All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It
This paper presents a teacher training course for bilingual education (BE) based on the use of drama. For the purpose of this chapter BE is “about the teaching/learning a subject through an additional language” (Costa, 2021, p.93). In the case of this chapter, the language is English and the subject is science.
There are many points of contact between drama and the classroom, which can be seen from many points of view and have been the subject of study for many years. A whole line of research views the teacher as a performer (Giggs, 2001), and therefore tends to try to develop in the teacher skills and competences similar to those of an actor (correct and effective use of the voice and body language, the involvement of the audience, learning how to be on center stage, etc.). There are obviously also some differences between the two contexts, for example, the audience (see also Horning, 1979). For teachers, the audience remains the same for a long period of time and is called on to intervene, while for actors the audience is usually passive and different every time.
This paper starts from and shares these premises, focusing on the description of a teacher training activity within a university degree in Primary Education for BE trainee-teachers in Italy based on drama activities and techniques, which sees trainees both as future educators and as learners themselves. This type of training is based on the belief that future teachers must be able to experience first-hand the techniques they will then develop with their classes. Therefore, the training has a twofold objective: to make trainees participate as learners of drama activities for BE and to make them aware as teachers of how to use these techniques with their future students. As part of their final assessment trainees could choose between two types of activities. They either had to write the script of a science play and perform it or they had to prepare a lesson plan with a drama activity and present it to their class. Both the script and the lesson plan had to be in English and had to be ‘reusable’ with primary school students.
This paper will illustrate studies on teacher training and BE and on BE and drama, and then move on to describe the Italian context in terms of BE, the activities carried out in the teacher training, and provide examples of a script and a lesson plan prepared by the trainees. Finally, it will analyze one of the plays created by the trainees from a lexical point of view. This study is theoretical-descriptive in nature and has no research-based aims.