The Mantle Of The Expert

Part of our students training is based on Dorothy Heathcote’s “Mantle of the Expert”. Her method was hugely effective to prepare invisible theatre, where it was necessary to work with quality improvisation techniques.

Mantle of the Expert is an educational approach that uses drama and inquiry to create imaginary contexts for learning. Teachers work in collaboration with their students to generate fictional settings that are used to study the curriculum and to develop knowledge, skills, and under- standing across wide subject areas.

The aim is to make curriculum study engaging and meaningful, and to place the classroom community at the centre of the learning process. It is not child-led in the sense that the students make all the decisions; rather it is a collaborative approach, where the teacher and the students work together to build the context and to generate purposeful activities for learning.

The teacher starts by selecting and planning the imaginary context based on three interlinking factors: the curriculum to be studied, the interests of the students, and the resources available.

The students are then cast as a team of experts – people with specialist knowledge and responsibility – within the fiction who work for a client, who commissions them to perform a range of tasks in pursuit of a specific aim or project. These tasks are then used across the curriculum to create meaningful and engaging activities for learning.

PLANNING MODEL

Stage 1: foundations

Step 1 Choose a theme

Step 2 Create an overview of the students’ learning

Step 3 Make a list of things that make the theme interesting

Step 4 Generate questions for inquiry

Stage 2: The context

Step 5 Invent a narrative: include tension, location, and time

Step 6 Select the expert team, and create a list of powers, responsibilities, and values

Step 7 Decide on the client, and their role, purpose, and authority

Step 8 Devise the commission

Step 9 Consider other points of view

Stage 3: Activities and curriculum links

Step 10 Make a list of team tasks and classroom activities

Step 11 Link the tasks and activities to the national curriculum

Stage 4: the start

Step 12 Plan a sequence of steps into the fiction

Wild Animals - an example

This piece of drama is set in a fantasy world where wild animals start behaving as humans. At first, humans get shocked by what’s going on but, step by step, animals want to fight for their rights to be treated as humans, with the same laws and opportunities.

The scheme structure overview

TV Show: the presenter asks about the strange things happening in their guests’ home with some wild animals.
Working in pairs, students pick up a wild animal and they have to embody that animal telling their partners what happened yesterday with humans.
Again, work in pair session. A is the chosen animal and B is a psychiatrist who has to give advice to his patient animal
Meeting at the townhall with political parties, pro and against animal rights to decide what to do
Proposal to the Prime Minister by the townhall
Wild animal living with his human “owner”. The wild animal must decide if s/he goes to the demonstration or stay home.

Description of the activity

Five students are chosen and seated on chairs on a front row. They don’t know what’s going to happen and the only instruction they have is that they have to agree to what the teacher is saying. The teacher embodies a tv presenter and make up stories about shocking situations: a man gets back home and find a giraffe in the bathtub after having breakfast; another guest might have found a talking lion trying to comb his hair, and so on.
Each participant chooses to be a wild animal. They are matched in pairs and each animal must tell his own story with their human encounters. It’s important that animals behave as humans, walk like humans. Participant must act as they are, not like animals.
After a while, student A is the animal who find it difficult to get integrated in human life and B is a psychiatrist who has to give advice. Then they swap roles. Some animals want to live with humans, some want to live their own life, others can’t stand the human he’s living with, some others feel so happy living with humans but they feel they are traitors towards their own species.
The townhall must make proposals to give to the Prime Minister. Some parties are pro wild animal rights, some parties against. Participant must be chosen randomly and it’s only after being chosen that they will know the party they belong to. They know that a demonstration is going to happen in the following days. Animals are claiming for their rights and they have to argue about how to organize the city: animals living with humans, creating ghettos for animals, having the same work rights, what’s happening with resources, etc.
A list of proposal and resolutions must be ready to be given to the Prime Minister (the teacher), who is going to ask for an explanation for each proposal that must be defended by the townhall.
Just two actors in this part of the drama piece. The demonstration is about to happen. The animal lives with a human being. They feel very closed and attached to each other. Besides, the human being lost his wife because of a terrible decease and has nobody else in the world. The human gets back home and find the animal feeling a bit sad. The animal wants to go to the demonstration because he has strong feelings about fighting for animal rights but he knows that if he goes it’s very unlikely he’ll get back home. Both of them know it. They have to perform a dialog: the human being is trying to convince the animal not to go because he is the only thing left in his life and the animal loves the human being but he feels that if he doesn’t go will be a traitor towards his species. When the teacher thinks it’s the right moment will count 30 seconds down and nobody knows if the animal will leave or stay. It’s only the actor who decides what to do according to the improvisation of the dialog.