforming galaxies, a collection of autobiographical stories “from the life of insects,” a performance by a noise orchestra of a steel foundry, and so on and so forth.
The above principles allow us to call this technique “theatrical pedagogy”: it is the creation of a holistic image based on game action, role-playing, in the process of collective creativity, organized according to the laws of art, involving the possibilities of all types of art.
Nine principles
Naturally, the basic techniques of “theater pedagogy” were discovered in the depths of primitive culture. After all, the ancients, as we have already said, did not know any other way of understanding the world except holistically and figuratively. What kind of techniques are these?
First. Active, effective forms of presenting and assimilating material (the same game), and among the ancients - a ritual. Like this? Very simple. The simplest and most famous example is the spell for a successful hunt. The youth are divided in the ritual into game and hunters. In addition to its sacred meaning, ritual play also has a very practical meaning. The habits and psychology of the animal are studied and hunting skills are trained.
Second. Surprise in the presentation of material. Surprise contributes to the formation of a positive attitude towards the perception of the material and activates the possibilities of perception. The surprise of the ancients lay primarily in the fact that the situation of obtaining knowledge was surrounded by deep secrecy. And this situation has never been repeated. We are talking, for example, about an initiation rite, when young men find themselves in a secret cave or some other “house of their ancestors.” They go there blindfolded. In the wavering light of torches, they look at secret signs that they will never see again, they hear unusual “voices of their ancestors”, telling them secret information that they will never hear again. And they leave the “ancestral home” again blindfolded.
A modern teacher cannot unfold such a game in full every day. Although sometimes you can play like that. But the teacher can easily realize some surprise in the presentation of the material, at least at the level of intriguing intonation.
Third. The emotional significance of the material for the student and teacher. An example from the archaic - again, a ritual. If the entire tribe, from the leader and shaman to the children who are not yet full members of the community, do not exactly fulfill their role in the ritual, the gods will not send the tribe what it needs to live. The emotional significance of what is happening for the teacher (shaman) and the student (young man) is the same. In a modern school, the emotional significance of the material for the student and teacher depends on the teacher’s ability to apply educational material to real life - his own and the child’s. It would be too cumbersome to give examples here. But it is in this case that most teachers know many ways to solve the problem.
Fourth. Plot structure of the lesson. The plot of most archaic rites is the same, but fundamental: birth, death and rebirth for a new life. The plots of our lessons can be infinitely varied, but it is desirable that they be just as strong, have a clearly defined plot, climax and denouement. The plot of the lesson is well organized by search activity: movement from the unknown through the crisis of the search path to the acquisition of knowledge.
Fifth. Role-playing game. This point seems to require no explanation. In the ritual, each participant plays his own role: an animal, a plant, a natural spirit, a ancestral deity or another person - this is clear to everyone. ABOUT role-playing game We already talked at school. However, there are also significant subtleties here. The performer of the role in the ritual protects himself from his character with a mask, makeup and costume. Precisely it is protected, because for the duration of the ritual the spirit being portrayed inhabits the mask, or, if you like, the mask. artistic image, and not into the body of the person playing. And this is an essential principle for the school: do not confuse image and personality. This principle has long been successfully used by correctional pedagogy. It is not Vasya who can solve problems, but Buratino, played by Vasya. And it is not Masha who teaches him wisdom, but Malvina. This removes the fear of failure and intellectual pressure. But is this a principle of interest only in correctional pedagogy? This is only the tip of the problem of the relationship between the child and the role, but it is not possible to talk about it deeply and seriously here.
Sixth. Holistic inclusion of the individual. The principle is also well understood. A primitive student, studying, say, the habits of an animal, spends hours watching it from a hiding place, feeling it, sniffing its tracks, learning to imitate its voice and habits. Each teacher’s task in a modern school can be formulated differently so that the individual is included in the learning process holistically. In particular, the methods of socio-game and interactive pedagogy, to which a fairly large amount of pedagogical literature is devoted, work very well to implement these tasks.
Seventh. Revealing the topic through a holistic image. This is fundamental for archaic pedagogy. Every action carried out by a person in life is an episode of a single chain by which gods, spirits and living beings are connected. Each ritual action implies the establishment of this holistic dialogue, assistance to the entire system of the universe in the harmonization of its relations. Here it is appropriate to recall the plot again: birth, death, rebirth. Whether the ritual is about the reproduction of ostriches, the path of man, or the annual solar cycle, the basis is always the image of the birth, destruction and rebirth of the world. This is exactly what the modern lesson sorely lacks. The problems of the world through the prism of today's topic, a separate fact or phenomenon - that's what we should strive for.
Eighth. Focus on collective creativity. It is not an individual child who grows in a tribe, but a cohort, a brotherhood, an entire age group. This group is connected by sacred, family and partnership relationships. They are collectively responsible for the viability of the tribe tomorrow. And at the same time they are not leveled. Roles and responsibilities are distributed among them depending on their individual capabilities. For children in today's classroom, it is extremely important to feel like they belong to a group, to feel like individuals, and individuals now, today, participating in the process of creating social values.
Ninth. Focus on achieving the final creative result. As a result of any ritual, gods and people reach an agreement on some events. Each age group makes its own discoveries and leaves behind new cultural signs, which later become part of the cultural baggage of the community. Nothing is done just like that. Everything is aimed at achieving a specific and necessary result. In our modern classroom, knowledge is very often given for future use and is not implemented in specific activities. This naturally reduces motivation and efficiency. We have already discussed above how to organize activities so that they produce a specific final creative product.
The mystery of the artistic image
Each era has made its own contribution to theater pedagogy. Here, alas, there is no opportunity to talk about this. But the foundations, of course, are laid in the archaic.
In our minds, the archaic world, archaic culture and archaic knowledge are associated with shamanism. And based on this, it is easy and logical to accuse theater pedagogy of shamanism. There is no need to deny that this is not possible without shamanism. However, what is shamanism?
The heroine of Terry Prachchet's modern fairy tale "The Spell Makers" - the village witch, Mother Weatherwax, starting to teach the secrets of witchcraft to a young student, invites the girl to explain what is magical about her witch's hat. The girl looks at the strange structure made of wire and an old rag and comes to the following conclusion: “You wear this hat because you are a sorceress. But on the other hand, this hat is magical because you wear it.” The witch recognizes the girl as very capable.
Why? And actually because the girl was able to understand the secret of a holistic artistic image. This is the basis of shamanism and the basis of art pedagogy.
The synthetic nature of theatrical art is an effective and unique means of artistic and aesthetic education of students, thanks to which children's theater occupies a significant place in common system artistic and aesthetic education of children and youth. Preparation of school theatrical productions, as a rule, becomes an act of collective creativity not only of young actors, but also of vocalists, artists, musicians, lighting technicians, organizers and teachers.
The use of theatrical art in the practice of educational work helps to expand the general and artistic horizons of students, general and special culture, enriching aesthetic feelings and developing artistic taste.
The founders of theater pedagogy in Russia were such prominent theater figures as Shchepkin, Davydov, Varlamov, and director Lensky. Qualitatively new stage in theatrical pedagogy he brought with him the Moscow Art Theater and, above all, its founders Stanislavsky and Nemirovich - Danchenko. Many actors and directors of this theater became prominent theater teachers. In fact, the theatrical pedagogical tradition that exists to this day in our universities begins with them. All theater teachers know the two most popular collections of exercises for working with students of acting schools. This is the famous book by Sergei Vasilyevich Gippius “Gymnastics of the Senses” and the book by Lydia Pavlovna Novitskaya “Training and Drilling”. Also wonderful works by Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky, Mikhail Chekhov, Gorchakov, Demidov, Christie, Toporkov, Dikiy, Kedrov, Zakhava, Ershov, Knebel and many others.
Noting the crisis of modern theater education, the lack of new theatrical pedagogical leaders and new ideas, and, as a consequence, the lack of qualified teaching staff in children's amateur theater performances, it is worth taking a closer look at the heritage that has been accumulated by the Russian theater school and in particular the school theater. and children's theater pedagogy.
The traditions of school theater in Russia were established at the end of the 17th - beginning of the 18th century. In the middle of the 18th century, in the St. Petersburg land gentry corps, for example, special hours were even allocated for “teaching tragedies.” Students of the corps - future officers of the Russian army - acted out plays by domestic and foreign authors. Such outstanding actors and theater teachers of their time as Ivan Dmitrevsky, Alexey Popov, brothers Grigory and Fyodor Volkov studied in the gentry corps.
Theatrical performances were an important part of the academic life of the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens. Moscow University and Noble University Boarding House. Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum and other elite educational institutions of Russia.
In the first half of the 19th century, student theater groups became widespread in gymnasiums, not only in the capital, but also in the provincial ones. From the biography of N.V. Gogol, for example, it is well known that while studying at the Nizhyn gymnasium, the future writer not only successfully performed on the amateur stage, but also directed theatrical productions and wrote scenery for performances.
In the last third of the 18th century, children's home theater, the creator of which was the famous Russian educator and talented teacher A.T. Bolotov. He wrote the first plays for children in Russia - “Praise”, “Rewarded Virtue”, “Unfortunate Orphans”.
The democratic upsurge of the late 1850s and early 1860s, which gave rise to a social and pedagogical movement for the democratization of education in the country, contributed to a significant intensification of public attention to the problems of education and training, and the establishment of more demanding criteria for the nature and content of educational work. Under these conditions, a heated discussion is unfolding in the pedagogical press about the dangers and benefits of student theaters, which began with an article by N.I. Pirogov “To be and to appear.” The public performances of high school students were called “a school of vanity and pretense.” N.I. Pirogov posed the question to youth educators: “...Does sound moral pedagogy allow children and young people to be exposed to the public in a more or less distorted and, therefore, not in their real form? Do the ends justify the means in this case?”
The critical attitude of the authoritative scientist and teacher to school performances found some support in the teaching community, including K.D. Ushinsky. Some teachers, based on the statements of N.I. Pirogov and K.D. Ushinsky, even sought to provide some kind of “theoretical basis” for prohibiting students from participating in theatrical productions. It was argued that pronouncing someone else's words and depicting another person causes antics and a love of lying in the child.
The critical attitude of the outstanding figures of Russian pedagogy N.I. Pirogov and K.D. Ushinsky towards the participation of schoolchildren in theatrical productions was apparently due to the fact that in practice school life There was a purely ostentatious, formalized attitude of teachers towards the school theater.
At the same time, at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, a conscious attitude towards theater as the most important element of moral, artistic and aesthetic education was established in domestic pedagogy. This was largely facilitated by the general philosophical works of leading Russian thinkers, who attached exceptional importance to the problems of the formation of a creative personality and the study of the psychological foundations of creativity. It was during these years that in Russian science (V.M. Solovyov, N.A. Berdyaev, etc.) the idea began to be established that creativity in its various expressions constitutes a moral duty, the purpose of man on earth, is his task and mission, that it is the creative act that pulls a person out of a slavish, forced state in the world, and raises him to a new understanding of being.
Research by psychologists who stated that children have the so-called "dramatic instinct" “The dramatic instinct, which is revealed, judging by numerous statistical studies, in children’s extraordinary love for theater and cinema and their passion for independently playing all kinds of roles,” wrote the famous American scientist Stanley Hall, “is for us teachers a direct discovery of a new force in human nature ; the benefits that can be expected from this power in pedagogy, if we learn to use it properly, can only be compared with those benefits that accompany the newly discovered power of nature in people’s lives.”
Sharing this opinion, N.N. Bakhtin recommended that teachers and parents purposefully develop the “dramatic instinct” in children. He believed that for preschool children raised in a family, the most suitable form of theater is the puppet theater “comic theater of Petrushka,” shadow theater, puppet theater. On the stage of such a theater it is possible to stage various plays of fairy-tale, historical, ethnographic and everyday content. Playing in such a theater can usefully fill free time child under 12 years of age. In this game you can prove yourself to be both the author of a play, staging your favorite fairy tales, stories and plots, and a director and an actor, playing for all the characters in your play and a master needleworker.
From puppet theater, children can gradually move on to a passion for dramatic theater. With skillful guidance from adults, children's love of dramatic play can be used to great advantage in their development.
Introduction to pedagogical publications late XIX- the beginning of the 20th century, statements by teachers and children's theater workers indicate that the importance of theatrical art as a means of educating children and youth was highly appreciated by the country's pedagogical community.
The First All-Russian Congress on Public Education, held in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1913-14, paid interested attention to the problem of “theater and children,” at which a number of reports on this issue were heard. The resolution of the congress noted that “the educational influence of children’s theater is felt in full force only with its deliberate, purposeful production, adapted to child development, worldview and to national characteristics of this region." “In connection with the educational impact of children’s theater,” the resolution also noted, “there is also its purely educational significance; dramatizing educational material is one of the most effective ways to apply the principle of visualization.”
The issue of children's and school theater was also widely discussed at the First All-Russian Congress of People's Theater Workers held in 1916. The school section of the congress adopted an extensive resolution that touched upon the problems of children's, school theater and theater for children. In particular, it was noted that the dramatic instinct, inherent in the very nature of children and manifested from a very early age, should be used for educational purposes. The section considered it necessary “that in kindergartens, schools, shelters, school premises at children’s departments of libraries, people’s houses, educational and cooperative organizations, etc., an appropriate place should be given to various forms of manifestation of this instinct, according to the age and development of the children, and namely: the organization of games of a dramatic nature, puppet and shadow shows, pantomimes, as well as round dances and other group movements of rhythmic gymnastics, dramatization of songs, charades, proverbs, fables, storytelling, the organization of historical and ethnographic processions and celebrations, staging children's plays and operas.” . Taking into account the serious educational, ethical and aesthetic significance of the school theater, the congress recommended the inclusion of children's parties and performances in the school's program of activities, and the initiation of petitions to the relevant departments for the allocation of special funds for the organization of school plays and holidays. When constructing school buildings, the resolution noted, it is necessary to pay attention to the suitability of the premises for staging performances. The congress spoke about the need to convene an all-Russian congress on the problems of children's theater.
Advanced teachers not only highly valued the possibilities of theater as a means of visual learning and consolidation of knowledge acquired in school lessons, but also actively used a variety of means of theatrical art in the everyday practice of teaching and educational work.
Everyone knows the interesting theatrical and pedagogical experience of our great theorist and practice of pedagogy A.S. Makarenko, talentedly described by the author himself.
Interesting and instructive is the experience of educating pedagogically neglected children and adolescents using theatrical art, gained by the largest domestic teacher S.T. Shatsky. The teacher considered children's theatrical performances as an important means of uniting the children's team, moral re-education of “street children”, and introducing them to cultural values.
Theater pedagogy and its specifics
Theater is a stage action that occurs during the performance of an actor in front of an audience. Pedagogy is the science of human upbringing, revealing its essence, the laws of upbringing and personality development, the process of education and training.
Theater pedagogy is a way of personality development in the process of education and training through the process of play, or stage performance, where individual development comes from freedom of choice through responsibility to the joy of self-expression.
Goals and objectives:
Creating a condition? for the comprehensive and harmonious development of children?, the revelation of their talent? and abilities?;
Attracting children? To musical art and development of interest in vocal and theatrical skills;
Increasing the level of viewership? and performing? culture;
Cultivating artistic taste and familiarization with modern forms of musical art;
Unlocking creativity? children's individuality? through theatrical forms of self-expression.
Oh. A. Antonova
GAME SPACE OF EDUCATION: SCHOOL THEATER PEDAGOGY
The article proposes a new interdisciplinary direction - school theater pedagogy; the prospects for its development are analyzed; The stages of inclusion of theater in the educational space of the school are considered.
School theater pedagogy is an interdisciplinary direction, the emergence of which is due to a number of sociocultural and educational factors.
The dynamics of socio-economic changes, the development of processes of democratization of public consciousness and practice give rise to the need for
a person capable of adequate cultural self-identification, free choice of his own position, active self-realization and cultural-creative activity.
It is at school that the formation of personal self-awareness occurs, a culture of feelings is formed, the ability to communicate, mastery of one’s own body, voice, plastic expressiveness of movements, a sense of proportion and taste is cultivated, which is necessary for a person to succeed in any field of activity. Theatrical and aesthetic activity, organically included in the educational process, is a universal means of developing a person’s personal abilities.
The processes of modernization of the domestic education system take into account the relevance of the transition from the extensive method of simply increasing the amount of information included in educational programs to the search for intensive approaches to its organization.
The need to build a new type of school that meets society’s need for a cultural personality, capable of freely and responsibly choosing their place in this contradictory, conflict-ridden, dynamically changing world, is becoming more and more clearly recognized in the philosophical and cultural literature. Apparently we're talking about about the formation of a new pedagogical paradigm, new thinking and creativity in the educational field. A “culture-creating” type school is born, building a unified and holistic educational process as a child’s path into culture1.
The basic principles of cultural pedagogy coincide with the principles of theatrical pedagogy as one of the most creative in nature. After all, the goal of theater pedagogy is to emancipate the psychophysical apparatus of the student.
ka-actor. Theater teachers build a system of relationships in such a way as to organize “maximum conditions for creating extremely free emotional contact, relaxedness, mutual trust and a creative atmosphere”2.
In theater pedagogy, there are general patterns of the process of teaching a creative personality, which can be purposefully and productively used for the purpose of nurturing the creative personality of both students and future school teachers.
What does the term “school theater pedagogy” include? Being part of theatrical pedagogy and existing according to its laws, it pursues other goals. If the goal of theater pedagogy is the professional training of actors and directors, then school theater pedagogy is aimed at nurturing the personality of the pupil and student through the means of theatrical art.
We propose to denote by the term “school theater pedagogy” those phenomena in the educational process of schools and universities that are in one way or another connected with theatrical art, are engaged in the development of imagination and imaginative thinking, but not in the pre-professional training of actors and directors.
School theater pedagogy involves:
Creating a performance not as a goal, but as a means of education for the emotional and sensory sphere of the student;
Inclusion of theater lessons in the school educational process;
Training of specialists to conduct theater lessons at school;
Teaching students of pedagogical universities the basics of directing;
Training school teachers in the basics of directing.
Each of these blocks, in our opinion, represents extremely fertile ground for researchers, theorists and practitioners: teachers, psychologists, directors, theater experts, etc.
In modern pedagogy, the possibilities of school theater can hardly be overestimated. This type of educational activity is known as a genre and was widely and fruitfully used in school practice in past eras - from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age. The school theater contributed to the solution of a number of educational tasks: learning live colloquial speech; acquiring a certain freedom of circulation; “learning to speak before society as speakers and preachers.” The school theater was a theater of usefulness and action, and only incidentally - a theater of pleasure and entertainment.
In Russia, the traditions of school theater began to take shape in the first half of the 17th century in schools that created “brotherhoods” that advocated for a national unique culture, language, literature and way of life.
In the 20s of the 18th century, a school theater arose in St. Petersburg, at the school of Feofan Prokopovich, who writes about the importance of theater in school with its strict rules of behavior and the harsh regime of the boarding school: “Comedies delight young people with a harsh life and a prison-like conclusion”3.
In the middle of the 18th century (1749), a school theater was organized in the St. Petersburg gentry cadet corps.
Sumarokov's first tragedies and comedies were performed on the stage of the Gentry Corps Theatre. At the end of the 40s, performances of tragedies were organized in the corps, in which theater lovers from among the cadets participated. Per-
At one time, French tragedies were performed in the cadet theater French. Performances were staged not only within the walls of the building. The cadets also played in the Opera House for the courtyard. In 1749, the cadets performed the tragedy “Khorev”. From the beginning of 1750, by order of Empress Elizabeth, cadets began performing Sumarokov's plays at court.
The repertoire of the cadet theater expanded. At the end of 1750 and at the beginning of 1751, performances of Lomonosov's tragedy “Tamira and Selim” took place. Elizabeth was captivated by the performances of the cadet theater. “The Empress herself, apparently, became involved with this troupe...,” writes Catherine II in her Notes. “She was not at all tired of watching these tragedies performed; she herself took care of the actors’ costumes.”
In 1783, schoolchildren of the Cadet Noble Corps organized a festival, which included the erection of a triumphal column, allegorical figures, and living paintings.
“A new breed of people, free from the cruel mores of society”4, was the dream of Catherine II, and the theater played a huge role in the education of Smolnyanka and future artists at the Academy of the Three Most Noble Arts. The teaching of theater arts continued to be included in the curriculum.
Performing arts were taught not only in the Corps of Gentry, theological colleges and seminaries, but also to students of the Imperial Academy of Arts. The initiative in this case belongs to the students themselves: in 1764 they turned to their superiors with a request to allow them to play comedies and tragedies. In response to this, I. I. Betskoy wrote in the order: “To avert the thoughts of students during idle times from boredom causing gloominess and for
preventing them from engaging in the most unacceptable pranks: if they wish, allow them to play comedies and tragedies at the Academy of Arts, for which purpose a small theater is ordered to be built in a convenient place.”
The theater was no less zealously promoted by the Society of Noble and Bourgeois Girls at the Novodevichy Smolny Convent (later the Smolny Institute).
Performances in Smolny began with the fact that on November 28, 1770, on the occasion of the arrival of the King of Prussia, Prince Henry, a masquerade was given at court, in which up to 3,600 people took part. Following the first performance at the end of 1771, the Smolnyans acted out Voltaire’s tragedy “Zaire” at their monastery.
The delight from the performance of the Smolnyankas was caused by a whole series of circumstances. Firstly, the enthusiastic and sentimental tendency of minds that characterizes the 18th century played a role; then, of course, interest in the fate of the Smolny Theater was fueled by the empress’s disposition towards him. Further, the modern love of theater played a huge role; and, finally, a “flower garden” of young girls, who, moreover, were still studying various sciences, was a novelty and, of course, amazed the imagination.
“In fairness, one must be surprised,” says an eyewitness, “at the naturalness of any representation and the expression of such different characters both in the pronunciation of speeches and in the body movements of the characters, who satisfied this foreign matter so completely for them, as if it had been their main thing for several years already.” exercise" (St. Petersburg Gazette, 1775, November 30).
Another eyewitness gives a similar review: “They played, sang and danced,
He writes with such skill as can only be seen in famous actresses, singers and dancers” (Spectator of Light, 1775, December, p. 74).
In the 60s of the 19th century, when a wave of reforms captured all spheres of Russian life, not excluding pedagogy, the issue of school theater again became relevant. The problem of the school performance worried pedagogical thought; Various approaches to its repertoire were proposed, its functions were discussed, doubts were expressed about the benefits of the theater, up to its complete denial.
The overwhelming majority of teachers and theater workers were unanimous in their opinion about the importance of theater in the education and upbringing of young people, both within the walls of educational institutions and beyond. Their activities convincingly demonstrated the possibility of combining pedagogical requirements and aesthetic goals.
Pedagogical practice, ahead of theoretical thought, has shown that it is not only possible, but also useful to allow children and young people to play on the public stage. Only the stage acting must remain truthful and sincere, helping the young person “to be” and not “to appear.”
The first All-Russian Congress of Stage Workers, held in Moscow in 1897, paid a lot of attention to the problems of school theaters. The report of N.I. Timkovsky says that education does little to prepare a person for the perception of genuine artistic values, because “art slips into school as a smuggler, fearfully looking around and even ashamed of oneself... What a wonder if people brought up in this way. .. having gone out into life, they attack card games, gossip, drunkenness, or feed on vulgar counterfeits using
art, dismissing serious theater?”5.
At the Second Congress of Stage Workers (March 1901), not a word was said about the school theater.
For the development of theater in educational institutions Russia in the second half of the 19th century is characterized, firstly, by the fact that performances were not an end in themselves, but a means of educating students, and, secondly, on a small stage, without any luxury and tinsel glitter, without imitation of professional theater, sincere and serious educational activities were created. actions.
Along with teachers, professional theater figures also spoke about the importance of school theater. For example, A. N. Ostrovsky, in his note on amateur performances, noted the great benefits of performances of the classical repertoire in educational institutions. They are given “not for the development of acting abilities in young artists... in such performances performing arts not a goal, but a pedagogical means:
classical languages, classical literature
ratura".
A special place in the history of theater pedagogy is occupied by the works of Nikolai Nikolaevich Bakhtin, whom his contemporaries called an encyclopedist in matters of school theater. Here are just some of the problems that worried him:
The role of children's theater in the educational process;
Educational value school theater;
Specifics of school performances;
School theater repertoire;
The need to “build schools not
otherwise than with auditorium» .
The art and pedagogical magazine in ten issues for 1910 publishes articles by N. N. Bakhtin dedicated to
repertoire of children's performances. In 1912, “Review of plays for children’s and school theater”9 appeared in the “Russian School”, and in 1914 in the art and pedagogical magazine - “Review of children’s operas”10.
All the fruitful activities of N. N. Bakhtin in the field of aesthetic and moral education of children through the means of theater still await their in-depth study.
Activists of Russian theater and pedagogy came to the conclusion about the need to introduce art into the educational process of school and to train teachers in pedagogical educational institutions who could carry out this task. The first All-Russian Congress of People's Theater Workers, which took place in Moscow from December 27, 1915 to January 5, 1916, paid a lot of attention to solving these problems. In the school theater section specially created by the congress, three reports and seven reports from the field were heard and discussed, and decisions were made on many creative and organizational issues.
In the first years of Soviet power, interest in school theater did not fade. In the spring of 1918, the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat of Education in Petrograd organized a permanent Bureau, and then a periodically convened Council of Children's Theater and Children's Celebrations, which included both theater workers and non-school teachers. This was the first government body to deal with issues of children's theater.
Thus, school theater as a special problem has its own history in domestic and foreign pedagogical thought and practice.
Theater can be both a lesson and an exciting game, a means of immersion in another era and the discovery of the unknown.
new facets of modernity. It helps to assimilate moral and scientific truths through the practice of dialogue, teaches one to be oneself and the “other,” to transform into a hero and live many lives, spiritual collisions, and dramatic tests of character.
Creative Group, including university teachers (Russian State Pedagogical University named after Herzen, Faculty of Human Philosophy; St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts; Russian Institute of Art History), heads of school theaters, professional actors and directors, developed a project for the St. Petersburg Center “Theater and School”, the purpose of which is:
Interaction between theater and school, realized through the organic inclusion of theatrical activities in the educational process of city schools;
Inclusion of children and teachers in the creative process, formation of school theater groups and their repertoire, taking into account the age characteristics of the participants, as well as the content of the educational process;
Interaction between professional theaters and schools, development of theater subscriptions focused on the educational process.
The uniqueness of the project lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt is being made to unite the efforts of all creative organizations and individuals involved in school theater work.
School theater pedagogy today is a subject of intense interest, with pedagogical searches being carried out in various directions and with varying degrees of success.
IN modern processes related to the formation of school theater pedagogy, we can highlight several
independent directions that are presented in Russian schools:
1. Schools with theater classes.
Theater lessons are included in the schedule of individual classes, because in every school there is always a class that seems to be predisposed to theatrical activities. It is these classes that often form the basis of a school theater group. Usually this work is carried out by humanities teachers.
2. Schools with a theatrical atmosphere, where theater is a subject of general interest. This includes an interest in the history and modernity of the theater, and a passion for amateur amateur theater, where many schoolchildren take part.
3. The most common form of theater existence in a modern school is a drama club, which models theater as an independent artistic organism: selected, talented children who are interested in theater participate in it. His repertoire is arbitrary and dictated by the taste of the leader. Being an interesting and useful form extracurricular activities, the drama club is limited in its capabilities and does not have a significant impact on the organization of educational work as a whole.
4. Children's theaters outside of school represent an independent problem, but their methodological findings can be successfully used in the school process.
5. It is especially worth noting schools where theater is included in the number of major artistic disciplines.
Some schools have managed to attract a large group of professionals, and the Theater lesson is included in the curriculum of all classes. Indicative in this regard is the experience of secondary school No. 174 in the Central district of St. Pe-
Terburg, on the basis of which the experimental program “Theater Pedagogy at School”11 was developed.
In other schools, theater lessons are introduced either in primary school or from grades 1 to 7.
Childhood and youth need not only and not so much a theater model, but a model of the world and life. It is within the “parameters” of such a model that a young person is able to most fully realize and test himself as a person.
“By connecting such subtle and complex phenomena as theater and childhood, it is necessary to strive for their harmony”12. This can be done by building with children not a “theater” or a “team”, but a way of life, a model of the world. In this sense, the task of the school theater coincides with the idea of organizing a holistic educational space of the school as a cultural world, where it, the school theater, turns out to be a universal pedagogical tool. In this world, theater realizes its educational functions with renewed vigor, fully influencing the individual, becoming an artistic and aesthetic educational act, showing its uniqueness and depth, beauty and paradox.
Pedagogy is also becoming “theatrical”: its techniques gravitate towards play, fantasy, romanticization and poeticization - to everything that is characteristic of theater, on the one hand, and childhood, on the other. In this context, theatrical work with children solves the actual pedagogical problems, including both the student and the teacher in the process of mastering the model of the world that the school is building.
In this sense, the model of a cultural-creative school, developed at the Department of Aesthetics and Ethics of the Russian State Pedagogical University named after. A. I. Herzen. Here we propose a concept focused on the development of personality re-
bank according to the idea of correlation between onto- and phylogeny13. And then the school theater unfolds as a method of introducing the child into world culture, which takes place according to age stages and involves problem-thematic and targeted integration of the disciplines of the natural sciences, socio-humanitarian and artistic-aesthetic cycles. The work of the school theater here can be considered as a universal way of integration.
School theater appears as a form of educational artistic and aesthetic activity that recreates life world, settled by a child. And if in a role-playing game, whose name is theater, the goal and result is an artistic image, then the goal of a school theater is significantly different. It consists in modeling the educational space to be mastered. Based on the idea of differences in the educational world at the age stages of personality development, it is important to determine the specifics of school theater at these levels, accordingly building a methodology for theatrical and pedagogical work.
When starting this work, the school staff should clearly understand the possibilities and place of the school theater in a particular school, with its own traditions and ways of organizing the educational process. Then you have to choose and build existing and possible forms: lesson, studio, elective. It seems to us that a combination of these three forms is necessary.
The developmental function of theater has specific manifestations depending on the age of the child and the nature of his theatrical and creative passion.
The first stage of theater education (junior grades) is associated with children’s theatrical activities in the classroom and outside.
cool work. Particularly promising is the introduction of the integral lesson “Theater” into the primary school curriculum. It can be called differently: “The Beginning of Theatre”, “Theater Games” (more modest than “Acting” or “Stage Movement”).
At the first stage, the theater serves to master the syncretic world of fairy tales and is focused on understanding the language of culture and nature. In junior school age, when we are dealing with the relevance of kinetic forms of perception and mastery of the world, the syncretism of the worldview, when the child does not yet separate the living and the inanimate, animating, “humanizing” things and phenomena of reality, play is the most important (if not the only!) way of understanding the world. The child perceives the world with the whole complex of his abilities: sensory, rational, emotional, associative. All receptors are active. This period is characterized by linguistic dominance, teaching cultural languages: speech, gesture, facial expressions, plastic arts, the language of fine arts and music. “The syncretism of worldview correlates with playful theatrical activity”14. Here you can play everything: animate the elements (fire, water, earth); imagine the world of animals and plants; play the alphabet and even the multiplication table; become the hero of a fairy tale or myth.
Middle age is characterized by an experimental impulse, the development of speech and analytical thinking, and an interest in “we” more than in “I.” Without repeating or duplicating, but by updating and adjusting, clarifying and animating educational material, the theater emphasizes the imagination, analytical abilities, and verbal and plastic abilities of children. At this age, when the syncretism of worldview is broken in favor of the active formation of conceptual
thinking, school theater works in creating images of culture, historically successive pictures of the world.
At older (youthful) ages, problems of self-awareness and issues of relationship in the “I and the world” system are relevant. There is a need to obtain a holistic understanding of the world and a sense of oneself in it. The task of theatrical creativity coincides with the youthful search for oneself, providing the developing personality with a full and adequate connection with the world and with oneself in this world. Compositions on moral themes(Good and Evil, Love, Memory, Poetry, etc.); topics of citizenship and legal culture. And, of course, an appeal to classical and modern dramatic material. In high school, theater education is based on the interaction of all components of the system: in-depth work in literature classes, the elective “Fundamentals of Theater Culture,” and finally, the school theater studio.
So, the inclusion of the art of theater in the educational process of school is not only the good desire of enthusiasts, but a real need for the development of a modern education system, which moves from the episodic presence of theater in school to systematic modeling of its educational function. There is no doubt that even in the first steps of a school in this direction, theater can become a means of increasing the effectiveness of pedagogical efforts and results.
However, it must be taken into account that we do not propose to “saturate” the system of theater education in school with all possible forms and methods, but to give the school a choice depending on the experience and passion of the teacher and students.
Problems of professional and methodological training of school theater teachers-directors. Modern reform processes in education, the obvious tendency of Russian schools towards independent pedagogical creativity and, in connection with this, the actualization of the problems of school theater give rise to the need for professional training of a teacher-director. Such personnel, however, were not trained anywhere until recently.
Let us note that “in the pre-revolutionary years in Russia, teaching in real schools and gymnasiums was allowed to specialists of any profession who had completed pedagogical courses”15.
There is interesting foreign experience in this area. For example, in Hungary, children's theater groups are usually organized on the basis of a school and have a professional leader (every third group) or a teacher trained in special theater courses.
Theater specialization for persons from 17 to 68 years of age who want to work with children is offered at a number of community colleges in the United States. Similar initiatives are taking place in Lithuania and Estonia.
The urgent need to put theatrical work with children on a serious professional basis does not question the priority of pedagogical goals. And it is even more important to preserve that valuable thing that noble non-professional enthusiasts and subject teachers look for and find in children’s theatrical creativity.
The teacher-director is a special problem of the modern school. Theater turned out to be the only art form in the school that lacked professional leadership. With the advent of theatrical
classes, electives, with the introduction of theater pedagogy into general educational processes, it became obvious that the school could not do without a professional who knows how to work with children, as has long been realized in relation to other types of art.
The activity of a teacher-director is determined by his position, which develops from the position of a teacher-organizer to a colleague-consultant at a high level of development of the team, representing at each moment a certain synthesis of different positions. In the constantly ongoing debate about who he should be, a teacher or a director, in our opinion, there is no antithesis. Any one-sidedness, be it an excessive passion for staged discoveries to the detriment of conducting normal educational work or, conversely, ignoring the actual creative tasks of the team, when the spark of creativity goes out in general conversations and similar rehearsals, will inevitably lead to aesthetic and moral contradictions.
A teacher-director is a person capable of active self-correction: in the process of co-creation with children, he not only hears, understands, and accepts the child’s ideas, but actually changes, grows morally, intellectually, and creatively together with the team.
Based on the Department of Aesthetics and Ethics of the Russian State Pedagogical University named after. A. I. Herzen has developed a new professional and educational profile “School Theater Pedagogy”, which will train a teacher capable of organizing educational theater and play performances in school and optimizing the development of the values of domestic and world culture.
NOTES
1 Valitskaya A.P. Education in Russia: strategy of choice. St. Petersburg, 1998.
Stanislavsky K. S. About the art of theater. M., 1982.
Vsevolodsky-Gerngross V.N. History of the Russian theater. L.; M., 1977. P. 299.
4 Ibid. P. 27.
5 Proceedings of the first All-Russian Congress of Stage Workers. St. Petersburg, 1898. Part 2. pp. 2279-282.
6 Ostrovsky A. N. Complete. collection Op. T. 16. M., 1953. P. 108.
7 Bakhtin N. N. About children's theater // Russian school. 1913. No. 9. P. 51-63.
8 Bakhtin N. N. Repertoire of children's performances // Artistic and pedagogical magazine. 1910. No. 5, 8, 12, 14-17.
9 Bakhtin N. N. Review of plays for children's and school theater // Russian School. St. Petersburg, 1912. No. 3. P. 36-38.
10 Bakhtin N. N. Review of children's operas // Artistic and pedagogical magazine. 1914. No. 22. P. 3309-313.
11 Serdakov E. G. The next lesson is theater! // Children's theater is serious! St. Petersburg, 2002. pp. 84-86.
12 Sazonov E. Yu. Theater of our children. M., 1988.
13 Valitskaya A.P. Education in Russia: strategy of choice. St. Petersburg, 1998.
14 Vygotsky L. S. Imagination and creativity in childhood. St. Petersburg, 1997.
15 Vsevolodsky-Gerngross V.N. History of theater education in Russia. St. Petersburg, 1913.
SCHOOL THEATER PEDAGOGY
A new interdisciplinary trend is proposed: school theater pedagogy, its development and stages of introducing theater in the educational space of the school are analyzed.