ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a way of looking at aims and objectives which, Davies claims, ‘might prove helpful to teachers in the planning and appraisal of their work’. Unlike other authors, he adopts the predictive instructional objectives model and attempts to apply it to four areas of drama – learning to use the process; understanding themes through acting out; participation in presentation; interpretation and appreciation of dramatic statements by other people (McGregor, Tate and Robinson, 1977).
There are many problems with using this particular approach, as the writer himself observes. The most crucial of these is the identification by the teacher of any ‘affective’ learning which may result in both the process and as a product of drama work. Many of his examples are, therefore, concerned with measuring acquired social behaviour, the ability of participants to recognize the ‘rules of the game’ and cognitive understandings. They do not provide means of measuring ‘sensitivity’, ‘concentration’, ‘attitude change’ or emotional congruence of each participant’s behaviour with the given objective. Indeed, they do not measure progress in drama. Nevertheless, the chapter provides an important contribution to the use of objectives in drama and may most usefully be viewed as a means of approaching the structuring of what Eisner describes as ‘instructional objectives’ – ‘a predictive model of curriculum development i.e. one in which objectives are formulated and activities selected which are predicted to be useful in enabling children to attain the specific behaviour embodied in the objective….’ By placing it in this context we may distinguish it from those chapters about drama work which concerns itself principally with expressive objectives. Interestingly, it also contributes to the debate on education and social engineering.
