Teaching with many acts: curriculum as theatre.

Storytelling is an ancient and honorable act. An essential role to play in the community or tribe.

--Russell Banks

 
Circus as Prologue 
 
    All the world's a stage, 
    And all the men and women merely players: 
    They have their exits and their entrances; 
    And on man in his time plays many parts ... 
 
    (Shakespeare, 1623/1970) 

I tried to leave the earth behind, by walking on a tight wire erected above a stage, by hanging from my knees on a bar above a primary colored landscape. Changing my external form so the internal form would reflect my needs. It was an exploration of air. An exploration of the ethereal, unreal, surreal, truly the circus. I literally ran away to join the circus; running away from my earthly commitments of the "good sister," the stable "one," and the grounded responsible "one." I joined a community of players. The name of our merry band was chosen based on the Vaudevillian premise that P's and K's are the funniest letters in the alphabet. So as The Pickle Family Circus, we worked to challenge, support, excite, inform, and change our audience ... and we had just an hour to do it.

Autobiography, according to Madeline Grumet, is the method by which curriculum is reclaimed and reconceptualized. She suggests that in the process of "selection of some events and the exclusion of others", that we can see our own "processes and biases at work" (Grumet, 1980/1999, p. 25). In the process of evaluating my own life choices, the choice to be teacher, the choice to re-turn to student, I intend to confront my own pre-conceptions, mis-conceptions, and re-conceptualize my own curriculum. Maxine Greene describes her view of her own writings in terms of stages on a quest, a quest that includes her roles "as woman, as teacher, as mother, as citizen, as New Yorker, as art-lover, as activist, as philosopher, as white middle-class American" (1995). While her stages are a way of looking both back and forward on her path "on life's way" (Kierkegaard in Greene, 1995, p. 1). I propose that these stages are more than stopping points for reflection, they are the physical and metaphorical stages, the theatre in fact, in which we act, behave, communicate as teacher, as mother, as friend, as wife. The acting is not superficial in the sense of feigning or pretending, but the deep, connected, elemental and material act of being our selves, of being a person. I propose that in order to be ourselves we must have an audience. The theatre complete. This paper looks at story, acting and theatre as a means of curriculum.

Madeline Grumet states in Bitter Milk "Curriculum expresses the desire to establish a world for children that is richer, larger, more colorful and more accessible than the one we have known" (Grumet, 1988) While we circus players may not have understood the terminology of curriculum at the time, we were definitely engaged in the practice. We used the stage to present the mysteries of the earth. We used our knowledge to delight and surprise our guests; we helped to transform an ordinary day to one filed with magic. We taught them to discount their understanding of gravity by sending juggling balls in the air in a fragile dance between earth and sky for a momentary escape. But we reveal only those parts that are necessary, for "authentic mystery must remain mysterious" (Derrida, 1995). We presented the substantial and delicate balance between hard ground and soft sky by walking on the slim line of a tight wire. We showed them how to break the fear of weightlessness by showing them the joy of escape by flight on a trapeze. We fooled them into learning the physics of motion by disguising it as theatre.

We learned too, of the interesting juxtaposition between abject fear and sheer delight with the appearance of a clown. It was the ultimate "open classroom". Our stage was surrounded by the primary colors meant to entice and excite children of all ages. A garish set designed to take you away from your ordinary existence and move you into a space where anything was possible. We challenged expectations by playing live jazz music, sharing the breadth of the genre, as you entered into the "big top." But then, there was no top. Open to the sky like a Greek oculus you were privy to the atmosphere through a "looking glass."