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Before I morphed into an English teacher, I
was a social worker for six years in Chicago. Teachers, in general, are
pretty keen about role playing. And there are always a handful of
teachers who jump into the role of “difficult” student. But usually they
are a source of comic relief more than an actual threat to the teacher’s
control within the role-played situation. Social workers are different.
When a social worker gets into the “difficult” client role, they take years of
pent up frustration and a deep understanding of human pathology and then focus
it like a laser of discontent on their poor coworker.
I remember one particular training on
personality disorders. Now personality disorders are messy things.
Think about it, personality disorder means just what it says, a person’s
personality, their core style of interacting with the world, is their
illness. One of my coworkers, a lovely woman by the name of Lucy, was
acting as if she suffered from passive aggressive personality disorder. I was her social worker. I asked her about her day and she
replied in a non-reply kind of way and slowly pulled a half eaten sandwich out
of her pocket. I tried to get her talking about her upcoming job
interview, but “P.A. Lucy” just methodically took her sandwich apart, layer by
layer until she had three nice piles laid out in front of her, one of bread,
one of sandwich meat, and one of lettuce. All the while a half-smile
played across her lips and she agreed haphazardly with everything I said,
including the suggestion that she put her sandwich away. I did not feel
like laughing. I’m pretty sure the other social workers in the room also
did not feel like laughing. We were all linked by a taught thread of
impatience, a desire to slap the sandwich pieces across the room.
So I was wondering about the connection between role-playing in social
work, teacher training and the language classroom. If we look at what the basic ELT literature has to say about
role-playing, we find out that it is classified as a social interaction
activity (Richards & Rogers, 1985), that it, "allows learners to
explore the effects of different contextual factors…on language,"
(Thornbury, 2006), and that it helps to activate a learners, "emerging
language skills." (Nunan, 2004).
Now if we replace the word "language" with "therapy"
or "teaching" I don't see much of a problem with how role-playing is
similar whether you are an English teacher, social worker or language student. Role playing allows us to contextualize
what we have learned and allows emergent skills to find further room for
expression and development. It
also provides students (and social workers, and teachers) with a chance to work
on fluency and accuracy; to not so much develop new skills, as to sharpen or
keep the ones already acquired in good working order.
In Moral Principles in Education, Dewey (1909) writes about a swimming
school where the students were taught to swim without actually ever going into
the water. When one of the
students was asked what he did when he finally did get into the water, he said
simply, "Sunk." There's
actually a Japanese saying, "Swimming training on the tatami
mat." It's usually used when
referring to someone who has only studied theory without attempting to put it
into practice. And perhaps that's
what makes role-playing so attractive to social workers and teachers. It lets us get off our tatami mats and
flounder around in the water, although teachers are much more likely to offer
each other a hand if things get choppy, while social workers take a little bit
of joy in pushing each other under.
But for language students, I think the attraction of role-playing is a
little different. Students are
continually constrained by the limitations of the classroom and these
environmental boundaries invariably rub up against the students' desire for a
more uninhibited form of expression. Role-playing offers students an exit from
the boundaries of the classroom.
When everything goes well, students can find themselves washed up on a
deserted island or making contact with an alien civilization. It's a psychic-affordance which is wholly dependant on the
students' imaginative capabilities and willingness to fully invest in a roll.
And once invested, I think that role-playing also serves as a kind of buffer
for the ego, allowing for greater risk taking than might otherwise be
possible. Which might explain, for
the most part, why during roles plays:
- (nice) social workers seems to get
nastier
- (disciplinarian) teachers revel in rule
breaking
- and (disaffected) students sometimes go
way out on a limb
and start show genuine signs of caring for each other…
(OK, I did my homework. I read and thought about what is positive about role-playing. Tomorrow I start to write about how
such a good idea could have gone so terribly wrong in my 5th period class
yesterday. Hope that brings you
back for post #2 on role-playing.)
Sources:
Dewey, J. (1909). Moral Principles in Education. The Riverside
Press: Cambridge.
Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge
University Press.
Richards, J. C. & Rodgers, T. (1986). Approaches and Methods in
Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Thornbury, S. & Slade, D. (2006). Conversation--from description to
pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.
